It’s the day after Christmas. The rain is pouring down on the roof and the turkey roast is slowly digesting… and since I have just asked practically everyone in the world I’ve ever met to help me raise a lot of money to do something I have only dreamed of I’m going to be sharing my story with you….
I was raised in New York City in a creative household. My dad was a documentary television producer and my mom, a pioneering female entrepreneur and author.
As a typical high achieving “Type A” family, the conversation at the dinner table every night was around my mother’s business and her new endeavor as a self-help author. When I was 8 my mother’s book The Women’s Selling Game became a bestseller and her subsequent books Women and Work, and When Smart People Fail also were hits. Mom was on dozens of TV shows; Oprah, The Today Show, Donohue, etc. and, she was featured in magazines, and newspapers. She started traveling even more than she had in her role as an entrepreneur, speaking around the world motivating women with talks and workshops who were moving away from traditional jobs and as they were newly adapting to their roles of executive females.
At the time of this was happening my dad who is an Emmy Award winning documentary TV producer, was experiencing a less soaring trajectory.
The TV business started to experience a transition and, all of a sudden the public wanted less of what my father made. New types of programming began to replace the high budget high quality documentaries my father worked on. Videotape and cheaper methods that my father wasn’t used to began to replace film. Thousands of people began to flood the TV market as “TV” was a new major in universities and the market became saturated with younger more nimble people who would work for less. Dad, unwilling to compromise his artistic vision, started working less.
What happened to my dad has happened to many in his generation and in my lifetime to countless musicians who were unable to adapt. They got left behind. Today my dad is still a producer of live events and he has found a satisfying outlet for his creativity, but he no longer makes TV documentaries and he hasn’t for a long time.
I can’t help but think that I think about my childhood and seeing my dad get left behind factored into why I was so drawn to artists – helping artists find their voices, tell their stories and adapt to new changing technologies.
It’s not fair that all of a sudden there are all of these new rules (I never have said that it is) but it is necessary. If you want to stay competitive doing what you love you must stay nimble and adapt or you will get left behind.
