Freekstorm VFX Blog

I am a victim of my lizard brain.

Let me explain. I am a huge fan of Seth Godin, probably the world’s most famous business blogger. If you’ve never read him, then I humbly implore you to check him out ASAP. I guarantee that reading his books will change the way you think about your work. His sound business advice applies equally well regardless of your chosen profession - yep, including and especially your filmmaking career. Anyhoo, enough of the book recommendations and back to my lizard brain and how it relates to filmmaking.

In his new book Linchpin, Seth makes an extremely persuasive argument that our attitude to our work and whether or not we make a go of our project depends on how well we can resist our amygdala.



The amygdala is a lizard shaped piece of your brain, located near the brain stem. It determines your feelings of rage, fear and your sex drive. When you feel threatened or scared of failure, when you hear that nagging voice in the back of your head telling you that you will probably never finish your movie because it’s too damn hard, when you want to write a script but you keep putting it off, when you have writer’s block, that’s your amygdala talking. As Seth says, “the lizard hates change and achievement and risk.....so it rises up in rage and fear and shuts you down.”

And so your amygdala resists, so much so that you find excuses for not pushing forward your filmmaking project. You prevaricate, you doubt that your ideas will ever work and as a result your movie never gets off the ground. But as Seth says, if you want to achieve your goal, if you want to push forward and make your plans reality, then you have to fight and defeat your lizard! How do you do this? By recognising that what is stopping you finishing your film or your script is merely your amydgala at work. You must stop finding excuses, quash your self-doubts, push aside your fears and your dawdling and realise that your film is more important than your insecurities. Willpower is your only solution when faced with the mighty lizard. Push, push, push through your blocks. Ignore the distractions of your mind and just keep on going until your work is finished.

And when you have fought your lizard and won, when you have finally finished your film and you are ready to release it to the unsuspecting public, only then will you have vanquished your demons, only then can you sit back proudly and say, “I did it. I really did it!”

And that’s what makes a truly successful filmmaker rather than a mediocre one.

Right, time to go slay my lizard! See you all next week...

Labels: books, filmmaking