We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Natalie Young. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Natalie below.
Natalie, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?
When you begin your career as an actor you learn the art of resilience very quickly. To want to be an actor you must want it past the limits of not only regular rejection, but senseless rejection. There’s a great line in one of my favorite plays by Duncan McMillan, where the main character is talking about the audition process and she says something like, “Sometimes you don’t get the parts. And sometimes the people that do aren’t as good as you.”
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
The Trophy Club produces content. Our primary focus is video, whether it be lo-fi UGC style content, or that slick and pretty branded content. Whatever the project, we try to inject a healthy dose of playfulness into it. Think the staff writers at SNL writing for your META ad campaign. It won’t always make sense, and we definitely “swing big” more often than not, but if you manage to capture some element that brings the audience joy, you’ll find it’s one of the most underrated tools for conversion out there. We try to leave seriousness for business, and let everything we create be the opposite.
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?
Well, I love a list. Here goes:
1) Adaptability. Having rigid expectations of a process, or an outcome is the quickest way to upset yourself, and make crumby art. The hilarious part about having expectations is it’s likely you haven’t even shared those expectations with anyone else on the team, you’re just holding them inside. Then when you have to pivot (because you ALWAYS have to pivot), you spend a great deal of unnecessary energy having feelings about it. Try not to treat your business like some bland task list you check off and where no surprises or variables can enter into.
2) Celebrate. This goes back to treating everything like a todo list. A great way to burn yourself out is to push forward in perpetuity without ever pausing to go “Hey, I’ve never done that before and I just did it – and kinda well for my first go. That’s really neat. Good for me. Maybe I’ll shut my laptop for today and walk the dog longer than usual.”
3) Ignore your competition. Many creatives I know, not excluding myself, get handicapped by concerning themselves with what their peers are doing. You can relax about this. The competition doesn’t exist. That’s a construct birthed from a scarcity mindset and the toxic individualism impressed upon us from an early age in America. This is art. The collage we cut out and glued to a neon foam trifold board for our science class presentation in third grade is now our job. If you like something someone else has done, learn from it. Don’t let it stop you from making what you make. If you need to, give the nasty voice a name. Mine is called Shelly. When my brain says, “You’ll never catch up with ______. Better quit now and go into dentistry,” I remember to say, “Can it, Shelly.”
Who is your ideal client or what sort of characteristics would make someone an ideal client for you?
This is a funny question, because I think early on I might have said things like “edgy, femme, risk takers” or something like that. But that generally falls away fairly quickly, or it did for me. I no longer require myself to be in love with a brand to want to work with the people behind it. It’s pretty simple: at The Trophy Club, we like to collaborate. We like to get paid fairly and in a punctual fashion. We like clear and timely communication. That’s it. It’s not really about the content itself. After a while, you learn you can make almost anything fun and create all sorts of cool content for nearly any purpose, but at the end of the day, the one thing you can’t do is make a difficult agency/client easy to work with. Some people just don’t want to, or can’t, effectively collaborate with anyone but themselves. That’s when you want to run for the hills – even if they’re on your “dream” list.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.itsthetrophyclub.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/itsthetrophyclub/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/itsthetrophyclub
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-trophy-club/
Image Credits
Jordan Fraker
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