Oh man, if only I had an actual answer to this one. The whole reason I went to business school was this idea that as creatives, we cut ourselves off at the knee because we don't understand the business end of the creative work we do. It's not like business school was a golden ticket or anything, but now that I've done the thing, I've got a diverse set of new business tools that'll carry me through the rest of my career. At least that's the plan – and what I told St. Anne the Wife.
Being the analytics nerd that I am, I kept track of my time as a graduate student in fifteen minute increments. I'm proud of those 1,700+ hours of class and studying these last 18 months though I'm still bitter about that one B I got in Managerial Accounting.
About two years ago I got serious about pursuing this MBA nonsense and it's been a dead sprint ever since. I finished my last classes this past week and it's now the first Monday I've had in 18 months without a load of classwork. It's wild trying to realistically get my footing again as a working professional now that I'm not also a full-time student.
In addition to wrapping up my graduate work at OU, I was in the DFW area this past weekend with the OU MBA program. We heard from a handful of Dallas-based businesses like Texas Health Resources, 7-Eleven, and PepsiCo. I headed down early and got some face time with a couple of my contacts in the DFW area. Sai Selvarajan is a documentary filmmaker and an editor with Camp Lucky. We had lunch Thursday and talked shop about a few of his recent and upcoming projects. In 2021 he released The Unlikely Fan, a short documentary about his mom and her wild love of basketball. The film got accepted to the 2021 SXSW Film Festival and landed Sai some additional opportunities. He's got another film in the works and I'm looking forward to seeing what that leads to. I also met with Micah Austin who's been my go-to at Filmsupply over the years. Seem's like he's just as much an analytics nerd as I am, so we got deep in the weeds with that nonsense.
There are several creative works I'll start spinning back up this week in addition to pre-production work on a couple of client projects. Surely I'll have more updates on those as they get going again. Since I don't have any of my own nonsense to share at this point, here are a few recent podcasts and news articles I've gone through that are worth your time:
- Rethinking Growth at All Costs, HBR IdeaCast
- As Production Slows to a Crawl, Crew Members Say ‘Everyone Knows We’re All Looking for Work’, IndieWire
- How Bad Can It Get for Hollywood?, The New York Times
- In the Belly of MrBeast, Time Magazine
- How Networking Can Help You Build and Grow Your Business, This is Small Business