The transferable skills I learned starting my career in Hollywood (and the skills I had to unlearn)

It has taken nearly a decade since leaving the film industry to know what skills have served me well

Early in your Hollywood career, assuming you’re more the producer type than actor/writer/director type, you become aware of certain skills that are required to secure a paying job as an assistant to someone in the business. Those skills include: writing script coverage, knowing how to make a phone call (harder than it sounds), and scheduling meetings (also harder than it sounds). You’re supposed to already know how to get coffee. 

I remember agonizing with fellow bottom-rungers that these skills seemed so remedial, and hardly transferable should the dream of becoming a studio head not be fully realized. We’d lament how silly it seemed to have to know how to manage an executive’s call sheet if one day we were supposed to be able to negotiate killer deals and discover mind-blowing intellectual property. 

Five years after those beginner days, I decided to leave the film industry and pursue a career in marketing and advertising. I figured these industries were similar enough to film- they were both media after all- that certainly I could spin my experience in Hollywood into a career in those fields. 

It was hard. Lots of stops and starts. But I did it, and eight years later the only regret I have is that tacos in Colorado are just not as good as they were in LA. I should have seen that coming, I didn’t realize how much tacos mattered to me. 

Here are some skills I learned early in my career in Hollywood that continue to serve me well:

How to tell a story

This one is obvious: there are simply no better storytellers on the planet than the ones in Hollywood. It attracts the best talent because the stakes are the highest. There is no greater fame, no higher earning potential than Hollywood if you’re a writer. 

With that said, I learned the most about screenwriting from the terrible scripts that crossed my desk. The attributes of good stories are never more glaringly obvious than when you’re reading something terrible. 

I learned conflict is essential and that your main character has to want or need something above all else; that the outer (the action) and inner (the character development) stories have to intertwine and move each other forward. 

However, I didn’t become a copywriter or a creative director. Because I could identify a good story - and understood how widespread its impact can be - it made me a better business strategist, which is what I do today.

How to get a job

I spent half a decade in Hollywood trying to survive through a patchwork of jobs on set in the first couple years to always making sure I was preparing for my next move. In Hollywood, I learned that looking for work is a way of life, not something you do when one job ends. You’re never not looking for work, you’re never not seeking to expand your potential for opportunity. Getting any job is the luck of a moment, getting exactly the right job, the best one for you at a particular point in your career, is the work of years. I learned how to think about job strategy in terms of a sequence of jobs, not in terms of making ends meet right now. 

How to not have a job

This is almost more important that how to get a job. I learned what it meant to survive without a paycheck. I don’t want to give the impression that I know what it means to truly be impoverished; I had a lot of privilege going for me. But I didn’t have parents that could supplement my regular income or pay for my bills at the time, and I took on a lot of debt in the time in between jobs. 

I learned the unemployment is not the worst thing that can happen to you. You make it through and you do recover. I learned that credit card debt is also not the worst thing, and that you’re not a terrible person if you’re living off credit cards for short periods of time. 

This made me willing to take risks later on in life, I knew it was possible to bounce back. 

How to be charming

This is my favorite skill. I learned early on, especially during my time on sets, how to make friends and allies quickly, how to make small talk seem like fun, and how to get to know people just enough that you build rapport, but don’t cross any boundaries. 

It’s helped in job interviews at the recruiter stage when you’re telling your qualifications to someone who really doesn’t know the field they’re interviewing you for. It’s helped establish quick connections at conferences and business meetings.

How to follow up

It’s important to follow up. Always follow up. You send a cold email to someone asking to pick their brain over coffee and they don’t respond? Follow up. Every time. 

How to be tenacious

If you spend any time working in Hollywood, you’ll meet someone who is fighting to make  movie with everything they’ve got, but it’s a terrible idea. You’ll meet someone who believes in something so much but never makes any progress. You’ll meet someone (a lot of people) who believe their big break is just around the corner. 

The thing is that pure, raw tenacity isn’t useful or helpful. Tenacity on its own is easily misguided and blind to reality. 

I learned that the success of anything isn’t about the quality of the idea, it’s about your ability to inspire others to act on its behalf. The game isn’t always just about persistence, it’s about picking your bets and knowing how to shepherd an idea, a product, or a project to life by influencing the right people and inspiring the right action. 

How to drum up business from nothing

Remember those phone calls and meeting scheduling I mentioned? The thing about talent agencies, and the film industry in general, is that it is literally drumming up business out of nothing. They are literally making it up: they are using their imaginations to tell brilliant make-believe stories that other people will pay money to hear. 

The rhythm of the business is the constant dance of discovering new talent, introducing them to the right people in an ever-escalating progression of prestige and influence, until they’re on stage accepting an award. This rhythm of business revolves around three essential drum beats: Have you met so-and-so? Do you like their work? Would you do a project together?

I realized this largely characterizes all of the business world: relationships, ideas, and the combination of complementary talents and resources. When you combine this with the ability to tell a good story, in the business world you are unstoppable. It also helps to be charming. 

Here are a few things I picked up in my time in Hollywood that I’ve had to unlearn:

That my career is my whole identity

It’s not. But when you’re young and you’ve left home to move to the big city, your career is the only thing you have and the only thing you’re working on. It’s really a magical time in your life where you have both freedom and means to explore it. You are also among an entire cohort of young aspiring professionals experiencing the same thing. In LA, I could be best friends with anyone because our top 3 priorities in life were: work, work, and work. And we all did the same work. 

But as time went on, I felt increasingly one-dimensional. I moved to LA to live in a big, big world only to feel confined to the incredibly small world of the film industry. When I met the man who would later become my husband, all of a sudden I started to realize a part of my identity that had value completely separate from the film industry. I started to think of my life in terms of the next five years, not just the next year. 

I am a much fuller person today as a wife and mother whose friendships aren’t based on the shared experience of working in the same claustrophobic industry. I am also much more effective at the job I do have because the stakes just aren’t as high: when I take a risk at work, that’s all I’m doing, I’m not gambling my whole identity and livelihood. 

My power is in my association to someone else

Hollywood is built on power structures of association. It was important to be the assistant to as powerful a producer or executive as you could because it conferred privileges of access to the best talent, the biggest deals, and the most important projects. Being able to say you worked for a major producer or studio head also served as a currency in the social circles of film: you became someone people wanted to know and be connected with. 

But it always bothered me that I didn’t have my own value or worth. That’s not really a critique, it’s just fact. If you are a writer or director, you develop your own creative voice and your own style of storytelling. You may not be very good but you at least have your own identify and value. 

When you’re a producer or studio head, you have power by proxy only. Even the most powerful studio heads have their power because they hold the purse strings- they ultimately call the shots on behalf of the studio that bankrolls a slate of films. But they themselves do not have the money. They become powerless and worthless when they lose their job. Now, this isn’t to say that they don’t have some unique talents that put them in that position in the first place, but there really isn’t a whole lot that distinguishes one executive from another other than the relationships they have. 

This is the other way that assistants, producers, agents, managers, and executives only have power by proxy: it is directly tied to their relationships and associations with the best talent (writers, actors, directors). 

It’s fair to say that this holds true in the business world as well, but I do think there are more mitigating factors and more opportunities for me to provide unique, authentic, and inherent value in most situations. It could come through advanced degrees, specialized experience, a certain intuition and personal experience with a product or industry. 

I had to unlearn that my power was only based on my association to others, and I had to learn a sense of self-worth and value that wasn’t dependent on the perception of those around me. That was a really hard lesson to learn, and one that takes a lifetime to understand and practice. 

Arrogance and egotism are normal

In the film industry (and many industries), arrogance is a learned skill and deftly wielded tool of influence and subjugation. I look back on many conversations or experiences from that time in my life and realize how impressionable I was in my early 20s: I was easily influenced by arrogance and misread it for true power and confidence. 

I grew to feel that my opinion wasn’t worth voicing; that I couldn’t possibly have a valid perspective among the more creative, more experienced men around me. 

On the other side, I thought it was normal to be critical and judgmental of others, to be quick to write someone off or talk behind their back. It may have been normal but later on I learned a very hard lesson that it’s not professional and just plain reflects more poorly on you than the one you’re criticizing. 

I had to learn the hard way that arrogance is simply someone’s attempt to hide their own insecurity, and I learned it because I was the arrogant and deeply insecure one. 

I didn’t learn how to manipulate pivot tables in Excel or read a profit and loss statement. I didn’t learn how to code or shoot and edit video, but I did learn life skills that have come in handy over and over again. I look back fondly on that time in my life for many reasons, and feel grateful to have trod the same pavement as some of the best storytellers of our time.