MIGUEL PARGA

Nobody’s coming to rescue you. I don’t mean that harshly. I actually think it might be one of the most freeing things you can hear. I learned it years ago at three in the morning, standing in an empty studio in Los Angeles.

There’s a room I go to when I’m lost. It doesn’t exist physically. But I could walk you through it blindfolded.

Nobody tells you about this part of being an artist. We talk about failure. We talk about rejection. We talk about the difficulty of getting the movie made, selling the screenplay, booking the role, publishing the book. But there's another part of the creative life that I think can be even more dangerous. The silence in between.

I was a national champion. Karate. Kung Fu. Two black belts. I had been competing in martial arts since I was nine years old. So when I walked into a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu school in California for the first time, I wasn't exactly lacking confidence. I knew who I was.

Success has an interesting way of disguising itself. When we're young, we often imagine it wearing someone else's face. We want someone else's career, someone else's confidence, someone else's life. For years, I wanted to be Steven Spielberg. Not just make movies like him. I wanted his life. It wasn't until I began teaching filmmaking that a single question from one of my students completely changed the way I thought about creativity—and ultimately about my own life. This isn