Meet Ian Coleman

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ian Coleman a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Ian, so many exciting things to discuss, we can’t wait. Thanks for joining us and we appreciate you sharing your wisdom with our readers. So, maybe we can start by discussing optimism and where your optimism comes from?

As was said very well in the Shawshank Redemption, “It comes down to a simple choice really. Get busy living or get busy dying.” I care a lot about the world and the future of the world, both in my small part of it and for the whole of it. With that I have to believe that things can get better and that good things can happen. If we don’t believe there’s much of an impact that we can have, then life is a pretty depressing thing, a feeling of wasting away, but if we believe that life is worth living and that we can make our life and others lives better then there is a world of possibilities before us. I want to enjoy my life. I want to help others enjoy theirs. I’m not sure exactly where it started for me, but I have always loved helping other people and though I have been knocked into the dark by quite a number of experiences and challenges in my life I always find that no matter how dark things get, if we keep going, we will break through into a beautiful world again. Optimism for me isn’t a way of having the world always be rosy, it’s rooted in the belief that I will find solutions to my challenges and that the dark periods are leading to something better and for that we have to keep going. I recently watched the trailer for the new documentary about Christopher Reeve, showing all that he accomplished after he became paralyzed and even just the trailer was very powerful. I have had challenges in my life, but nothing like what he went through. Watching it I had to think, how would I be in that situation, would I have the strength to push through? It’s hard to know for sure on anything how we’ll respond, but I’ve continued to push through my challenges, so I have to hope that whatever comes my way, I will push through that too and continue to enjoy a beautiful world as much as I can. I don’t believe our impacts on others and the world have to be monumental, there’s no one way for anything, but one way or another I want to leave it better than I found it and hopefully inspire others to do the same.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I’m an actor and voiceover artist living in Los Angeles and with my friend Richard Scott, we have started our own production company, Endless Imagination Productions. We both care deeply about the quality of the products we are putting out and about creating shows and movies that will entertain a wide range of audiences as well as supporting other artists within the industry. One of Richard’s screenplays, a western TV pilot called Tales of the Valley, was a finalist at the Santa Barbara Film Festival and is a finalist at the Wild Bunch Film Festival which we will be attending shortly. I love the entertainment industry and stories, and I love being able to have a larger hand in creating stories that I want to see. We have a number of award-winning screenplays, and we are making our way through one of the harder challenges on the journey, finding the right investors to make the projects possible.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

First of the qualities would be work ethic. No matter what, achieving success in any venture requires hard work. There are parts of our development or work that aren’t always the most fun, but if we continue to work, we will reap the fruits of those labors. Both work and perseverance are required to be as good as I want to be, and I think that is true for anyone in this industry. There will also be a lot of things that have to get done, sometimes at quite inconvenient times, especially since things tend to happen all at once. This is where working smarter also comes in, because we want to do the work we need to do, but if there are any ways we can make what we need to do easier for ourselves then that is a highly valuable investment as well. For each of us this will probably be a bit different depending on our needs and our strengths, and we have to work within our means as well, but anything we can do to make our work easier, more efficient and more enjoyable will be extremely impactful. If you are struggling to do the work you want or need to do, take a moment to think about that. What feels like it is getting in your way? What can you do to improve that? The more hurdles we can remove from our path, the easier and easier it will be to do what we need and want to do.
The next quality would be collaboration. The creative arts are collaborative arts. As important as the work is the relationships and being able to work well with others. A lot of moving parts need to work together to make any project happen and I’d rather that time was pleasant and runs as smoothly as possible. No one wants more stress, so anything that can be done to alleviate unnecessary stress is valuable. To this point, I want to work with people who make my life easier, which I believe is true for others as well, so when I find those people, I naturally develop deeper relationships with them.
The third would be ingenuity. A lot of the time we have to find creative solutions or do things our own way even though a lot of people tell us different, or we have to make things possible with limited resources. It’s important to remember that no one has all the answers. There isn’t just one way to do things and what works for someone else may not work as well for you. I am always looking to learn so I can improve and also challenge the things I think I know. I don’t believe I know or am right about everything and I don’t believe anyone else is either, so I am always looking for deeper truths and new possibilities. It helps to stay flexible and be creative as we navigate whatever challenges come our way.

Do you think it’s better to go all in on our strengths or to try to be more well-rounded by investing effort on improving areas you aren’t as strong in?

I believe that both of these are true in their way. Our strengths are our strengths so it’s good to not forget about them by focusing too much on what we aren’t as strong in, but I also believe it is good to diversify our skillset. As someone who is interested in and wants to learn and be good at a variety of things, I have had to be honest with myself about how many areas I can maintain and how many I can improve at one time. That is how I have started to look at it. There are the areas that I am strong in, and I want to continue to learn and improve them, but in order to improve other things as well, some areas go into maintenance while more time goes into building an area or possibly two that I’m not as strong in. So, maintenance areas and growth areas. As the saying, “Jack of all trades, master of none” goes, it is easy to try to work on too many areas at once and not really make much progress on any of them, so I work to master a number of skills, but not all of them, and not all at once.

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David Carlson, Matthew James Photos, No Dogs

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