Continuous Learning for Filmmakers, especially those wanting to achieve even more success.

Disclaimer: The following information is NOT to be considered financial advice. It is for informational purposes only. It is also accurate as of the time of this writing. 

Please perform your own research and due diligence before making any financial decision.

Lastly, we purposely DON’T use affiliate or referral links. So you can have confidence we are making an impartial analysis free of any conflicts of interest.

Overview

Much has been written about how to get better as a filmmaker. Most of this information is centered around specific techniques, technical information, or general business advice. While this information is certainly helpful, there seems to be a missing component that sits above this advice.

Our goal with this article is to provide more clarity on “why” continuous learning makes such a big impact and “how” to go about it.

What is Continuous Learning?

The idea of Continuous Learning has been around for a while. It centers around the idea of continuing to improve your skills and knowledge on a proactive basis. Your goal is to continue improving yourself, your business, and striving to become the best version of yourself.

Another version of this concept is Kaizen, which is a Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement.

Why does this matter?

Having worked at Toyota many years ago, the concept of Kaizen was deeply embedded in the company culture. It wasn’t just a talking point, or a cute poster on the wall. Rather, it was embedded as part of the design and engineering process of vehicles, financing, processes and more. Toyota held departmental, country specific, and global Kaizen competitions on an annual basis, with financial rewards and recognition for the person or team’s contributions.

This foundation of continuous improvement relates directly to the idea of continuous learning for filmmaking. I recall attending WPPI in 2015 and going to a session with Adam Forgione of Pennylane Productions. He said something quite profound that really resonated with me: “At the beginning of every year, I throw away everything I was doing from the prior year.” He was referring to the techniques he had relied on to be successful in the prior year.

His intent was to hammer home the fact that you need to constantly and systematically evaluate what you are doing, should you keep doing it, and what new improvements can you make. Adam was essentially forcing himself to conduct continuous learning by not simply doing what he did last year (i.e. rinse and repeat). He understood that the filmmaking landscape is constantly evolving and thus created a forcing function to seek out new information.

How does this apply to me?

Great question. The reality is it may not. It really depends on your goals. For those wanting to be more successful in their filmmaking career, which might mean working with better clients, making more money, working less, growing your team, working more “on the business” rather than “in the business”, continuous learning can be a huge catalyst.

Engaging in continuous learning also requires courage and downscaling your ego a bit. You realize that you know a lot and can also learn a lot from others.

Practical Application: 3 Steps

Step 1: Mentally commit to making continuous learning a part of your ethos.

This step can be the most difficult. It requires making a proactive mental shift that you want to continue improving yourself, your business and your success. You make a commitment to making positive changes that require action.

To help with this mental shift you can explore using meditation, creating a vision board, or writing in a daily journal. Focusing on “why” you are committed to this improvement will have a massive impact on your success.

Step 2: Proactively allocate time for continuous learning.

Now that you have mentally committed to making continuous learning a part of your life, Step 2 is the action portion. There are unlimited ways of putting this into action, so it really depends on what works best for you and something you can repeat.

For example, you could allocate 20-30 minutes every Wednesday and map out the next week of continuous learning activities, goals and wins. You could also do this exercise once per month, once per quarter, read 1 page each day, etc.

The main idea is first allocating time to determine what continuous learning you want to focus on and then a success roadmap. You might spend 1 hour on the first of every week or month and set goals to read a specific book, attend a specific conference, take a specific online course, meet with an industry group, etc.

Then you allocate time each day or week towards these goals. One method could be blocking off 15 minutes each day for continuous learning, such as reading a book. You would then commit to this same time each day and treat it as immovable, similar to a doctor or dentist appointment, or a meeting with your most important client. Some folks have had success doing this early in the day or first thing in the morning to ensure it gets completed and doesn’t become a victim of “I ran out of time” or “the day got away from me” or “something more important came up.”

Step 3: Proactively create a budget to invest in continuous learning.

This step is incredibly important as well. While there is a ton of great free content available, you likely will find even more value in paid content and courses for a few key reasons. First, when you pay for something you likely are more invested in the outcome. You likely don’t want to throw money away so paying for something can often create a stronger commitment to the successful outcome.

Second, free content usually has to be monetized somehow. For example, a free video on YouTube has paid ads, affiliate links, and the like. Similar to free blog posts, social media posts, etc. When the author or course creator charges for their product they can often remove conflicts of interest associated with monetizing free content. Clearly you may be asking yourself, “Isn’t this blog article free?”. You would be absolutely right. As you can see in this article however there are no annoying ads, or referral or affiliate links or calls to action to make a purchase somewhere.

The other budget will be for your time and attention, arguably your most valuable asset. Investing in yourself can pay massive dividends and shouldn’t be viewed as an expense. As such, by setting aside a continuous learning budget you are mitigating the risk that you won’t purchase a book or course because you “don’t have the money” or “can’t justify the expense right now.” You want to remove that potential roadblock early on, especially if a great opportunity comes your way to invest in yourself. As a simple example, you could set a monthly budget of say $100 to spend on books, courses, seminars, etc. Any unspent money would be rolled towards the next month. So essentially you would have a $1,200 annual budget, or the equivalent of $3.29 per day, or $0.14 per hour.

Conclusion

I realize this notion of continuous learning, continuous improvement (i.e. Kaizen), and investing in yourself may be challenging to justify to yourself, family, friends, co-workers and the like. However, by making this mental shift and committing to lifelong learning you create a massive opportunity to achieve more success and work towards your big goals.

“1% better every day can lead to big changes.”

This article should help as a starting point to move towards action. We wish you the best success!

Author Notes

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