We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Scott Weil. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Scott below.
Scott, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?
Resilience. Oh man…where would we be without resilience? I suppose mine has a few origin stories within me: the first I think is the importance of growing up an athlete and competing in multiple sports. My two younger brothers and I are all within a total of three and a half years and our parents always made sure we were playing one sport or another from football to snow skiing and everything in between. Competing in a sport generally involved a coach (who was not our parent) and a team. These elements helped me learn, improve and compete. There is an enormous amount of actual falling down while attempting to master a sport, listen to your coaches and get along and compete with your teammates. I broke my left collarbone three times, my right wrist and right ankle over the course of about eight years and I always had to fight to come back from those injuries to compete again.
Also, having two younger brothers, you learned how to be tough, dust yourself off and go back at it…we did not show a lot of mercy to each other. Ha!
The second origin story of my innate resilience comes from the fact that most of my adult life I have been a successful voice-0ver actor. Talk about the toughest of entrepreneurial paths… probably the number one thing actors have to deal with constantly (and consistently) is rejection. When your win rate is below 5% of your attempts…you best be resilient. I waited tables for almost five years out of college before finally starting to make a living as an actor. A lot of late nights questioning what the hell I was doing!
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 have been a successful voice-over actor for a little over three decades…something that I’m quite proud of. It is a brutally tough business to succeed in but I have somehow been banging around here in Hollywood talking into a microphone for a lot of years now. Besides being a father to two now almost grown kids, that has been my primary gig. I was the voice behind all of ABC primetime comedy promos for almost ten years. When reality television started rolling out, I lent my voice to a few new shows like The Bachelor, Dancing With The Stars and more. Very, very fun years. In the VO world I have voiced everything like this to animation to narrating National Geographic shows, to literally thousands of tv and radio commercials, As far as work is concerned, the old saying “it’s good work if you can get it.” comes to mind! It has allowed me to stay mostly at home and help raise my son and daughter…something I’m also very proud of.
About 15 years ago, I started my indie filmmaking career when I made my first short film. I wrote/directed/produced and acted in it…which was taking on way too much, but more about that later. In the past 15 years or so I have made dozens of short films, commercial specs, web series, a scripted fiction podcast and most recently, a comedy tv spec pilot. This, along with my vo career, has kept my creative fires burning.
After divorcing 12 or 13 years ago, I branched out to the start-up tech world and helped start Tagger Media as an angel investor. It was a very interesting addition to my career, as I had basically existed as an actor and creator in the entertainment world to that point. Tagger helped me find that one of my great talents is connecting people and business’s. Because of the excellent leadership that eventually emerged in the company, it went on to great success and sold about a year ago. Teamwork is everything. You can’t do it all yourself.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Being a very creative, optimistic person is certainly one of my greatest assets. This has always allowed me to dream and think way outside the box. Ego is a very dangerous thing and can easily derail any project you are working on. Confidence is definitely key, but ego will take you down if you don’t watch it. Listen to everyone on your team and even though you may not agree one hundred per cent with everyone, true collaboration will bring ultimate success. The last is something we spoke of earlier, resilience. People say it all the time, but you have to fail in order to succeed. You need to learn from those falls and at the same time you need to get your butt up off the floor and move forward.
If you knew you only had a decade of life left, how would you spend that decade?
Currently I am in the middle of producing a comedy tv show. At this point, we have created the first show, (the pilot), and are now moving forward in an attempt to make the fist season on our own. Which is a little crazy I guess but that’s what we’re doing. The challenge is we are seeking more brands to jump on board with us and be sponsors. Gorilla Glue was our first brand in the pilot. It is a satire of the Home Shopping worlds and our cast are all professional improvisors. Giving them the space to improvise around the assets of your brand is a hilarious and genius thing to witness. We laughed so hard making the pilot, that I know, even though it is currently a challenge, we will line up many more brands to fill our season!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.youtube.com/@TheBuyNowShow
- Instagram: @scottyweil
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheBuyNowShow
so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
