By Daniel Kim
I’ve been a storyteller for as long as I can remember. It started by roleplaying “house” with other children, or pretending to be our favorite cartoon characters on the playground. I was forced to attend church since birth but often, not understanding a word of what was said by the Korean pastor, I would take the weekly pamphlet and write stories on them with the tiny pencils littering the pews. In bible camp, I was often the playwright, rewriting biblical stories with characters from Martin, or using Superman as a metaphor for Jesus – a good twenty years before Zach Snyder. Growing up in a low income neighborhood I would take McDonald’s toys and turn them into communication tools for ghosts and spirits and we would hunt down wanted criminals in the night. (Because kids.)
As I entered middle school in the nineties, I came to the sad realization that if I did not specify my race and gender in a short story, I would be perceived as a white man. I found this to be a disheartening truth and could not bear the erasure of so many different identities because of a perceived white neutral that exists in America. And it quickly became clear to me that this was not just my own struggle but the struggle of so many “others.” I made an effort early on to write exclusively female protagonists as a challenge to myself. Then I started writing Latinx, queer, and Black characters. All through high school and then into college I continued on this path, which ultimately made me confront my own biases and expose myself to the lived experiences of other marginalized peoples.
I’ve lived in Brooklyn for most of my adult life, and I’ve met many other creators. Yet early on realized I was different from most of them. Generally speaking, most artists seemed to have this deep sense of self-doubt and insecurity. I could practically smell it on them, no matter how confident they pretended to be. This happened even with artists that had received a modicum of success and praise early on. In fact, this seemed to make the problem worse. It finally occurred to me what the difference was between myself and many of my peers: I made work that wasn’t about me making art. I just removed that from the equation entirely. It could be about me but it wasn’t for my sense of being an artist. I made art exclusively for an unknown audience that I wanted to inspire. Far too often many artists make work to be loved and admired as artists. Once I realized this difference in the operating system, I started to unravel the reasons behind it.
If you make purpose driven work, it’s not really about you and your ego. And once the ego is removed from the equation, it’s so much easier to fail because it was never about you. It’s easier to make mistakes because being perfect is not the point. The point is to make work about something bigger than yourself. And once it’s bigger than yourself, your confidence in the work also grows. You are making art in a way where you are channeling a greater purpose and the power of that begins to take over.
There are so many examples of this in Hollywood, of people that make work to be loved and admired, and then often burn out. But when you work to inspire others outside of yourself, even when you fail, people around you want to know what’s next. Because there is something so attractive about someone that makes work selflessly. When you make a film with that kind of energy, your collaborators feel like they’re also involved in your work. It’s for the universe and the universe begins to conspire with you to achieve that goal.
Sometimes I meet folks that have this goal in mind, but they lose sight of the target. They begin to devalue themselves and second guess their intentions because they go back to yearning for egoic love and admiration. It exists in all of us. But forget that. Let that go. Remember the goal. It’s for something bigger than yourself. Something that exists even after you die.
I have personally coached quite a few celebrities and leaders from different communities and fields of art, and the main thing I do for each of them is to find that through-line about why their work is about something bigger than themselves. Then I turn that into a one-sentence mantra. This way when they lose sight of what they’re doing, or if fame begins to elude them they can go back to their personal mantra and regain their clarity. They become empowered to a degree that it often feels miraculous. Here are some of the mantras that have helped creators:
“Whenever you make a video, mothers will no longer feel alone and in the dark about how to raise their newborns.”
“Every time you tell your story a couple of queer kids might not kill themselves.”
“You have to become the hero you always wish existed when you were young.”
“It’s not about if your work is good or bad, it’s about honestly searching and sharing the truth of existence.”
“Only you can perform the way you do and your specificity will let people know that they are universally not alone.”
And on and on.
Not just “you’re good at this,” because that is not enough. Look, you could succeed just by being good, but I would wager it’s a far more insidious and destabilizing route to take. Focus on the purpose of your path, and the clarity you amass can make the work flow through you. Suffering often triggers the artist but you don’t have to suffer to make art.
So get over yourself, and get with something greater.