What can filmmakers learn from a guy who died before the first camera was invented?

A lot it turns out.

Benjamin Franklin was a prolific writer, business man and politician, and he shared a lot of his ideas.

Today we’re going to dive into my favorite quote of his:

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
- Benjamin Franklin

Apply this to filmmaking. Make movies about the cool things you’ve done. If you don’t have anything to make movies about, go do something cool and tell a story about it.”

Live an epic, story worthy life

“We should do something this weekend,” is the start of endless conversations that lead to yet another weekend at home, doing chores, making food and trying to catch up on some much needed sleep.

Does it have to be that way?

It’s easy to fall into the routine of a zombie worker. We work, eat, sleep, and if we’re lucky, work out on weekdays, and when the weekend comes we’re too tired or lazy to seek out anything new.

That won’t cut it if you want to make a living telling stories.

One of the biggest weaknesses of the film industry’s working culture is the lack of room for a life outside the job. When we get home from a 10-16 hour shift, we either crash or watch Selling Sunset until we’re not sure we like Chrishell anymore. All our inputs and impulses come from either making movies or watching movies.

No wonder so many films and TV shows feel derivative and like “more of the same.”

As storytellers we need to broaden the scope through which we see and experience life. It takes effort to break the routine, but it’s easier than we tell ourselves. A while back I listened to a podcast with a busy businessman (sorry, I can’t remember the podcast or the guest), and he talked about how every year  he and his family do 8-12 mini-adventures.

I love the idea of these mini-adventures.

You can set the cadence to fit your life, but whether it’s once a month or once a quarter, the idea is to plan to do something new and fun. It can be traveling to new places, doing an activity you haven’t done before or even be tourists in your own town and discover something new. It can be a one-day adventure, a weekend or a week, whatever works.

Having these mini-adventures is a great way to get out of your comfort zone and live a life worth telling stories about.

How to become a story sponge

When we live story worthy lives, we’re exposing ourselves to stories on autopilot. Like we talked about last week, motion is key when we want to attract luck. The same goes for experiences. We have to get up off the couch and move around, do something.

Once we’re up and moving I found it’s super helpful to capture the stories in the moment. A journaling habit I picked up from online writer Nathan Baugh is to write a “story of the day” at the end of the day. It doesn’t need to be much, something to jog the memory of what happened.

For example: “I refused to listen to our Maps navigation and took us on a 3 hour detour through rocky desert in our Mazda 3.” This will remind me of an epic, impromptu road trip into the bowels of Death Valley me and my wife took a few years ago.

This habit serves two purposes:

• it helps us remember the stories and magical everyday moments that so easily get lost
• we write daily

My second step in becoming a story sponge is curiosity. Ask questions of the places you go, and the people you meet. People LOVE talking about themselves. If you can get good at drawing stories out of people you’ll collect exponentially more stories. As a bonus the people you talk to will think it was the most amazing conversation.

Try it.

Write down stories, quotes or idea that resonate. These two habits will give you source material for decades.

Share your stories

If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend Austin Kleon’s *Show Your Work.* If you want the short version, try this blog post.

I like them both because he completely disarms a lot of the fear I have around sharing my stories in public. I’m especially guilty of the “my work should speak for itself” mindset. The truth is it rarely does.

If we want to have our creative voices heard, we need to speak up.

With the story worthy life and story sponge frameworks we’ve discussed above, you’ll have something to share that’s yours. Whether we share our experiences and the stories we collect directly, or use them to inspire our own works, the end result is the same.

“Find your voice, shout it from the rooftops, and keep doing it until the people that are looking for you find you.”
- Dan Harmon

There’s no one answer for how to share your stories, but the necessity of it remains all the same.

I used to be terrified of social media, but found that writing was a lot less scary than putting myself on video, so that’s where I’ve started. Your journey might be completely different.

Conclusion

Today we talked about living a story worthy life by getting out of our film and TV infused lives, and experience the world outside our screens.

We talked about collecting daily stories, doing things worth telling stories about with mini-adventures, and having a curious mindset always on the lookout for new stories in the wild.

Lastly we talked about the importance of sharing your story, and how to overcome the fear that so often holds us back from doing that.

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