Choosing People Over Projects

Reading The Signs and Charting a New Course

“THIS IS JACK LONDON PARK, BUBBA. ONE OF BOOKS ON DADA’S ARM.”

TL/DR: I’m putting low budget movies on the backburner because I have an offer to start a coaching company for men, but I’m going to keep a few weekly coaching slots open for writers.

Are you someone who believes in signs? I guess there’s two ways to look at life.

1) The universe is a cold and indifferent place for all of us self obsessed, computer chimps and we have to create our own goals and meaning.

Or…

2) The universe is alive and it presents us with signs that can be deciphered into goals and meaning. Some sort of energetic oversoul spits us back to Earth like a cosmic watermelon seed and our job to accept the mission of each moment.

I choose option 2 because it’s just more fun to live that way.

All the signs in my life are telling me to chart a new course. I love movies/TV. I love watching them, writing them and teaching people how to write them, but this endeavor is going to the backburner.

The first movie that I wanted to make for this project (the best single location story hook that I’ve ever heard) was based off a true story from my wife’s best friend, and she just passed away unexpectedly.

Addiction was the antagonist of this story.

It shattered my wife and led to weeks of discussions about how we can both be in service to people struggling with this while also building stable careers.

The hidden blessing of tragedy is that it puts everything into perspective, clears the fog of monotonous existence and reassembles your priorities.

I had to ask myself…

Do I really want this high-stakes, project building lifestyle or am I holding onto past grudges and rejections to prove people wrong? Was my primary motivation to prove that incompetent executives have put storytelling on life support and with the right people and culture, it can be revived?

If I’m being honest with myself, yes, most of this was being fueled by rage/revenge (and to protect younger writers from a broken system).

But EVERY SINGLE FUNDED FILM/TV PROJECT that I have worked on has ended with a combo pack of toxic drama, broken relationships and legal issues.

Every time I’ve just focused on improving people, through coaching or building community, it has the opposite result: ease, abundance and good vibes.

Dysfunction and corruption are the natural state of funded projects and I’m at a point in my life where I would rather invest my time and energy in people.

As the seeds of doubt started growing, I received another sign.

My good friend’s wife, a badass entrepreneur, told us about a female entrepreneur support group that she had just joined.

She explained that more than half of the women in that group were contemplating divorce because their husbands refused to do any personal development work.

Some of their S.O’s had tried things but nothing stuck.

The gap between their growth was becoming unbearable.

This hit me like a lightning bolt. I’m married to a development obsessed coach, I see a gap in my own marriage and I have to work hard to keep it manageable.

Why are so many men falling behind, checking out and giving up?

How did the internet unlock/organize the innies and destroy/isolate us outies?

How much of this toxic, incel, NEET, alpha, MAGA, Tate, Peterson counter reaction rage stems from a simple but deeply suppressed inferiority complex?

Has the “better half” joke become so real that it’s shamed most of us into quietly quitting and constructing our own cozy bubbles of isolation?

Are we really that emotionally avoidant or is this world of personal development… just… I don’t know… not meeting us where we’re at?

Not aligned with our inner language?

Do lots of men right now feel so radically obsolete and internally vile that we don’t even want to start unlocking those cellar doors in search of answers?

When I started discussing those “why’s” with my good friend, it eventually led to him throwing down an investment in this new venture.

We are going to build a coaching company and online support group for men.

We want to help men Bridge The Gap between who they are and who they can be. Help them Bridge The Gap in their relationships, so we can get this underlying inferiority complex back to an open, honest and respectful stalemate.

There’s so many incredibly talented screenwriters and storytellers on Substack and a cool little indie counter culture is brewing, but I my communication skills are needed elsewhere. I haven’t felt a certainty this strong in a very long time.

My two life-long thematic passengers have always been…

1. What makes a good story great?

2. What makes a good man in the modern world?

I spent the last 15 years on the first question, now it’s time to pursue the other.

I want to teach emotional self defense to emotionally avoidant men…

Because I fear what might happen if AI continues to put angry men out of work.

The truth is men are in a fragile/reactive state; lost between epochs and archetypes and we’re getting swooped up by the wrong people.

When someone is struggling with their identity, a nudge from any direction often leads to hard reactions or quick seductions.

It’s way easier for someone to provide the answers to your problems than it is for you to “do the work” and find them yourself. If men continue to see answers outside of these peer-led support structures, this gap will continue to grow.

So this is my new course. Turning “the work” into a “fun challenge” that gets men re-engaged in the game of life and back into support structures.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with this Substack account yet, but I’m going to keep a few weekly coaching slots open for writers.

With the inbound AI wave, storytellers will have to pick a supplemental lane…

1. Community Building/Coaching/Education

2. Live Events (plays, immersive experiences, etc) to counter the AI onslaught

3. Or you can fully embrace THE INTERTAINMENT AI/VR/AR revolution and build an open world like this.

The hidden blessing of all of this chaos in entertainment, tech and politics is that there is nothing stable to hold onto. Nothing’s working and no one knows what to do, so that’s the best time go back to the big questions:

What are you holding onto? What do you want and where are you a needed?

I hope you find answers.

Connor