Leap! goes to Hollywood; Never say never

You're a writer in an industry that worships the young and shuns the old. Your calls stop being returned. You feel alone and question what you'll do with the many decades you still have left. Some would call it a crisis of confidence, others a midlife crisis, but you call it the "narrows."

So you do what you have always done in the past and you start writing. Soon you are not feeling sorry for yourself and you poor yourself into what is quickly becoming your life. It's a book that, in part, is about what happens when you find yourself on the outside when you used to be very much on the inside.

Then a funny thing happens. Your book, Leap!, comes out and the phone starts ringing again. First from Newsweek, then it's people who've read the book and for which it resonates with them, and then even a website or two. Finally and most surprisingly, Hollywood calls and wants you back.

If this sounds like a movie***, it's not. But it is a TV show, or will be. ABC has commissioned author Sara Davidson and her friends (Goldie Hawn, Marta Kauffman, and Nancy Josephson) to create a pilot for Leap!

Besides being happy for Sara is there a lesson here? Probably several. But for us the takeaway is that in challenging times it's never a bad idea to turn to that which you love most, in other words your calling. For Sara it was writing. She didn't begin working on Leap! as a way to get back into Hollywood. That was just a wonderful side-benefit. No, she started it because writing is what she does best. At a book signing that we attended in April, someone asked Sara what she would do if she suddenly found out that she only had a few days to live? Without missing a beat she "I’d take notes, because I am a journalist at heart." She later noted that the two years writing the book were some of the most pleasurable in her life.

That's the real lesson here. When you are uncertain what to do, start with what you love to do. You'll be Happier for doing so.

***Of course it sounds like a movie and we even said so several months ago:

This sounds like a formulaic Hollywood movie: after years of rejection, an out of work writer pens the best book of her life, a major publisher gets behind the project, and the result is a blockbuster and success for all...

Update: One commenter on another blog quipped:

"By the time the network gets through with it, the show will be about four twenty-somethings who run a tanning salon in L.A. Their doddering, fifty-something parents will serve as straight-persons."

"sara davidson" goldie hawn