What does that mean?
Honestly, it can mean a lot of different things to all of us. For some of us, it’s just the dream of running our own business. For others, it’s the potential of what our small business can do.
For Hamil Bros Studios, it’s been both in baby steps.
In 2011, when I first started trying to make a living doing video production, the big dream was to quit my full-time job and do what I loved to do. After a couple of years, the dream was to start doing television commercials and short films. In the last couple of years, it’s been to grow the business and start doing much bigger jobs. The best part is that all of it has been happening. It’s been slow, but, it’s happening.
How do I get there?
Two main factors that I believe have contributed have to do with big dreams are keeping your eyes on the dream(s) and constantly pushing yourself out of your comfort zone.
Now, in case you didn’t know this, Jacob and I are a couple of certifiable weirdos. There’s really no way to explain how our brains work except to say we see most situations through a version of exaggerated reality that is most often comedic. I only mention this because one of the tools we have to help achieve our dreams is a live, ongoing document that we write down all of our ideas in. Most often, they are extremely goofy, if not flat out dumb, but, it’s always going and it’s always getting added too. The document was started on October 7th, 2016, while we were on our way to Dallas for a concert for my birthday. This is one of our main tools for keeping our eyes on our dreams. It’s something to look at and talk about how we will shoot all of these ideas some day.
Thing two is the hard one: constantly pushing ourselves out of our comfort zones. As it applies to this topic, I’m going to talk about the creative boundary pushing. Since I started doing videos, way back in high school, I had the desire to do something that none of my peers were doing. This all started in my Spanish II class and has followed me to this day. What it all boiled down to was one big question: how am I going to actually pull this off? In high school, it was a low-risk endeavor. If the idea wasn’t working, I could just do something different and easier. In our production business today, it’s a high risk. If we can’t do something we promise, we lose money and our reputation takes a hit. Luckily, our problem-solving skills have been getting constant exercise and are continually developing. So, when we ask ourselves, “how are we going to actually do this?” we often answer that with, “I don’t know how, but, I know we can.”
A good side-note, here, is that this is not a license to commit to things you absolutely cannot do. That’s just being ignorant, and setting yourself up for failure. You really have to know your abilities and be able to assess whether something is going to be within your skill set.
Conclusion
How does all of this tie together? For us, it has been a culmination that has resulted in us getting paid to execute one of our goofy ideas from our document.
After years of pushing the envelope on our own creativity, we have, within the last month, been asked to create a comedic short film to be displayed at the trade show of our dreams… And we’re getting paid to do it. We’ve dreamed big for so long and really pushed to get to where we are and, now, we’re doing things that, two years ago, we believed were pipe dreams.
The thing about accomplishing your dreams is that they’re not easy to get. If they were, they wouldn’t be worth achieving.
So, the takeaway, here, should be this: keep your eyes on your dreams, but, don’t expect to get them without staying uncomfortable.
Until next time!
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