Director Steven Spielberg and his father Arnold

I am happy and sad to say that this will be my last blog post on this topic. So, for such an occasion I thought the analysis of Steven Spielberg’s life would be appropriate as he was on my list to write about and I never got around to it. Spielberg is considered to be one of the best movie directors of all time and is currently the highest paid director beating out the likes of Michael Bay, the Russo brothers, and many more. As you can probably guess, he didn’t get there overnight. He held a sustained passion for which he would not let go under any circumstances. 

As a young child, Spielberg had practically no ambition, like most children, but at the age of 12 he made his first film. A home movie production of a train wreck, in which he used his very own toy trains. Spielberg continued on to then film more of his amateur 8mm films. As a boy scout, Spielberg completed his photography merit badge by filming a nine minute cowboy 8mm film called The Last Gunfight. It sounds very cheesy, however, this can be considered the start of a very fruitful career. He took the opportunity to apply his passion to his current “work” by adapting a merit badge for photography to the big screen. A year later, Spielberg created another film, a forty minute long war film called Escape to Nowhere that was solely composed of his high school friends. He had entered the film into a local film festival and won first prize, which in turn motivated him to make several more 8mm films throughout his teenage years. 

During his senior year of high school, Spielberg and his family had moved from Phoenix, AZ to Saratoga, CA where his parents would get divorced, leaving Spielberg to move to LA with his father. At this point in his life, Spielberg had become hard set on becoming a movie director, so moving to LA gave him the opportunity to pursue this goal through higher education. Unfortunately passion and school work often do not intersect as one is usually given up for the other, and in this case nothing would stop Spielberg from pursuing his dreams. So he applied to his dream school, University of Southern California’s film school, where he was promptly rejected for his C average in high school. He could’ve given up and said that fate has concluded his own ineptitude as a director, however something as simple as being rejected from a school should not be the reason for failure and Spielberg understood this. He then applied twice more to the same school with the same outcome: rejection.

Steven Spielberg (left) on the set of Saving Private Ryan with Tom Hanks (Right)

He then later applied and got accepted to California State University, Long Beach. During his time there he would take up an intern position at Universal Studios’ editing department, where he was given the opportunity to write and direct a short film for theatrical release, a twenty-six minute 35mm film called Amblin’. The film had won a number of awards and had caught the eye of studio vice president Sidney Sheinberg. Sheinberg then offered Spielberg a seven year contract, which was eagerly accepted. Making Spielberg the youngest director ever to be offered a long term contract with a major Hollywood studio. Spielberg dropped out of college and the rest is history. 

We will never know if Spielberg would be the same man today if he had gotten accepted into his dream school, but we do know that he found the place where his talents were recognized and appreciated by his peers. He didn’t let his high school bullies, or college board, or anyone else dictate his actions or his passions. He knew what he was passionate about and simply persevered in the face of failure. If you were to take anything away from these ten blog posts it should be the common theme across all of my posts, perseverance is the greatest ally to success.

Thomas Edison, American Inventor

Thomas Edison is one of the most recognizable names in all of innovation. He holds more than a thousand patents (1084 to be exact) and has developed many life altering technologies that can only be described as an evolution of life. The only person to succeed Edison is Lowell Wood, who in 2015 obtained his 1085th patent at the age of 74.  Edison may sound like a guy who has it all figured out and he is. He is that very person. However, he still has faced and overcame failure to achieve success over and over again, more than a thousand times. His failure is different from the others because for him failure is part of the driving process behind innovation.

Failing forward is a common theme of keeping your head up and pushing through while learning from your mistakes and failures. Thomas Ava Edison took this to the extreme in an era where this was not common knowledge. Many times he would be working on one project and sees a problem to be fixed by simply inventing something else to make his other invention run better, smoother, or just work in general. Iron extracting was one of those issues. Many of Edison’s inventions in the 1880s relied heavily on iron and Edison became very distraught at the cost of it. So he sought to create his own solution to the problem, a low grade iron pulverizing plant to mass produce the element of value. Unfortunately before he could get it to work efficiently, new iron mining regions opened up reducing the price of iron and losing Edison a hefty sum worth time, equipment, and money. But just like with failing forward, Edison went on to utilize aspects of this failed plant for concrete production which became one of his major entrepreneurial successes. 

Thomas Edison’s First Lightbulb

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” A quote that effectively surmises Edison’s mindset. He doesn’t see failure as actual failure, but rather as a note from the universe that you simply need to change something before continuing. He was a man who faced constant failure in his day to day life and his profession. He tinkered with something until it worked and never considered every time it didn’t work to mean failure. Every single one of his inventions more or less followed this pattern of failure until success, and many people would’ve given up when they could not engineer their own solution. Edison spent tens of thousands of hours creating revision after revision just for one invention and then proceeded to do this a thousand more times. He was a man with a great aptitude for learning and a tenacity or stubbornness that would constantly thwart failure till the day he died.

As Edison once said, “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” So whatever you do, never give up on your dreams and always find a way to succeed because that is the very secret many people overlook. “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is to try just one more time.”