Gary W. Goldstein: Before I moved to Los Angeles, I was an attorney in San Francisco.
It was a very respected position.
It was a beautiful city.
I had a great life.
I had a nice income.
I was set and I was deeply comfortable.
And it scared the hell out of me.
Had I stayed, I knew for certain (about me), not true of all lawyers, not true of all people,
what have you.
I knew for me, I was going to wither from the inside.
But that was not the right life choice for me on a soul level, on a spirit level, not
a role level or a goal level but on a soul level it was…I had to leave.
I had to flee.
I had to run away, literally.
And so I did.
I ran away and I wasn’t sure exactly how it was going to work out but I thought, I’m
going to go to the far end of the state to this crazy place called LA where I knew nobody
and I was going to pursue getting into the film business because I so love storytelling.
I’d grown up inside of books, I was a lover of story.
And most of my friends and colleagues and certainly the other attorneys at the firm
I worked at they all wagged their finger at me and said “How can you do that?”
“That’s so brave.”
“That’s so crazy.”
Or something?
We don’t understand.
And I said to them it’s not brave.
It’s the opposite.
It’s…it’s…it’s survival.
That for me to survive and thrive, I can’t stay here.
This is unsafe for me and it’s unsafe because it’s so comfortable.
I need to go to this foreign land called Los Angeles.
I need to go to a place where I am anonymous and know nobody.
I need to stretch my limbs and I need to see if I can make it in this very highly-competitive
unknown world of filmmaking.
Because that lights me up, from the inside out.
I may fail.
I may come crawling back on my knees begging you to take me back Oh Friends of San Francisco.
But on the other hand if I don’t do it, I will never know and I’ll always regret
it.
That’s one version of many, many, many stories I could tell about…and that’s just me.
But I’ve seen it across most of the people who’ve been a part of my life, that this
thing called the comfort zone is the most dangerous zip code you can live in.
Because it’s limiting by definition.
You get inured.
You become habit-driven.
You notice less.
You become busy with that which is familiar and you build invisible walls around that
experience.
That becomes your longitude and your latitude as opposed to self-defining us as an adventure,
as an explorer, as someone who is going to be a maverick and do the things that truly,
truly express more deeply who you are and that cannot be the same thing when you’re
17 as when you are 40 as when you’re 80.
We are designed to evolve.
We are designed to change.
The world changes whether we like it or not.
It’s good of us to understand that’s something to be embraced and it’s like our friend.
It’s not our enemy, it’s not poison to our spirit.
It’s the opposite, it’s an elixir.
I’ve had multiple careers and I don’t think I’m done yet.
And that’s why because I can’t predict what my appetites will be 24 months from now
or five or ten years from now.
I know what I’m doing right now is exciting to me but it always involves exploration,
it always involves and I say that not as necessarily as a physical reality but it’s an emotional,
psychological, educational reality.
You know like “How can I be a better version of me?”
That’s the job really for all of us.
How do we become a better version of ourselves and since we spend a majority of our waking
hours in the service of this thing we call work and livelihood, boy what a great tapestry
to make sure that what you’re doing expands you.