Paying it Forward

Today I had a lunch meeting with the actor that I had in mind while writing Collectible Items, Joshua Adkins. We can even go so far as to say that I wrote this movie for him. He's not the protagonist, but he is the protagonist's love interest.

So, anyway, we met at our favorite Indian food spot in Studio City and spent some time catching up. He starred in a music video recently, was offered the role in a short film and is going on tons of auditions. He asked me what was going on with me, and I told him that I've been busy writing and that I'm so in the writing zone right now that I don't even want to think about doing anything else. However, that's not a luxury that I can afford, so in addition to spending the majority of my time writing, I'm also working on my business plan, looking for investors, working on my friends movie sets, researching films like mine, etc.

From there, we started talking about how busy we are, but it's a good busy.  I told him that my buddy is having a BBQ tomorrow for the 4th, and I don't even want to go. I honest to God just want to stay home and work on Collectible Items. People keep telling me that I need to relax and have some down time. But I feel like even though I'm working all of the time, I still have a lot of downtime. It may not be the same type of downtime that other people have, because it is work related, but it's still downtime.
Right now, I'm writing in my blog. I classify this as work and downtime. I'm heading off to a meeting in 10 minutes: work and downtime. Tonight, I'll work on the character breakdown for my Casting Director. If you guessed that it's gonna be work and downtime, then you are correct!

So I was telling my friend this, and he totally got it. He commented on how funny it is that no matter how hard you work, you can always work harder. That was when I introduced him to the What Would James Franco Do philosophy. I find myself working hard, but I'm not working nearly as hard as I could be. There are 24 hours in a day. Granted, it is physically impossible for me to utilize all of those hours, but I could use way more than what I do use. I elaborated a little more and told him that my plan is to work harder than I've been working to make sure that everything is in place in November so that I can make my movie. And you know what? I inspired him. He said that he liked my WWJFD mentality and he felt moved to adopt that philosophy as well. And just like that, the word began to spread. What Would James Franco Do? - motivating one person at a time.

#WWJFD