"Winners never quit and quitters never win." Vince Lombardi, legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers during their initial ascension in the early days of the NFL is credited with that phrase. And Vince knew that from personal experience - he was 45 before he became a head coach and that season had only a 7-5 record. The next year, however, he led the Packers to the NFL championship game against the Philadelphia Eagles. They lost that year (1960) but he never lost another post-season game while coaching the Packers.
Winners never quit - I also know this from personal experience.
My first "Hollywood" meeting was with a tough female producer - let's call her "Gail."
I was in the halls of Hollywood, brought to the Emerald City by an independent producer, Matt, who liked my recent script, "Nemesis." I got the meeting with Gail because I had sent Matt a previous script. He sent it back with the note that it was well-written but conceptually bereft. My first foray into the world of "high-concept" - the idea that what you write has to be instantly marketable. This was my first huge disappointment - I thought Matt would love the script that I had sent him and was discouraged when he didn’t.
But Matt did ask for my next script; that was "Nemesis" (which was my 4th spec
script.) “Nemesis” was something Matt really liked although he did ask for some changes in the second act. I did them and he set up some meetings with a few production companies who he thought might buy it.
I sat down with Matt, "my" producer, and Gail and prepared for a nice talk, hoping she’d say “We’re going to buy this today.” Instead she said, "You're a good writer. We can get a thousand like you. Next time pick a better subject." Basically that was it. She ushered us out ten minutes later and I went home crushed. Very similar to my first sexual experience.
Of all the outcomes I anticipated this was not one of them. I felt like a roller-blader who had just conquered a difficult turn maneuver and in the process of showing it off, all his wheels came off and he crashed and burned.
I never did sell "Nemesis" during that time. And it took another six months to sell anything at all (this after three years of writing every day.) But because of “Nemesis” I did do a meeting later that led to that first sale which felt like all the self-doubt I had undergone in that first Hollywood meeting was silly. I had to just pick myself up, and refuse to fail. My actual first sale is a great story, by the way, which I'll detail at some point in the future.
Since then, I've been working and writing professionally for nearly 18 years. I've had good, great, fantastic and horrible experiences. In all that time I've never forgotten the lesson of that first meeting - that it just wasn't my time. If I had quit after that first disappointment, I would have never sold 19 movies and had this amazing career that continues to elate (and frustrate) me to this day.
Winners never quit...say it. Believe it. Live it. You can see it in just about everyone's success story. Like Tyler Perry.
I'm not a huge Tyler Perry fan. But I am a huge Tyler-Perry-Story fan.
Perry gathered his life savings to produce his first play - $12,00.00. At the time, he had lived in his car at times to save enough money to be able to do the production himself. He finally put on his play and it flopped. Thirty people showed up all weekend - most, I'm sure, friends of his.
After the failure of his play, Perry said the following in a recent interview: "When the show was over I was broke, broken and homeless. For about six years after that, I held a string of odd jobs in order to finance the show, and lived on the streets when I couldn't afford to pay the rent. There wasn’t a lot of support during this time. Even my own mother, begged me to quit the theater and find a steady job. But I refused to give up."
"In the summer of 1998 (six years later!) I financed the production once again. That production was “I Know I've Been Change”, and it opened at the House of Blues in Atlanta and sold out eight times. Two weeks later, it moved to Fox Theater and sold out 9,000 more seats. After the show, every person who had told me no, every promoter who had turned me down, came to me with an offer."
The thing is, failing, losing, struggling, recovering is like lifting weights or running or any physical activity. At first, you gasp for air, pull muscles; you collapse at the end of the session with spittle running from your mouth and snot bubbles bursting from your nose...but because you want to get in shape or lose weight, you get up the next day and do it again. The pain is less this time. And the next. And the next - until you're finally running with head held high and an amazing last lap kick. If you want something badly enough failure is really just another phase of success. It’s a process. All right, so it's not a pleasant one at times but it does teach valuable lessons.
So, my droogies (from "A Clockwork Orange" - remember? Oh, never mind), don't quit. Write until it bleeds and snot bubbles come out of your nose. Fail, and fail again. But get up and do it until you have this amazing last lap kick.
Just don't quit.
Don’t.
Quit.
Because success, no matter how distant it might appear to be, is that much further away if you’re not even in the game .
