The pattern shows up across industries and experience levels.

A business owner who has been successful for decades walks into a conversation with assumptions about what will and won’t work. A mortgage banker with thirty years in the field dismisses a new client approach because the old one always produced results. An executive avoids a difficult conversation with a key partner because the last attempt went badly.

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None of them think of these as habits. They think of them as conclusions.

That distinction is where most of my client work begins.

Our brains make this harder to see than it should be.

Metta McGarvey, a mindfulness researcher and lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, describes what she calls the brain’s negativity bias: the tendency to give negative experiences and information disproportionate weight in our memory and thinking. From a survival standpoint, this makes sense. Strong recollections of bad experiences help us avoid repeating dangerous ones.

In a business context, though, the same bias means that day-to-day stressors and past disappointments tend to dominate our thinking and crowd out our ability to respond clearly to what’s actually in front of us. The failed deal from eighteen months ago shapes how we approach the next one. The difficult conversation that went sideways becomes the reason we avoid the next necessary one.

McGarvey and researchers at the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley have documented something worth sitting with: the brain can change. In a process called experience-dependent neuroplasticity, neural connections grow and strengthen based on what we practice. Repeating a thought pattern, a behavior, a habitual response to a situation literally reinforces the neural pathways associated with it.

This works in both directions. Patterns that don’t serve you get stronger the more you repeat them. Patterns that do serve you can be built through deliberate practice.

The habits that are limiting a capable executive are not fixed. But changing them takes more than awareness. It takes practice, repeated over time, against the brain’s own tendency to default to what it already knows.

Most people I work with can identify their unhelpful patterns when you ask them directly.

They know they avoid certain conversations. They know they react defensively to specific kinds of feedback. They know they carry setbacks longer than is useful. What they often don’t have is a practical framework for working against those patterns in the ordinary course of a business day.

McGarvey describes mindfulness as single-tasking: approaching any situation with your undivided attention, keeping that attention on the present moment, and accepting whatever thoughts and feelings arise without immediately judging them. This isn’t a meditation-retreat concept. In a business context it means creating enough space between an event and your response to make a deliberate choice, rather than defaulting to a pattern you formed somewhere in the past.

That pause is where most of the real work happens.

I’ll be honest about this one. I spent years letting other people’s behavior dictate my attention and mood for the rest of the day. Someone would be dismissive in a meeting, and I’d carry it around for hours. When I started to recognize how much control I was handing other people over my own time, that was the beginning of something different. The clients I’ve watched make the most lasting changes have almost always gone through a similar recognition.

Five practices that can help.

McGarvey offers five practices that build these habits over time. I’ve adapted the language for a business context, because what she describes maps almost exactly onto what I see working with the executives I work alongside.

1. Step away from your work several times a day.

Put the phone down. Step away from the screen. Let your attention rest on something else for a minute or two. This isn’t lost productivity. It’s the reset that makes the next hour better. High-performing executives who do this consistently are not taking breaks from work. They’re managing the quality of their attention, which is the thing the work actually runs on.

2. Train yourself to notice what’s going well.

Our default setting is to catalog problems. The underperforming salesperson, the deal that fell apart, the client who went cold. Deliberately looking for what worked today, who delivered, what moved forward: that’s an active counterweight to the negativity bias McGarvey describes. Research on successful marriages has found five positive interactions for every negative one. The ratio isn’t that different in high-functioning business partnerships and teams.

3. Say the positive things out loud.

Noticing that someone did good work is not the same as telling them. The feedback loop that recognizing and voicing good work creates, for both sides of the exchange, is part of what McGarvey calls a virtuous cycle: positive communication builds the habits that make positive communication more likely. In organizations where people don’t hear what they’re doing well, the absence of that feedback becomes its own kind of information.

4. Move your body.

Exercise, meditation, yoga, any practice that activates the parasympathetic nervous system makes it physically easier to recover from stress. McGarvey includes this because it isn’t separable from the rest. The executives I’ve seen manage sustained pressure well almost all have some consistent physical practice. It’s rarely incidental.

5. Be persistent and be patient with yourself when you slip.

New habits work against the brain’s automatic response systems. McGarvey is direct: changing ingrained patterns means going against the grain of your own neurology, and that takes time. The people who make lasting changes are the ones who keep going after they fall back into old patterns. Not the ones who don’t slip. Nobody gets that version.

Are you willing to examine the gap?

The clients I find most rewarding to work with are the ones who are willing to examine that gap between what they intend and what they habitually do.

The executive who built everything on control and is starting to ask what it would look like to trust the team. The business owner who avoided direct feedback for years and is beginning to see what that’s cost the organization. The executive who carried one bad hiring decision into every subsequent one and is ready to look at it differently.

These aren’t character flaws. They’re old solutions to old problems that haven’t been updated.

The question I bring to almost every conversation: is this still working for you?

That question, asked seriously, opens more useful discussions than almost anything else I’ve found.

An invitation to you:

The conversations I find most valuable are the ones where someone says what’s actually happening, not the polished version of it.

That’s what the New View community is built around. Executives, business owners, and professionals from real estate, mortgage banking, title insurance, and independent film who are thinking seriously about how they work, how they lead, and what they want to build next.

If you’ve been reading the newsletter and finding value in it, I’d like to invite you to become a paid subscriber. Paid members get access to longer conversations, member discussions, and a community of people who are willing to say what they’ve actually learned, not just what they’d like to be true.

Your experience belongs in this conversation. I’d like to hear it.

Join the New View community.

Often, we go through life in a trance, doing what we do because that’s just what we do. Never stopping to observe the world around us. I think that may be truer than ever in the age of the internet, social media, and our ever-present mobile phones.

I can remember simpler times, with my parents and siblings at home, or with my father in the office as we worked together, talking about the day’s events and what was going on in the world of our business, current events, or personal matters. Each of us offering our take and what we thought it meant. After a round of reflections and observations, my father would pause and smile and say “Ah, such is Life.”

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And so it goes.

An early observation

One of my earliest recollections was when I was four years old living in Lynbrook, New York, standing outside a supermarket door dressed in a suit and tie, while my father stood at another, each of us handing out palm cards to people as they walked out. The cards had my father’s picture and information on him, as he was running for New York State Assembly as a Democrat in an overwhelmingly Republican district on Long Island. I had no idea what any of that meant, but I remember the excitement as people got a kick out of me, and my father’s loud boisterous laugh.

I still have one of those palm cards. Believe it or not, it had our home address on the back. Imagine that today.

My father lost that election. He said he learned a lot in the process. Five years later, we would sell the house, travel around the world with our family for ten months, something he would never have been able to do if he had won. My father would later say that losing that election was one of the best things that ever happened to him, as it allowed him to take his life in a whole new direction for the better.

Observations of my journey

I’ve been blessed with wonderful parents, siblings, and family both immediate and extended. I enjoyed playing sports, traveling the world growing up, and later with my own family. Great friends throughout my life. Success in many different businesses, and the opportunity to work with so many talented people who became friends. A wonderful wife and family, and children I am so proud of.

Life has also given me some tough times. The loss of a brother, and close friends way before their time. A divorce. A major health scare, financial challenges, the battle back. No life is without challenges. My best advice: count your blessings, not your troubles. The view gets a lot better.

Observations on success

Often success is measured as financial, and while that is certainly very important, never let it get in the way of a successful marriage, your family, your health, and taking the time to enjoy the beauty of life.

I’ve given a few eulogies. What people remember are the great stories you left them. At some point the money will be gone, and eventually forgotten, especially after it’s spent. Make your stories leave them with laughter and joy. That will be your greatest gift.

Observations on luck

Luck may come and go, and it is definitely a factor in life, although we tend to underestimate our good luck and overestimate our bad. The best way to get lucky is to do the work to put yourself in the best position to find it. Good luck!

Observations on love and marriage

One of the most important decisions you will make in life is controlled by who you fall in love with and choose to marry. A strong, healthy marriage will make your children stronger, as they will have a good example to follow. A supportive spouse will make you stronger and give you a better chance of success in life and your career. This goes both ways.

The best times in your relationship should be great, or at least good. There will always be difficult periods in life, which will require greater strength and commitment from both parties. It is the strength of the best times you have together that will carry you through the worst. If you are thinking of getting married and the good times aren’t that good, don’t do it.

Avoid the petty digs that can wear down a marriage. Joking around is fine and can be fun. A little tip: turn the joke around and make it about yourself. If you don’t find it funny, don’t tell it.

Some of the best things I’ve said in my marriage are the things I didn’t say.

That said, I am extraordinarily lucky to be married to an amazing woman.

Observations on sex

I’ve given this subject serious thought and consideration and have come to the conclusion that I am definitely PRO SEX. Try it. I think you’ll like it.

Observations on friendships

The friendships we build in our life will have an extraordinary impact on who we become and how much we enjoy life. Choose friends who share the same values and interests. Avoid negative people who always feel like victims and blame their problems on others. Sooner or later, they will blame them on you.

Good friendships provide companions and camaraderie. We become something more than just ourselves. A good friend will be happy for you when things are going well, and supportive when they are not. They will be honest enough to tell you the truth, even if you don’t want to hear it.

Many of my friendships became business relationships, and many of my business relationships became friendships. Virtual relationships are more difficult to build into real friendships unless you’ve actually met the person. It is through the unstructured nature of personal interactions that you get to know someone in a way that is difficult to replicate virtually.

Observations on work and career

Our work will take up a great deal of our life, and we should choose something we enjoy doing and have some talent for. So many people go through their life just putting in their time, until they can retire. As an entrepreneur, I have always felt the desire to try it my way, or our way, rather than work under someone else’s plan. Either way you can succeed or fail, but when you work for someone else you need their permission and support to succeed.

Try to find something you love to do and give it all you’ve got. You only live once. Swing for the fences.

Observations on religion

I have a strong faith in God and am a devout Catholic. I was raised in the faith, and it was instilled in me at a young age, especially by my mother. I respect the faith of others, as long as it does not try to infringe on my faith or the rights of others, including those who choose no religion.

I find that sometimes people spend too much time arguing about our differences instead of celebrating what unites us. When it comes to judging others, I remind myself: “I’m not God, that job is taken.”

Observations on observations

We can’t go through life over-analyzing everything, but we must take a step back throughout our life to observe the path we are on. Many times, we stay on the same path because we have already committed so much time to it. Our time is limited, yet we treat it like it is endless.

Take the time to observe your life, and maybe you will see things you’ve overlooked or avoided. Don’t sweat the small stuff. Avoid grudges. They hurt you more than the person you hold them against. Forgiveness is the gift you give yourself. The coolest person is the most chill.

Examine your life. Pivot when needed. Keep what matters. And remember: gratitude gives you a better attitude.

Chill out.

Such is life.

I would love to hear your story. Feel free to reach out in the comments.

Some of the most interesting conversations I have in business never make it into the public conversation.

Over the years, I’ve worked with successful founders, CEOs, executives, and investors across different industries. In an advisory role, I hear how they think, what they’ve learned, the challenges they’re navigating, and the decisions that shaped their businesses.

The most compelling part of those conversations is how they accomplished what they did, and what experience changed about how they see things.

I can write about business challenges and lessons in my newsletter, New View, while protecting the confidentiality of the people and companies involved. But the executives themselves may never communicate the insights they’ve accumulated over decades of experience.

They have something worth saying. They just aren’t saying it.

And they may be missing an opportunity.

Your Experience Is a Business Asset

Companies invest heavily in advertising, marketing, and sales. Those activities matter, but there’s a difference between telling people what you sell and giving them a reason to trust the person selling it.

Advertising communicates features, benefits, and offers. Thought leadership gives people a chance to understand how you think.

That mortgage banking executive could share a perspective on what changing market conditions might mean for borrowers, explain a lesson learned from a previous housing cycle, or discuss how the company approaches responsible lending in uncertain times. The value is explaining the reasoning behind that perspective and drawing on experience that readers may not have.

A real estate investment fund manager could explain how the firm evaluates opportunities, what makes a particular investment attractive, or why an apparently promising deal might not meet its criteria. Investors evaluate judgment, discipline, and the people responsible for their capital, not just the numbers.

There’s also an audience that companies sometimes overlook: prospective employees.

A job posting describes a position, its compensation, and its qualifications. It can’t communicate the leadership team’s philosophy, the company’s culture, or what makes the organization worth joining. Thought leadership can.

A prospective recruit who has spent months following a company’s CEO on LinkedIn has learned something about that company before the first recruiting conversation takes place. That familiarity can attract people who identify with the company’s values before a recruiter ever makes the call.

The objective isn’t to turn every executive into a full-time content creator. It’s to communicate the knowledge, values, and vision that make the person and the company worth knowing.

Experience Matters More When You Can Explain It

When I founded and ran a mortgage banking company, I learned that business success requires more than understanding your industry. It requires recognizing when the industry itself is changing.

In the late 1990s, the internet forced mortgage banking businesses to reconsider how they marketed their services, reached customers, and organized their operations. Customers could access more information, research their options, and approach the mortgage process differently. Established sales practices and workflows needed to be reconsidered.

The lesson wasn’t simply to learn a new technology. It was to understand how that technology was changing the way business would be conducted.

Executives are confronting the same kind of shift today with AI. The tools are different, but the underlying challenge is familiar: separating the excitement surrounding a new technology from the practical questions of how it will affect customers, salespeople, employees, and the business model itself.

Experience becomes particularly valuable at moments like these. Someone who has navigated previous periods of change has a perspective worth sharing. Not because the past provides all the answers, but because it can help us ask better questions about the future.

That perspective has little influence beyond the people who hear it firsthand unless someone takes the time to communicate it.

The Collaborative Process

Understanding the value of thought leadership is one thing. Making it happen consistently is another.

The word “ghostwriting” makes some people uncomfortable. It can sound as though someone is paying another person to manufacture an impressive public persona. With AI tools now capable of producing articles in seconds, it can also seem as though the whole exercise amounts to generating content and putting a name on it.

Good ghostwriting is something different.

The ideas, experience, opinions, and judgment come from the executive. The writer’s job is to draw them out, identify what matters, and communicate them in a way that reflects the executive’s voice.

That requires real collaboration. I begin with conversations about the executive’s business, industry, experience, and the people they want to reach. Sometimes a single question uncovers a story the executive has told dozens of times without recognizing its broader significance. Other times, a discussion reveals a perspective that has never been put into words.

AI can assist with research, organization, and editing. But it doesn’t automatically know which experiences shaped your judgment, which details matter to your customers, or what makes your perspective different from another executive in the same industry. Without that personal input, the result can be polished but interchangeable.

The goal is to help you communicate like yourself, only more clearly and consistently. The final work should reflect your thinking, your standards, and your approval.

Your Experience Deserves to Be Heard

I’ve spent much of my career on the business side of the table: as a founder and CEO, a consultant to business owners and investors, and an advisor working through complex business challenges.

I’ve also spent years developing my skills as a writer and storyteller through New View and my work as a screenwriter.

A screenplay can have an interesting premise, compelling characters, and plenty of action. Unless the writer finds a way to make the audience care, those ingredients alone aren’t enough.

Business communication works in a similar way. You may have an impressive career, a successful company, and years of industry knowledge. But the people you want to reach don’t automatically know what makes your experience valuable. They need context: what you’ve learned, why it matters, and how it connects to their own concerns.

Accomplished executives often have far more to communicate than they realize. The challenge is finding the stories within that experience and communicating them in a way that connects with the right audience.

That’s what I’d like to help more of them do.

I’m opening a limited number of monthly engagements for mortgage banking and real estate executives, or film producers, who want to build a stronger professional presence through LinkedIn posts, articles, and newsletters.

The process starts with a conversation about your business, your experience, your objectives, and the people you want to reach. From there, I’ll help identify the ideas worth communicating and turn them into thoughtful, compelling content in your voice.

For executives who need more than writing support, the engagement can extend into strategic advisory work: helping clarify the message and shape how the company presents itself to prospective clients, partners, and talent.

Please email me at mjwallace@newviewent.com and tell me a little about what you’d like to accomplish. Let’s explore whether we might be a good fit.

Over the years, I’ve founded several businesses and consulted for countless others. One of the biggest challenges I encountered as a founder was building a salesforce that could consistently bring quality business through the door.

The obvious solution was to recruit experienced salespeople who already had the right credentials, industry knowledge and, most importantly, a network of referral sources. There was just one problem: everybody else was looking for the same people.

So instead, we started looking for something else.

We looked for people who had the qualities we thought would make great salespeople. A college education was nice to have, but it didn’t necessarily tell us whether someone could connect with a client, solve a problem or figure out how to get a deal done. We hired people from the construction trades, from traditional retail, from backgrounds that had nothing to do with mortgage banking or title insurance, and taught them the business from there.

Some worked out. Some didn’t.

One person we hired didn’t stay with us. He went on to become a multiple Stanley Cup-winning NHL coach. He was certainly high agency. He just had to find the right place to use it.

Looking back, I realize we were looking for something I didn’t have a name for at the time.

Agency. Not agency as in an organization that represents you. Agency as in the ability to look at a situation and believe there’s something you can do about it.

I’ve been thinking about this because it seems increasingly relevant to the way we live and work. We don’t control everything that happens to us. The economy changes. Industries disappear. Deals fall apart. Someone says no. Sometimes things happen that we never saw coming.

The question isn’t whether we can control all of that. We can’t. The question is what we do next. That’s where agency comes in.

A low-agency response tends to begin with: Why is this happening to me?

A more active response asks: What can I do about it?

And high agency goes one step further: What else is possible?

Seeing the other door

One of the things I’ve noticed about people with high agency is that they don’t necessarily have better circumstances. They simply see more possibilities within the circumstances they have. They don’t necessarily have more resources. They’re often just better at figuring out what to do with the resources in front of them.

I recently came across the story of James Cameron, and it struck me as a good example. Before he was the director of The Terminator, Aliens and Titanic, he wasn’t attending film school at USC. He studied physics and English at California State University, Fullerton, and drove a truck for a living.

But he wanted to understand filmmaking and special effects, so he went to the USC library. Cameron has described going through graduate students’ dissertations on optical printing, front-screen projection and other visual-effects subjects, photocopying what he could and taking notes on what he couldn’t. He built his own education in visual effects out of whatever was already sitting on a shelf.

He could have looked at the situation and said, I can’t afford film school. Instead he asked a different question: What can I learn with what I have?

That doesn’t mean everyone who takes that approach becomes James Cameron. It does mean that sometimes the first limitation we run into isn’t the real limitation. It’s our assumption about what’s possible.

The person who doesn’t take no for an answer

There’s a similar story in business I find even more interesting. Rose Blumkin, known as “Mrs. B.,” founded Nebraska Furniture Mart in Omaha in the 1930s. No MBA. No venture capital. No sophisticated business plan. She started with a small amount of money and competed on price.

When competitors pressured suppliers not to sell to her, she looked elsewhere. When business was difficult, she looked for another way to sell. In 1951, when the store was struggling, she rented the Omaha City Auditorium, moved the furniture out, and held a three-day sale.

Years later, Warren Buffett bought a major stake in her company. But that’s not really why I find her story interesting. It’s the way she seemed to view obstacles. The obstacle wasn’t a stop sign. It was a problem to solve. And sometimes solving it meant doing something that wasn’t in the conventional playbook.

That’s agency.

Agency means thinking for yourself

There’s another part of agency that may be even more important than taking action: thinking for yourself.

Entrepreneur Patrick Collison has said, “Nobody is going to teach you to think for yourself.” It’s a simple statement, but it gets at something fundamental. Most of us are surrounded by people and institutions telling us what’s possible, what isn’t, and what people like us are supposed to do. Sometimes those rules are useful. Sometimes they’re just assumptions that have been repeated so often nobody questions them anymore.

High agency begins with the willingness to question them. Not recklessly. Not because conventional wisdom is always wrong. But because sometimes the conventional answer is simply the answer everyone else accepted without checking. Ask a different question, and you may find another possibility.

The impediment can become the opportunity

The Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius put it this way nearly 2,000 years ago: “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

That’s a powerful way to think about agency. The obstacle isn’t necessarily something you wait out before you can move forward. It may actually tell you where to look next. If you can’t get through the front door, perhaps there’s another door. If you can’t get funding, perhaps there’s another way to structure the deal.

And if someone says no, the next question isn’t why did they say no. It’s who else should I ask.

This doesn’t mean every obstacle has a solution. Some don’t. But agency means refusing to assume the first obstacle is the final answer.

Agency doesn’t always mean doing more

There’s a tendency to equate high agency with being aggressive or constantly taking action. I don’t think that’s quite right. Agency isn’t about saying yes to everything. Sometimes it means having enough control over your own decisions to say no.

Warren Buffett built much of his investment philosophy around knowing what he would and wouldn’t invest in. His success wasn’t based on chasing every opportunity in front of him. It was also based on recognizing he didn’t have to participate.

Agency isn’t only: What can I do? It’s also: What should I do? And sometimes: What should I refuse to do?

Having agency means understanding that you have choices. Choosing not to act can be a choice too.

You can only control your side of the table

I’ve seen this play out repeatedly with businesses I’ve founded and companies I’ve consulted for.

As a founder or CEO, you have a certain degree of agency. You can take an idea, test it, implement it and see what happens. It may be right, wrong, or a complete failure. But you have the ability to act on it.

Consulting is different. You can identify an opportunity. You can recommend a strategy. You can see a solution the people inside the business may not see. But ultimately, the client has to act. You can’t give someone agency. You can show them possibilities, challenge their assumptions, help them see another door. They have to decide to walk through it.

I’ve worked with clients who were open to trying something different, and I’ve worked with organizations that were more comfortable explaining why something couldn’t be done. The difference isn’t always intelligence. Sometimes it’s simply how people interpret what’s in front of them.

The tools are everywhere

This may be where agency gets especially interesting right now.

We have more tools available than ever before. You can publish without owning a printing press. You can reach an audience without owning a television network. You can start a business without renting an office. You can learn almost anything without enrolling in a university. And now AI gives individuals capabilities that used to require an entire team.

But tools don’t create agency. They create possibilities. What we do with them is what matters.

The paradox is that more choices can make people less likely to choose. With this many tools, platforms and possible directions available, it’s easy to mistake researching for acting. We can spend six months preparing to do something that could have started six days ago.

That’s why agency isn’t about having resources. It’s about recognizing the resources you already have and deciding what to do with them.

We can lose our agency

I don’t think people divide neatly into high-agency and low-agency types. Life changes that.

A person can be confident at 30 and discouraged at 50. A successful entrepreneur can lose a business and start doubting every decision. Someone can get laid off and decide their career is over. A few failures can convince you that trying isn’t worth the risk. Sometimes we simply get tired. That’s when the language we use with ourselves starts to matter.

That’s just the way things are. People like me don’t do that. It’s too late. I don’t have the connections. Someone else will have to give me an opportunity.

Maybe those statements are true. But maybe they’re only true if we accept them as the end of the conversation.

Because in any changing situation, there are really only two responses. One is to wait. Wait for the economy to improve. Wait for someone to recognize your talent. Wait for the right moment. The other is to ask: What can I do with what’s available to me right now?

Writer George Mack has called high agency one of the most important ideas of the 21st century. He said discovering the concept felt like finding a secret that had been hidden from him.

I understand what he means. Once you start thinking in terms of agency, you see it everywhere. The person who waits for permission, and the person who figures it out. The person who accepts the rules, and the person who asks whether the rules still apply.

What happens next?

High agency isn’t optimism. It isn’t pretending obstacles don’t exist. It’s the willingness to act despite uncertainty. To think for yourself. To make a small bet. To keep looking after the first no.

I’ve had periods in my own life when I was lower agency than I wanted to admit. Times I waited too long, took the obvious path, assumed circumstances would change on their own. I suspect most people could say the same.

Agency isn’t a permanent state. It’s a muscle. It gets stronger when you use it.

We don’t get to choose where we start, control every circumstance, or know whether the next decision will work. But we usually have more choices than we think we do.

Are you going to wait to be acted upon, or are you going to act?

It’s a matter of agency. High or low, you decide which way to go.

Become a paid New View subscriber and get the room where this actually plays out. It’s a private group chat of founders, executives and professionals across industries who aren’t waiting to see how things shake out before they act, they’re comparing notes in real time on what’s changing, what they’re trying, and what they’re getting wrong along the way.

Bring a question. Bring what you’re actually seeing in your own business. Starting that conversation instead of waiting for someone else to start it is agency too.

P.S. — I'm also now working with a few founders and executives directly, ghostwriting on a monthly retainer basis. If you've got something worth saying and no time to write it, reply and let's talk.

The independent film business is not for the faint of heart.

As someone working on my own film projects, I’ve become curious about what happens between the idea of making a film and actually getting it made. How do filmmakers finance their projects, pay their bills, pivot when something doesn’t work, and keep moving forward when the process takes years?

I wanted to hear those stories from filmmakers who had lived them.

I spoke with Christian Nilsson and Travis Carlson. Their paths are very different, but both have found ways to keep telling stories when the traditional path wasn’t always available.

These are their stories.

Christian Nilsson: The Long Game

Christian Nilsson grew up on the eastern end of Long Island and now lives in Brooklyn. As long as he can remember, he has wanted to tell stories.

He made his first film when he was eight years old.

That early passion never really went away.

I met Christian recently at the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington, where I saw his film “Westhampton”. The film premiered at the Tribeca Festival and later earned Christian the Best Director award at the Stony Brook Film Festival.

From the outside, that might sound like the beginning of the story.

It isn’t.

Christian attended Five Towns College on Long Island to study Film/TV Production. After moving to Los Angeles to pursue directing, the romance of becoming a filmmaker collided with reality. He quickly realized that making independent feature films was not going to be easy.

He also noticed something else: virtually every director he met had to find another way to make a living while trying to get their films made.

So Christian did exactly that.

He began producing and directing editorial and branded pieces for companies including The Huffington Post, Esquire, BuzzFeed, MTV, The Atlantic and Bloomberg and eventually started directing commercials.

But there is an important distinction.

For Christian, commercial work wasn’t simply a way to pay the bills. It was another form of storytelling. He was still directing. Still creating. Still learning how to communicate an idea through film.

He also founded his own production company, TXE Productions, as a vehicle for developing and producing his own projects.

And then there was Westhampton.

Christian considers it his first feature, which he started before but finished after his first actual feature, Dashcam. The difference was what it required of him.

Westhampton took years to bring to the screen.

That’s something you don’t necessarily see when you sit in a theater and watch the finished film.

You see the movie. The years that came before it are invisible.

Christian also told me about Unsubscribe, a short film he released during COVID as a marketing stunt. With theaters closed and traditional avenues for exhibition disrupted, he and YouTuber Eric Tabach rented a theater and bought all the tickets themselves to try to bring attention to their dream project, Westhampton.

Instead, the stunt helped them make Dashcam, which starred Tabach.

That story says something about the independent filmmaker’s situation.

When the conventional path doesn’t exist, you sometimes have to create your own.

Today, Christian has another project moving forward.

His screenplay Paparazzo was selected for the 2024 Black List, and the project is now in development with Passage Pictures. It’s a throwback to the gritty New Hollywood thrillers of the 1970s and follows an opportunistic youth who partners with a wily paparazzo for fast cash to help his ailing mother. Christian wrote the screenplay and is attached to direct.

He is also working on another screenplay, an action-adventure film based on a true story that occurred during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

There is a certain irony in where Christian is today.

The eight-year-old who knew he wanted to make movies never really changed his mind.

What changed was his understanding of what it would take to actually do it.

He learned that filmmaking wasn’t simply about having an idea or writing a screenplay. It meant finding ways to make a living, building relationships, creating opportunities, producing commercial work, starting a production company and sometimes creating your own path when the traditional one wasn’t available.

And it meant being willing to wait.

When I asked Christian what he believed was the key to success, his answer was simple:

Longevity.

Many people give up before they make it.

That may be one of the least glamorous parts of being an independent filmmaker, and one of the most important.

The image of filmmaking is about the finished movie.

The reality is about everything that has to happen before anyone sees it.

And the vision is what makes you keep going when the reality takes much longer than you imagined.

Travis Carlson: Finding Another Way to Tell Stories

For Travis Carlson, filmmaking started with a dream.

Growing up on a small farm near Buffalo, Travis imagined becoming the next Steven Spielberg. He began making short films with friends and eventually studied writing and film at SUNY Buffalo State, graduating summa cum laude in 2013.

But like most independent filmmakers, he quickly discovered that loving movies and making a living making them are two very different things.

After college, Travis built a career in commercial filmmaking while continuing to write and make his own films. He would often get up at 4 a.m. to write before going to work.

He eventually spent five years as a cinematographer working with the Buffalo Bills and Buffalo Sabres, creating marketing videos, social-media content and documentaries involving professional athletes, brands and businesses. He also received more than a dozen New York State Emmy Awards for his work.

That commercial experience eventually became an important part of his independent filmmaking career.

Travis co-founded Pan-American Film Division and went on to make more than fifteen short films, along with documentaries and commercials. Three of his shorts earned international recognition and screenings at the Cannes Short Film Corner.

In 2021, he wrote and directed “Mother’s Day", based on his own family’s experience with his mother’s struggle with mental illness.

Mother’s Day won best actress and best of the festival award from the Queens World film festival, and the programmer’s standout from the Hells Half Mile film festival.

But Travis has also seen firsthand how difficult it can be for an independent filmmaker to turn a film into a sustainable business.

He told me that film festivals can sometimes favor movies with recognizable stars because stars generate attention and media coverage. At the same time, audiences have become accustomed to watching movies cheaply or essentially for free through streaming services.

For an independent filmmaker, that makes the economics of selling tickets and recouping the cost of a film increasingly difficult.

Rather than simply waiting for the next opportunity to make a movie, Travis began looking for another way to use the skills he already had.

The answer came from something he knew extremely well:

Buffalo and the Bills.

Travis combined his filmmaking, writing and visual storytelling skills with his love of the Buffalo Bills to create ‘Mafia: Buffalo-vs-the Multiverse”, a fantasy adventure that transforms Buffalo and the Bills Mafia into an imaginative world of superheroes, villains and alternate realities.

The project began as a storytelling experiment and evolved into a 220-page hardcover book. It was released in time for the 2023 holiday season.

And unlike many of the independent films Travis had worked on, this project had something every filmmaker needs but doesn’t always have:

An identifiable audience.

The book sold more than 9,000 copies, according to SUNY Buffalo State.

The success also opened another door.

The Buffalo Sabres partnered with Pan-American Film Division on “Sabres: Buffalo-vs-the Multiverse”, a graphic-novel series written by Carlson. The project was distributed through Buffalo-area schools, with approximately 9,100 students receiving copies through the Sabres Foundation and NHL Industry Growth Fund.

For Travis, the lesson isn’t that books have replaced movies.

It’s that the same storytelling skills can be applied in different ways.

He could take what he had learned as a filmmaker: the ability to create a story, build a visual world and understand an audience, and apply it to something that people could actually buy.

There is also a reason Travis has continued to make Buffalo his home.

He told me that he loves the community and believes Buffalo offers something increasingly difficult to find in larger filmmaking centers: a place where it is possible to build a creative life without the cost of living found in places like Los Angeles or New York City.

That decision says something about Travis’s approach to filmmaking.

He hasn’t abandoned the dream of making films.

He has simply refused to define his future by one path to getting there.

For now, books, commercial work and other creative projects give him another way to tell stories and another way to build an audience.

Travis is still looking for his next path forward in film.

But he is no longer waiting for someone to give him permission to tell stories.

He’s finding audiences for them himself.

What I Learned from Them

Listening to Christian and Travis, I found myself thinking less about filmmaking as an industry and more about filmmaking as a way of life.

Their paths are completely different.

Christian left Long Island for Los Angeles, later returned to New York, built a career in commercial directing, created his own production company, and spent years bringing Westhampton to the screen.

Travis stayed in Buffalo, built a career in commercial filmmaking, worked with professional sports organizations, made his own films, and eventually found another way to use his storytelling skills through books and graphic novels.

Neither followed a straight line. Neither waited for the film business to solve the problem for them.

That doesn’t mean either has figured everything out. They haven’t. They are both still working toward their next projects.

That’s actually what I found most interesting. The work isn’t over.

I’m learning something similar in my own way.

I’ve spent much of my career learning the business of real estate and finance as an entrepreneur. Now I’m learning another business: the business of film. I’ve had to learn that writing a screenplay is different from getting a screenplay made. I’ve had to learn about financing, production, distribution and exhibition. There are things about this business you can’t fully understand until you start trying to navigate it yourself.

Talking with Christian and Travis has added another layer to that education.

Christian’s answer was longevity. Travis showed me what it looks like to take the skills you have and find another way to use them when the original path becomes difficult.

Neither lesson came from a formula.

They came from experience.

And maybe that’s what I was really looking for when I reached out to them.

Both of them kept making things. That’s the part I’ll carry forward.

Join the New View community, become a paid subscriber and you’ll join our private group chat. I’d love to hear your story and share what I can do to help. We all learn from each other.

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I remember when the internet started changing my business.

It was the mid to late 1990s, and I was founder and CEO of Continental Capital Corp, a mortgage banking company based in New York. We had seasoned loan officers, processors, and managers. A system for generating business built over years. We knew the business.

And then the internet arrived.

At first, it didn’t seem like an existential threat. We put up a website. We started sending email. We could give customers information online and maybe generate some leads.

Internally there was real apprehension. There always is when change comes. What I found is that the people who adapted fastest were the ones who felt like they were part of the decision, not just subject to it.

But eventually something became clear: the internet wasn’t just giving us a new tool. It was changing the behavior of our customers.

By 2001, customers were walking into our homebuyers’ seminars having already compared rates on three or four websites. They weren’t there just for information. They already had it. They were there to negotiate, to push back on what they’d found on their own. Our loan officers had to become something different: advisors who could contextualize, explain, and close on terms that a website couldn’t match.

That experience taught me something I’ve carried since:

When technology changes, the biggest challenge isn’t learning the technology. It’s figuring out what the technology changes about your business.

Today we’re facing that question again. Only this time, the technology is AI.

The wrong first question

Most businesses are asking: what AI tools should we buy, what should we automate, how can we use AI to make people more productive?

Real questions. But not the first one.

The first question is: what has changed?

AI isn’t another piece of software you bolt onto the business. It’s beginning to change how information is created, how decisions are made, how customers get answers, and how quickly things can happen. That means some of the assumptions underneath your business may be changing too.

In the late 1990s, the internet gave customers access to information they previously had to get from us. The relationship between the salesperson and the buyer shifted permanently.

AI is taking that shift further. A customer can now ask AI to research a company, compare alternatives, summarize a complicated subject, or analyze a proposal. Work that once required a conversation with an employee.

So ask yourself: if my customer can get information without me, what is the value I provide beyond information?

That’s a different question from “How can I use ChatGPT?”

Start with the business, not the technology

When we adapted Continental Capital to the internet, we didn’t need to understand everything the technology could eventually do. We needed to understand our own business.

Where were we getting leads? Where were we losing time? Where were the bottlenecks?

That’s how I think founders should approach AI.

Walk through the company from beginning to end. Ask: what takes too long? What is unnecessarily complicated? Where are people doing repetitive work that doesn’t require their judgment? Where are decisions slowed down because the right information isn’t available when it’s needed?

Those are AI questions. The technology isn’t the starting point. The business is.

There’s another lesson I learned running the company: when you make one part of the business dramatically faster, something else often becomes the bottleneck.

If AI allows your marketing team to produce ten times as much content, you may discover that content was not actually the problem. Distribution was. If your salespeople can prepare for a homebuyer’s seminar in ten minutes instead of an hour, the next bottleneck might be getting enough qualified prospects into the room. If your analysts can produce reports almost instantly, the question becomes whether anyone knows what decisions to make from those reports.

Speed doesn’t automatically create value. Sometimes it just moves the bottleneck.

That’s why implementing AI isn’t the same thing as transforming a business.

Don’t automate a broken process

This may be the biggest mistake companies make: they take an existing process and put AI on top of it.

But what if the process itself is wrong?

Technology gives you an opportunity to ask a more fundamental question: if we were building this business today, would we do it this way?

AI may allow you to eliminate steps, combine responsibilities, redesign workflows, and rethink jobs that have existed for years. The goal shouldn’t be to make the old business faster. It should be to determine whether you still need the old business model at all.

What experience hides

The longer you’ve been successful, the more you know about how your business works.

That’s an enormous advantage. It’s also a potential blind spot.

You know what worked. You know why certain decisions were made. You know why the organization is structured the way it is. You remember what happened the last time someone tried to change it.

And eventually you can find yourself protecting a business model that was designed for a world that no longer exists.

I’ve thought about this since the late 1990s, when the internet was arriving and some established mortgage companies decided they could wait it out. Not all of them made it through the next decade.

Experience is valuable. Experience is not a forecast.

What worked yesterday gives you information. It doesn’t give you permission to assume tomorrow works the same way.

The question worth sitting with

When the internet started changing our business, I couldn’t have predicted where it would eventually lead. None of us could.

I don’t think founders need to predict exactly what AI will become either. But we do need to get better at recognizing change when it’s already in front of us.

Look at your customers and where money is being made and lost. Look at what they no longer need from you.

Then ask the question that may be the most important one a founder can ask:

If I were building this business today, knowing what I know now, what would I build differently?

You don’t have to throw away everything you’ve built. You don’t have to chase every new technology. But you may need to build the next version of the business you already have.

That’s what happened to us when the internet changed the rules.

It’s happening again.

Today I Build Bridges

I use my experience as a founder, CEO, and consultant to help other founders and executives navigate the human side of technological change. I review a company’s structure and plan for introducing new technology, identify potential points of friction, suggest adjustments, and help implement the plan.

I am the bridge between the people and the technology.

As an independent third party, I can hold a more objective view and empathize with the concerns of all sides: the leadership under pressure to get results, and the people inside the organization who have to live with what gets built.

The conversation doesn’t end here

AI is going to change businesses across every industry. For most founders and executives, the hardest part won’t be learning to use the tools. It will be figuring out what the tools mean for their specific business.

Become a paid New View subscriber and you’ll join our private group chat, where founders, executives, and professionals from across industries are openly discussing what’s changing, what they’re doing about it, and what they’re getting wrong along the way. Bring your questions, share what you’re seeing in your business, and learn from what others are navigating in real time.

You’ll also get full access to the New View archive, including all previous articles.

If you’re a founder or executive who wants to think through what AI means for your company specifically, I’m opening a limited number of 30-minute conversations. No pitch. Just a conversation about where your business is today, what’s changing, and where you may need to go next.

30 minute introductory conversation

We don’t.

We make plans for next month, next year, five years out. We tell ourselves we’ll travel when we retire, start the business when we have more money, repair the relationship when things calm down. We assume there will always be another weekend, another chance, another year.

Then something happens that makes you reconsider the assumption.

September, twenty-five years ago

I can still remember conversations with friends and colleagues in New York in the days before September 11, 2001.

We were making ordinary plans. Where we were going the following weekend. Who we were seeing. What was on for the following week.

Some of them never made it to that weekend.

What stays with me is the ordinariness of those conversations. Every person making those plans had exactly the same reasons we have today to believe they would be there. They weren’t being careless. They weren’t ignoring anything. They were doing what all of us do: planning ahead because they expected to be around to see it.

That assumption is worth examining.

The year after

The following year, my brother died suddenly.

He was young. His business was doing well. He had a young family. He was optimistic about what was ahead. He wasn’t living like someone whose life was about to end, nobody does.

September 11 showed how suddenly an entire future can disappear. My brother’s death taught me something different: it doesn’t require a historic catastrophic event. Life can completely rewrite your situation in an ordinary year.

Health problems. A business that fails. A divorce. A career that vanishes. A family crisis that consumes everything else. None of these are part of the original plan. All of them can alter it completely.

The script

Most of us are handed the same rough plan: school, then a job, then a career, then marriage and family, then a house, then savings, then retirement. Enjoy the time you’ve earned.

Nothing is inherently wrong with that. The problem is that we can become so focused on following the script that we forget to ask whether it’s actually the life we want.

Retirement is the oddest part. We spend decades planning for a future that’s never guaranteed, setting aside time for later without any real idea how much later we have. Trusting that someday will arrive, and that we’ll be in good enough shape to use it.

That’s a lot of faith to place in an uncertain future. Live now.

If you had five years

Try this. Imagine someone told you that you had five years left.

Write it down, specifically. What suddenly becomes unimportant? What becomes urgent? Who do you want to spend more time with? Where do you want to go? What do you want to build, finish, or create? What conversation have you been avoiding? What would you finally stop doing?

Then bring it closer. Three years. One.

Would the pointless Tuesday meeting still feel worth attending? Would you keep giving your time to people who consistently waste it?

Most of us already know the answers. The exercise is making them hard to ignore.

Things that disappear

I go back through my old journals every few years.

The entries that once felt enormous, the conflicts I couldn’t sleep through, the decisions that consumed months, the professional frustrations I spent hours processing, I can barely remember many of them now.

How much of your life has gone to things you no longer care about?

Urgency and importance aren’t the same. Something can feel critical because it’s in your inbox, because someone is waiting, because it’s happening right now. That feeling has nothing to do with whether it deserves the time you’re about to give it.

On the other hand, the things in my journal that I am most grateful for are the good times with my wonderful wife and family. Long term friendships and business relationships that I enjoy to this day. May I have the audacity to make more time for what truly matters. So I pray.

Where your time goes is where your life goes.

Look back first

Write down every year you’ve been alive. Under each one, note what you remember: the people, the places, the decisions, the wins, the losses, the turning points. Don’t try to be comprehensive. Just what actually comes to mind.

You’ll notice something. The years themselves aren’t what you remember. You remember the moments that filled them. And some years may be almost blank, long stretches that produced nothing that stuck.

That’s worth sitting with.

Now turn it forward. Three categories: what you want to experience personally, what you want to build or accomplish professionally, what you want to create or contribute. For each one, ask the honest question: what have I actually done to make this happen?

Not researched. Not talked about. Done.

If the answer is not much, ask what’s standing in the way. Fear. Money. Other people’s expectations. Comfort. The wrong obligations. Or the most uncomfortable possibility: it hasn’t been important enough to actually act on.

Give your future a date

Now put something on a calendar.

Not intentions. Commitments with months attached. “Start writing the screenplay” is a wish. “First draft complete by October” is a plan. “Explore a new business” becomes five conversations scheduled for November. “Get healthier” becomes three specific habits tracked starting this week.

A goal without a date tends to stay a goal.

A five-year plan doesn’t mean you know exactly where you’ll be in five years. It means you’re giving yourself a direction and a timeline instead of a vague intention.

The plan will change

It will.

Opportunities will arrive you didn’t anticipate. Things won’t work out. People will enter your life and some will leave. Your health, finances, and circumstances will shift in ways you can’t currently see.

So review it. Adjust it. Change direction without guilt.

But uncertainty isn’t a reason to stay still. You don’t need to know exactly what your life looks like five years from now. You need to know what you’re going to do with next month.

What are you doing with the time you have?

Nobody knows how much they have.

Ten years lived with some intention can mean more than twenty on autopilot. A single conversation, a trip taken, a project finished, a relationship finally given the time it deserved, any of those can become one of the things you remember most.

“The time of your life” usually means the best period you’ve known. Maybe it means something simpler: the time you have is your life. Not your plans. Not your savings account. Not someday.

Now.

Take out a piece of paper. Write down what you want more of and what you want less of. What you’ve been putting off. What’s consuming time it doesn’t deserve. What you want to accomplish in the next five years, and what you can actually do this month to move toward it.

You already know the answers. This is the time of your life.

I Came into Indie Film with the Wrong Assumptions.

When I first wrote my screenplays, I followed the traditional advice. I entered screenwriting competitions and did fairly well, but nothing came from them.

As a seasoned entrepreneur, my reaction wasn’t to sit around waiting for someone else’s permission. It was to figure out how to produce a film myself.

I knew going in that independent film was a difficult business. You don’t get into it because it’s an easy way to make money. You do it because you have a story you are passionate about telling.

So, I approached it the way I had approached other businesses.

The conventional path seemed straightforward:

Write the screenplay. Budget the film. Attach recognizable talent. Raise the money. Make the movie. Enter festivals. Hope the film finds an audience. Find distribution. Then try to recoup the investors’ money and, if you’re lucky, make a profit.

The more time I’ve spent talking with filmmakers, attending festivals, studying distribution and trying to help independent filmmakers get their projects made and seen, the more I’ve come to believe that the order is backwards.

Here are three counterintuitive lessons I’ve learned along the way.

1. Don’t Make the Movie and Then Find the Audience

Sell the tickets before you make the movie.

I’m not suggesting that you literally sell every ticket before you shoot a frame.

I’m suggesting that you should know who is likely to buy those tickets before you spend the money making the movie.

I learned this lesson long before I entered the film business.

When I was building homes, I would never go through the entire process of acquiring a property, drawing plans, creating a budget and building the house without having some idea what I could sell it for.

Real estate gives you something filmmakers don’t have: comparable sales.

You can look at similar homes, in similar neighborhoods, with similar characteristics, and get a reasonable idea of what the market might pay.

There are no guarantees. The market can change between the day you start building and the day you put the house up for sale.

But you don’t ignore the market and hope for the best.

You study it.

Filmmakers need to do the same thing.

The question isn’t simply:

Is this a good movie?

The question is:

Who is going to watch it?

And perhaps more importantly:

Where are those people?

If you’re making a movie about a particular subject, community, profession, hobby, cause or cultural experience, are there already groups of people online who are interested in it?

Are there YouTube creators talking about the subject?

Podcasts?

Newsletters?

Facebook groups?

Reddit communities?

Organizations?

Influencers?

Local communities?

People who have already demonstrated that they care about the world your film is entering?

The recent success of independent films made by YouTube creators offers an important clue. These filmmakers aren’t starting with an audience of zero. They often begin with an existing community that already knows and trusts them.

That’s a significant advantage.

The audience isn’t something they have to discover after the movie is finished.

They already know where to find it.

This is where I think independent filmmakers need to start thinking differently.

Before you make the movie, try to find your audience.

Not just an imaginary demographic on a pitch deck.

Real people.

Find them. Talk to them. Understand what they care about. See how large the community actually is. See whether they will engage with the idea of your film.

You may discover that the audience isn’t as large as you thought.

That’s not necessarily bad news.

It’s much better to discover that before you spend $500,000 making the movie than afterward.

You may even discover that the market doesn’t want the movie you were planning to make but does want something adjacent to it.

That’s valuable information.

In business, we call that market research.

In filmmaking, we often call it something we should have done six months earlier.

Better to discover your market before you make the movie than after.

2. You Don’t Need to Find Stars. You May Need to Create Them.

When the subject of casting comes up, I’ve developed a somewhat unconventional response:

“We can’t afford any stars. We’re just going to have to make our own.”

There is an obvious problem with attaching recognizable talent to an independent film.

Name talent can help sell a movie.

It can make financing easier. It can attract attention. It can help with distribution.

But for a first-time or relatively unknown filmmaker, getting that name talent attached can create a frustrating chicken-and-egg problem.

The talent wants to know where the money is coming from before committing.

The money wants to know who the talent is before committing.

And even if you solve that problem, you still have to deal with the actor’s availability lining up with your financing, production schedule and budget.

I’ve watched this become a roadblock to getting projects made.

At some point, you have to ask yourself a different question:

What if we stopped trying to find someone who has already “made it”?

There are an enormous number of talented actors, writers, directors and other creative people who are looking for their opportunity.

They aren’t necessarily looking for a handout.

They’re looking for a chance.

In my previous businesses, I often had more success identifying talented people early, hiring them and helping them develop than trying to recruit someone who had already established themselves somewhere else.

And there was another benefit.

Those relationships tended to last.

There is something different about building something together.

I’m not suggesting that established talent doesn’t matter. It does.

If you can put a recognizable actor in your movie without blowing up your budget, that’s obviously valuable.

But I don’t believe an independent filmmaker should build a business model that depends on something they probably can’t afford.

Find the best actors you can.

Find people who believe in the story.

Find people who are hungry.

Find people who have something to prove.

And give them an opportunity.

My production company, New View Entertainment, has a simple motto:

Where the story is the star.

That’s more than a tagline.

It’s a philosophy.

If we can tell a great story and surround it with talented people, maybe we don’t need to borrow somebody else’s star power.

Maybe we can create our own.

And if the movie succeeds, we haven’t just made a film.

We’ve helped launch someone’s career.

3. A Film Festival Is Not a Distribution Strategy

This is probably the advice I’m most hesitant to give because I love film festivals.

There’s nothing quite like watching an audience experience a movie together.

Festivals create community. They give filmmakers an opportunity to meet each other. They can create publicity, credibility and relationships.

And yes, getting into a major festival can change a filmmaker’s career.

But here’s the part I think aspiring filmmakers need to hear:

A festival strategy is not the same thing as a distribution strategy.

The odds of getting into one of the major festivals are incredibly small.

For example, Sundance received 4,255 feature-film submissions for its 2026 festival and selected 90 feature films, roughly 2.1 percent of the submissions.

And even if you beat those odds, getting into a festival doesn’t guarantee that a distributor will come knocking.

Even when a film clears that bar, the deal on the other side is rarely the one people picture.

Jon Reiss, whose work on distribution I’ve studied closely, puts it bluntly: traditional distribution “doesn’t exist anymore, except for maybe 0.1 percent of films.” And the films that do get picked up most don’t make their money back.

Stephen Follows’ twenty-year study of American independent film found that even among movies that reached theaters, nearly 60 percent never recouped their budget. The ones that do land a deal are frequently asked to sign away the rights to the film for years, often for a guarantee nowhere near what it cost to make it.

Those aren’t statistics for every independent film or every festival, and I wouldn’t pretend they are.

But they make an important point.

Getting into a major festival is difficult. Getting a meaningful distribution deal afterward is another hurdle entirely.

Yet the traditional advice still tends to sound something like this:

Make the movie.

Apply to festivals.

Get accepted.

Create buzz.

Get a distributor.

Find an audience.

Recoup your investment.

I think independent filmmakers should reverse that thinking.

Plan for distribution before you make the movie.

Budget for it.

Understand the platforms available to you.

Understand your audience.

Understand how you are going to reach them.

And then decide if you want to use festivals as one potential part of that strategy. Not as the strategy itself.

If your film gets into Sundance, great.

If it gets into Tribeca, great.

If it gets into SXSW, great.

But what happens if it doesn’t?

You should still have a plan.

Because for the overwhelming majority of independent filmmakers, there is no guarantee that a festival is going to be the gateway to the marketplace.

And waiting months or even years for the festival process can create another problem.

Momentum.

You’ve just finished your movie. Your cast and crew are excited. You have a story to tell. You have people who want to see it.

Then you enter a long festival submission process and wait.

And wait.

And wait.

By the time you finally have an answer, some of the energy surrounding the film may be gone.

I’m not saying don’t enter festivals.

I’m saying don’t make your entire business plan dependent on getting into one.

The Indie Filmmaker’s Strike Back

This brings me to something I’m particularly interested in right now: the emerging NonDē movement.

For decades, independent filmmakers have largely operated inside a system where access is controlled by other people.

Agents.

Managers.

Producers.

Financiers.

Studios.

Distributors.

Festivals.

Platforms.

Each one controls a piece of the process.

And for an aspiring filmmaker, the message can sometimes feel like:

Get someone important to say yes.

But what if the future of independent film isn’t about getting better at asking for permission?

What if it’s about building a better system?

Ted Hope and Courtney Romano’s NonDē movement is an attempt to explore exactly that, a community of filmmakers and industry participants working together to develop alternatives to the traditional system.

I’m part of the movement, and I think the idea is worth paying attention to.

I don’t know exactly what NonDē will become.

But I believe the underlying idea is important.

Independent filmmakers don’t necessarily have to wait for Hollywood to fix the independent film business.

They can start building something themselves.

And maybe that’s the biggest lesson I’ve learned since entering this business.

The time and cost of applying to festivals, waiting for a decision, and if you are one of the fortunate few to be accepted you have the cost and time spent to attend the festivals. That time and money could be spent planning viewings for your predetermined audience.

Stop Asking for Permission

When I started exploring independent film, I thought the challenge was figuring out how to navigate the existing system.

Now I think the bigger opportunity is figuring out how to build a different one.

Know your audience before you make the movie.

Don’t let the absence of a movie star prevent you from telling a great story.

And don’t confuse getting into a film festival with having a distribution strategy.

None of these ideas guarantees success.

There are no guarantees in filmmaking any more than there were in real estate.

But you can reduce the risk by asking better questions before you commit the money.

When I built houses, I knew that the market could change.

I just didn’t want to discover what the market was after I had finished building the house.

I think independent filmmakers should think the same way.

Don’t make the movie and then ask who wants to see it.

Find the audience first.

Then make the movie.

Maybe the future of independent film isn’t about getting permission from the people who have always controlled the business.

Maybe it’s about building an audience, creating opportunities for new talent, owning your distribution and proving that a great story can find its people.

Because sometimes the best way to change the rules...

is to stop waiting for someone to let you play the game.

Five years ago, I wrote an article called “Adventures of the Indie Film Investor”, an early exploration of what I kept running into as I moved from real estate and finance into independent film.

How do you evaluate a project when distribution is uncertain, and you don’t know whether audiences will show up? And how do you build a portfolio in an industry where a handful of successes have to cover a lot of failures?

I decided the best way to understand the business was to talk to people actually investing in it.

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One of those people was Timo Argillander, Executive Chairman and co-founder of IPR.VC, along with Tanu-Matti Tuominen. IPR.VC is a Nordic investment firm based in Helsinki, Finland, and London. Three years ago, Andrea Scarso joined as a partner and is now managing partner, based in London.

When I spoke with Timo five years ago, IPR.VC was a relatively young fund. Its first fund, launched in 2015, raised €20 million to invest in media and entertainment across Northern Europe, includi…

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I was recently with a client, a founder trying to figure out what to do with his business.

Should he sell?

Should he find someone to merge with?

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Should he pass the business to a family member?

Or sell it to his employees?

I understood the business problem. But as we talked through the options, it became clear that the decision was about much more than the business.

It was about his life.

He had spent decades building the company. Almost everything he knew professionally had come from that experience. He wanted to take some time off, but he didn’t want to retire. He still wanted to work. He had ideas about what he might do next, but nothing concrete.

The advice he was getting from people around him was predictable: “Do something similar to what you’ve always done. That’s where your experience is.”

I understood the logic. But I gave him different advice.

Don’t let the talents you developed in your past determine the only future available to you. Your experience is portable. The question is how yo…

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A 26-year-old YouTube creator makes a $750,000 horror film. Focus Features acquires it for a reported $15 million. By late June it had earned approximately $342 million worldwide, and Peacock now describes domestic earnings alone at more than $250 million against that $750,000 production budget.

Two weeks after that film opened, a 21-year-old YouTube filmmaker released his own film through A24. It opened to roughly $81 million and quickly passed $100 million.

Two films. Two YouTube creators. Two extraordinary results. Same summer.

Hollywood has spent years trying to figure out how to reach younger audiences. Maybe it should have been looking at the kids.

Who Curry Barker Actually Is

The first film is Obsession, directed by Curry Barker. The second is Backrooms, directed by Kane Parsons. The numbers are extraordinary. But the real story isn’t the box office.

Barker wasn’t simply an unknown filmmaker who got lucky. Before Obsession, he and Cooper Tomlinson had built an audience through YouTub…

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I was at a consulting client’s office watching the boss move through a PowerPoint presentation when one woman in the room raised her hand.

She asked a question about something in the presentation that didn’t make sense to her. The boss answered and continued. A few minutes later, she raised her hand again.

Something changed.

People around the room began looking at her. The boss was still standing at the front, still in control of the meeting. But she had something he didn’t. She was asking the questions everyone else was thinking. She’d connected with the room. She’d become the voice for the people who weren’t speaking.

Without a title, without authority, and without ever asking for it, she had taken over the leadership of the room. She hadn’t competed with the boss or challenged him. She’d simply done something he wasn’t doing. She was listening.

She wasn’t trying to take over. She was trying to understand. But in a room full of people who weren’t saying what they were thinking, asking ho…

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One of the first questions I ask a founder, after hearing how they built their business, is one of the simplest.

“What are you most excited about right now?”

The answer tells me more than the story that came before it.

Every founder has a story. It almost always begins with a willingness to take risks, a few painful mistakes, and the determination to keep going when most people would have stopped. Those experiences build resilience, instinct, and real wisdom.

But they can also become invisible anchors.

The Anchor Nobody Names

I was working with a founder whose business had plateaued. Revenue was flat, not declining, just not moving. The team was capable. The brand had earned genuine respect in the market. From the outside, everything looked fine.

What I found, when I started digging, was that the strategies that had driven the company’s early growth had quietly become the company’s identity. The founder wasn’t running the same playbook because it was still the right one. He was running it be…

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I was at a client’s office doing some advisory work when, just outside the office, I heard three employees debating the intent of an email.

They weren’t debating what the email said.

They were debating what the person who sent it really meant.

They were doing what most of us do, building the stories we tell ourselves about what someone else thinks, feels, or intends, from scraps of silence and incomplete information.

Each of them had an interpretation. And none of them were particularly positive. They were reading between the lines, looking for hidden meaning, assuming the worst of the sender’s intentions.

I walked out and said, “Why don’t you pick up the phone and ask them what they meant?”

They did.

And, as it turned out, everything they had imagined was wrong.

The sender hadn’t been trying to insult anyone. There wasn’t some hidden agenda. There was no passive-aggressive message buried between the lines.

It was just an email.

This happens all the time in workplaces, particularly in larger or…

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When most people think about the movie business, they picture Hollywood: the studio lots, the blockbusters, the whole machine built on scale. But over the past twenty years, New York independent film has been building something different, nearly 3,000 miles away.

New York didn’t try to become Hollywood. It became a place where entrepreneurs, financiers, producers, distributors, and storytellers built a different kind of business, one that runs on strategy more than spectacle and on understanding the market rather than chasing it.

My interest in independent film began with the creative side. I’ve written several screenplays and have been working in production, but the deeper I’ve gone, the more I’ve realized that the challenges filmmakers face aren’t simply creative ones.

They’re business problems: financing, positioning, audience development, distribution. That’s what drew me to study these companies, not simply because of the films they’ve released, but because of the businesses they’v…

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When Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple in 1985, many people assumed his story was over.

How do you recover after being fired from the company you founded?

What happened during the years that followed surprised nearly everyone. Jobs didn’t spend his time trying to prove Apple wrong. He built NeXT. He invested in Pixar. He immersed himself in storytelling, animation, design, and a different style of leadership.

When he returned to Apple more than a decade later, the company was on the verge of collapse. But Jobs wasn’t simply the same entrepreneur getting a second chance. The experiences he’d gained outside Apple had fundamentally changed the way he thought. He simplified Apple’s product line, elevated design from decoration to strategy, and helped create one of the greatest business turnarounds in history.

He didn’t just return.

He returned different.

He had become what I call a Business Creative.

I know this because I’ve lived a version of it myself.

For most of my career, my work looked lik…

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When I was younger, I believed success came from having the right answers.

Today, I think it comes from asking better questions.

Looking back over my career in business, leadership, consulting, and now writing, I’ve realized that every meaningful step forward had something in common. It wasn’t a new strategy or a better business plan.

It was another person.

My father was the first. He had an uncommon ability to ask a question that reframed everything, not because he knew the answer, but because he knew which question would make me find it. I didn’t appreciate the gift at the time. I thought he was pushing back. He was holding up a mirror.

That pattern continued throughout my career.

My business partners. Trusted employees. Clients. Friends. None of them simply helped me build a business. They helped me build myself.

At the time, I didn’t fully appreciate what was happening. We were solving problems, building companies, celebrating victories, surviving setbacks, and making decisions one day a…

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As we celebrate the Fourth of July this weekend in the United States, we do so with special appreciation. This year marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, a reminder of the courage, vision, and determination that gave birth to our nation.

We often think of our Founding Fathers as fiercely independent men. They were. They challenged one another, debated passionately, and saw the future through different lenses. Yet despite their differences, they shared a common purpose and understood something that remains true today: lasting achievements are rarely accomplished alone.

Our independence was built through interdependence.

That same principle has stayed with me throughout my years as a founder and advisor to founders and senior executives. And the longer I sit with it, the more convinced I am that it isn’t just a historical observation. It is the central truth of every business I have ever built, invested in, or advised.

Business has never really been about products,…

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Over the past several months, I’ve been having a specific kind of conversation.

This time it was with title insurance agency owners, primarily in the New York metropolitan area, people who have spent years, in many cases decades, building something of genuine value, who have been reaching out with a question they rarely say out loud at first.

“What comes next?”

Sometimes it surfaces as a question about growth. Sometimes succession. Sometimes a potential sale to key employees, a strategic partnership, or an outright exit.

But underneath all of it, it’s the same question.

And I’ve found that the people asking it aren’t usually looking for a transaction. They’re looking for clarity.

Faith

After spending most of my career building, operating, investing in, and advising businesses across real estate, mortgage banking, and title insurance, I’ve come to believe that every meaningful chapter of entrepreneurship begins with the same thing.

Faith.

Not blind faith.

Faith in yourself. Faith in your ability…

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There are days when life feels like it is moving too fast.

Work pressures. Relationship demands. Financial concerns. Health worries. Family responsibilities. The relentless uncertainty about what comes next.

And if we’re honest, there are moments when we silently think:

”Stop the world. I want to get off.”

Lately I’ve found myself managing consulting engagements, pursuing new opportunities, trying to resolve a delayed tax refund with the IRS, which, if you’ve ever tried to reach someone there, you know is its own particular form of meditation, managing this newsletter, staying present on Substack, making time for my wife and family, getting to the gym, going to church, and trying to figure out where the next chapter of my life is leading.

The stress I experience doesn’t come from those things alone. In many ways, we don’t live in the world, we live in our perception of it.

The same circumstance can create anxiety, frustration, excitement, or hope depending on the story we attach to it. And …

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