Meet Sayre Crabtree

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Sayre Crabtree. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Sayre below.

Sayre, thank you so much for making time for us today. We’re excited to discuss a handful of topics with you, but perhaps the most important one is around decision making. The ability to make decisions is a key requirement for anyone who wants to make a difference and so we’d love to hear about how you developed your decision-making skills.

The skill of decision making is one that can only be strengthened through practice. The best thing you can do to be come a better decision maker is to learn to live and welcome the consequences that come with decision making. It can be easy to push the blame onto unforeseen circumstance or point fingers at the various other people involved, but it is only when you accept accountability for your decisions that you can learn from them, anticipate better for the next time, and remove anxiety from your life. Neuroscientists have proven the root cause of anxiety is the sensation of unknowing and the fear of choosing incorrectly. So, it feels only natural to say the solution to confident decision making is to know more and make peace with the worst possible outcome prior to deciding.

To address the first remedy, live more life. Experience more things. Talk to more people. Read more. Learn more. Interact with people of varying cultures and backgrounds. Give your mind as much context for life as you can to strengthen its ability to anticipate and empathize with the patterns of the world. Our minds are beautifully intricate and complex, with incredible abilities for pattern recognition from a micro to a macro level. Take body language for example, I do not need to verbally check in with everyone I interact with to know their feelings because more or less, my brain will alert me if someone’s body language feels ‘off’. This is only possible because I have experienced enough social interactions to have a good handle on that area of my life. Did I come out of the womb knowing these patterns? No. It is only through enough observation of missed social cues that we become aware. The same concept applies to your job. It’s only through running into what you do not know that pushes you to begin to know.

This leads me into the second half of the solution: make peace with the worst possible outcome. When deciding what to eat for breakfast, the stakes are pretty low. Whether you eat a bowl of cereal or a banana, the worst case scenario is you might get hungry sooner than you wanted or do not end up loving the taste of your selection. Either way, I would say most people have little difficulty making low stakes decisions. Now for a second example: you started your own company, you took out a 1,000,000 business loan from the bank, and you currently stare into the abyss of an email asking for a decision on font color for your product’s label. If you fail to check in on yourself, you could feel insane for being so overwhelmed and fatigued by what seems like a trivial decision — but it makes sense! Your brain knows that this decision could drastically impact your financial health. Whether you know it or not, you mind is spiraling in the background, putting you into a state of fear. Whenever I find myself in this state of indecision, I welcome those thoughts into my conscious and give validity to the potential outcomes. Then, once I am tuned in, I walk myself through what the reality of failure in this decision would truly look like:

‘if i choose pink, and that somehow completely destroys my sales, if i can never pay back my business loan, i would file for bankruptcy, and this company would be done. Okay, well, six months ago, I did not even have this company. So, I can live without it. If I file for bankruptcy, I would destroy my business credit, but there are tons of successful business people who had multiple bankrupt companies before their success, so it is not the end of my dream. It would make my next business harder to start, but I would have the ability to learn from this mistake. My family would not have a source of income for a while. How long can I provide for them off of my current savings? 3 months? Okay, then I’ll give this business 3 months to prove its success, and if it is not working, I will get a job I’m over qualified for to save up some money for my next attempt at being a business owner. Would that kind of suck? Yeah, but, what is a couple of months working at Panda Express compared to getting another chance at my dream? All in all, I would be perfectly okay. This font choice is not going to kill me. If it fails, it fails.’

Once I have that conversation with myself, the peace sets in, and my mind is cleared.

Then, I welcome in the thoughts of success. What if I decide correctly? What would that look like?

Suddenly, the right choice becomes so much clearer and I make a decision with confidence opposed to in fear. I remind myself that if I make decisions out of fear, all I am doing is surviving. I do not want to just survive, I want to live. There is freedom in peace. The more you run this thinking exercise, the more obvious the root of your fear becomes and the train of thought becomes much faster the more you practice it. Everyone has their own personal narrative in their minds and only a handful of root fears that motivate their decision making. Practice overcoming those fears.

The absolute best advice I can give to people who are in positions of high-stake decision making is to become at peace with life and death as soon as possible. Once you have peace in the ultimate consequence, everything else feels so minor and powerless over you. I was lucky enough to find my faith at 21 which has completely changed the way I live, feel, and experience life. I no longer see my decisions as anything to worry about but instead an opportunity participate in God’s will. Even when I choose wrong, God’s plan will always be accomplished. Nothing I do will dismantle God’s victory over evil, instead, my actions and decision to follow Him include me in His victory. God does not need us to act for Him to get things done, but He invites us to participate in His plan to increase our confidence and trust in His promises, to come closer to Him and feel His goodness.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

I am a freelance producer working in the Narrative, Commercial, and Music Video industry. I have three short films I am producing in the next couple months as well as some music videos to keep an eye out for.

I am also work as Operations Director for Production Connect which is a community of leaders in the film industry, coming together to connect, share ideas, and collaborate. I moved to LA two years ago with zero ties to the industry and knowing absolutely no one. I was fortunate enough to hear about the first ever Production Connect event founded and ran by Andrew Sandler. I attended, and fell in love with the community and the mission. Since then, I have become heavily involved in its expansion and can attribute almost every job I have worked on to a connection I made with someone attending the monthly event. We like to say that networking makes us nauseous and to be people first. From the friendships I have made from Production Connect, I have been a witness to the strength in numbers and the invaluable experience of having people to call on for advice, help, or inspiration in such a crazy industry.

To learn more about Production Connect, find us on Instagram @ProductionConnect

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

Purpose. Purpose is the intangible you cannot force or create. It is an underlying absurdity to your soul that drives you to wake up and work harder than anyone could without it. It is the unspoken thing that convinces people to put their trust in you despite not having ten years of experience under your belt yet. It is the thing that reduces the stakes of every day, delivering you from the decent to madness and elevating you to a hushed security of your place in the world, your career, and your relationships. I do not think there is any broad blanket advice for how to find your purpose except to say, your purpose is calling to you from the day you were born and instead of running into walls trying to find it, stop for a second to listen and walk yourself down the hall toward the sound until you know it is in your grasp. Then, never let it go and do not feel the need to get anyone else to grasp it. The more crazy it sounds to others while feeling like utter peace to you, the more obvious I hope it is that it truly is your purpose and no one else’s.

Empowerment. Find joy in empowering others. Yes, the search for self is imperative, but to know yourself and your purpose is to utilize it for others. Not everyone is supposed to be on your journey or path in your life. I think one of the best skills you can develop as a creative is to help see that other people fulfill their purpose in alignment with the fulfillment of your own. Take the time to ask people what they want, where they see themselves going, how you can help if you even can, and find the way that your strengths can shine a light on theirs. Do not force it in an inorganic way for the sake of opportunity or taking score on favors. Do not stretch your purpose to fit or fill anyone else’s. Instead, be a beacon for other’s to feel more authentically themselves, and celebrate that even if it means not working together or not walking through life together. If their purpose aligns with yours, you’ll get an authentic environment for both of you to do better and help one another.

Curiosity. In school, I never felt rewarded for my curiosity. I had questions that led off topic or caused informational overload for other students who only needed to know what was on the test. It led to me always feeling bored in school and in turn, not working as hard as I could have. I always did well on tests, but I did the absolute bare minimum needed for homework assignments. I would read academic journals or text books for fun and hardly ever did the assigned readings. It was not until podcasts took off that I felt like I had access to information that superseded my curiosity. I’m extremely grateful that I did not get rid of my curiosity before becoming an adult. In the work force, being curious has proven to be the conditional to being wise. By rewarding your mind’s questions, you search for answers that arm yourself for so many situations you have not ran into yet. More often than not, I have found myself relying on random pieces of information I cannot remember when or why I learned to get me get out of problems quickly. I believe if you wait until you need to know to be eager to learn, the impatience of the necessity will cloud the ability to fully receive the knowledge. Reward your own mind for being curious.

How can folks who want to work with you connect?

I am always open to meeting more people in this industry and seeing if we walk in alignment with our goals. I want every working relationship I have to be based on a genuine belief in one another’s success and purpose so that obviously means not every person I meet would pair well working with me. Therefore, I try to be as open minded to meeting new people and creatives in the industry as I can be — its a number’s game of finding your people. I do have it on my mind to connect with more working directors that would benefit from having a producer who believes in them and their vision. Producer’s can often be seen as the enemy to creative, so I do everything in my power to deconstruct that stereotype.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://sayrecrabtree.com
• Instagram: @sayrecrabtree