A Pep Talk for Creatives: We Bought a Zoo

Oh, this movie. My heart! If you haven’t watched We Bought a Zoo yet, put that on your to-do list this week. It’s on one of the many streaming services we have, but if you can’t find it streaming, check it out from your library or you can buy it on the cheap. It will do your heart happy (and also, might want to make you want to buy a zoo. Just a fair warning.)

 

“Sometimes all you need is twenty seconds of insane courage.”

I love this clip from We Bought a Zoo. Sometimes we (I’m talking to me here) overthink things. We think about all the ways this thing can go wrong. How we could ruin our careers. How we could make a fool of ourselves. And sometimes we need to shut down all the “what ifs” and go for the “twenty seconds of embarrassing bravery.” Want to enter a contest? Do it. What to submit to an agent or publisher? Click that submit button. What to start a conversation with another artist that you look up to? Start that conversation (really! You fangirling/fan-guying all over them is going to make their day!)

The point of it all

If I didn’t have twenty seconds of insane courage, I never would have gotten a publishing contract. It’s true. I wasn’t going to submit and, at literally the last minute, the day of the deadline for submissions, I thought “what’s the worst that could happen” and clicked submit. That twenty seconds of courage meant that two weeks later I got a call about a book contract and three days after that, I landed an agent.

Not all twenty seconds of courage are going to end in a win. There have been many times when I mustered up the courage but didn’t get the win I was looking for. But if you never try, how are you going to find out?

So what are you going to do this week that takes twenty seconds of insane courage? Let me know how it goes!

Need more pep talks? You can find more here.