Meet Teeg Stouffer

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

Teeg, 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?

Perhaps unpopular opinion: my resilience comes from my faith, and my faith is really not in myself – it’s in Jesus.

I mean, this idea of “believe in yourself,” isn’t all wrong, but if my life has proven anything, it’s that I can get myself into some pretty sticky situations.

But my life also proves that when I find myself in trouble, as I do every so often, as long as I do what I am able to, God will close the gap.

That has made me much more willing to take risks. Not risks that I feel like are outside God’s will for my life, because I really don’t want to find myself “out there on my own,” outside of Him. I want to do everything I can with Him and for Him, and one result is that when I get knocked down, He’s going to pick me back up. I’m sure of it, and because I believe that to my core, that makes me resilient.

This is almost outdated, outmoded thinking in our current social climate, but I think it’s actually timeless and true.

I once had a leadership role in a company where I was a leader but not the owner. Over time, the perspective of leadership diverged from the actions of the owner. At first, the disconnect was just philosophical – a difference of business opinion. As time went on, we began to disagree on matters of ethics. But – I was being paid well, we were doing more right than wrong, and I was able to excuse some ethical things that I probably should not have. But then it came to the point that the owner had crossed from bad business to illegal business, and I decided to leave. During that time, I realized that he set me up to take his fall for grand larceny in case he was found out. I made an exit as quickly as I could without damaging our clients, and not long after, the company failed. I left with no backup plan and less financial cushion than was wise – but I knew that getting away from him and the situations he was creating were the only move I could make and keep my integrity intact. It was the right thing to do.

Despite making more money than I ever thought I would in my life.

Despite enjoying my work and clients and co-workers.

Partnering in a lie, a fraud, is wrong, and there was never going to be any way I would change his nature.

So I left – and although I did have to do my part – getting scrappy and finding work – work came, opportunities came, my friends and family and church rallied around our family, and we found ourselves better off than ever!

I don’t think that if I wasn’t anchored in Truth, like legitimate Biblical truth, I would have been able to identify that what we were doing was wrong. The world justifies some pretty awful things. And if I didn’t have faith, I would have been too afraid to leave. We see this, people feeling trapped in bad situations, staying in them because they’re afraid. But Jesus teaches us what is right, teaches us not to fear, and then He promises to carry us through difficulties when we do what is right.

So: that’s the very honest, if not popular, true answer to where my resilience comes from.

It’s proven out so many times. Once, my wife and I lost a year’s salary in a bad business decision. We survived.

Once, I took a huge risk to start an event-industry non-profit and a for-profit professional event organization, a few months before the pandemic hit and all events were shut down for a year. We struggled for a while and then those businesses failed. I survived!

Taking risks, some working, some failing, and surviving each time – with God’s help – has proven to me that we can bounce back!

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?

The story of Fascination Film Studio was born in the dusty corner of my Dad’s attic, after he passed away.

After he died, my brother and I started making our way through our mom and dad’s stuff, the accumulation of their lives – and the artifacts of the family that they’d collected. I was in the attic with my brother, sneezing my way from box to box, and I came across a plain white banker’s box. Inside, I found carvings … African artifacts. It took me a moment to remember what they were, but then it clicked. My great-aunt and uncle, maybe even a great-great aunt and uncle, had been missionaries in Africa, and these were theirs.

But here’s the thing … their names. I couldn’t remember their names. And I couldn’t ask my dad. He was gone.

He was the youngest of three brothers, there was nobody else left to ask.

I wondered, “Which country in Africa did they serve in?” Were they simply missionaries, or was there a colonialist aspect to their story? I wish I knew. Wish I could ask my Dad. I regretted not recording those stories when I had the chance.

I could have. I have had lifelong passion for storytelling. Even as a kid, I was filming stuff on my VHS camcorder. When I was 14 years old I got my first radio show. By the time I was 16 I worked at WHO-radio in Des Moines.

I have always been a storyteller, a recorder of moments, but somehow I hadn’t recorded my own family’s history. I just assumed I’d remember it all. I didn’t. A seed was planted in me when I realized it.

On my mom’s side, my great-grandmother came to Iowa in a covered wagon when she was a young girl. I knew this lady until I was about twenty, and I remember her well. Joy Larsen.

Her story Is remarkable – legendary in our family. When she was a child, her mother passed away during childbirth, so her father, grieving and overwhelmed, packed up his kids in a covered wagon and journeyed to Iowa to be closer to his own parents, hoping they could help him raise the kids.

During that journey, tragedy struck: their wagon was hit by lightning, and my great-grandmother’s siblings, who were on either side of her, were killed. She survived, though, and her survival – among other things – means … me. Because she lived, I am.

As I continued to search through the boxes, I found a diary – a record of her life, starting with her birth in Watertown, South Dakota, in 1904. As I read through this diary, I became committed to preserving her story with a film. Not for fame or fortune, but for my kids and for future generations.

Stories like hers show just how much sacrifice went into the comfortable lives we live today. My great-grandmother probably survived on a fistful of cornmeal a day as a kid. It’s not her fault – It’s what she was born Into. Contrast that with my kids – again, not their fault – they were born into it – but they’ll LOSE THEIR MINDS if we buy the wrong brand of chicken nuggets!

They have only ever known climate control, a comfortable bed, stability, excess, abundance, extraordinary comfort. She only knew the frontier, the life of survival that came from these early settlers of the plains. As a result, she had grit, forged by the hardships of her time. That grit was passed down to my grandmother, who was raised during the Great Depression, and then to my mother, but maybe a little less, because she was raised in the 50’s and 60’s. Then some came my way, but by the time I was coming up in the 80’s, we had A/C and cable TV and it just didn’t engender the same amount of resilience. Grit.

Each generation has grown a little more removed from that struggle, and as comfort has increased, I think we see resilience decrease. I think this disconnection might contribute, in some way, to the epidemic of anxiety we see today. As we face problems that seem existential, maybe we forget that so has everyone before us, and get overwhelmed.

And so. It has become not just a passion or a on-the-side thing for me, but my central focus to make these films.

It’s not just about heritage—it’s about connecting people to their past, helping them understand the sacrifices that have been made for them, and showing us the strength that lies in our roots.

As for my own kids: I want them to see that life wasn’t always as easy as it is now.

As I work on each film, I become even more passionate about this mission. Every story I uncover confirms that behind every door, there’s an extraordinary story waiting to be told.

And maybe, someday, I’ll have the honor of telling yours.

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?

I think that one of the most transferrable skills a person can have is good communication skills. Which doesn’t mean you have to be a world-class writer or storyteller, but of course it helps. Being a good communicator is being oriented toward communicating well, communicating often, communicating in a way that people can understand. Whether you sell shoelaces or lead a family or make widgets in a factory, communication plays a role in being successful. I’ve always been oriented toward this thing of transferring ideas, and that means being a great listener, distilling information, and then knowing what to say, what not to say, how to say it, and when. If you can get a handle on those fundamentals, communication skills can take you a long way.

The second thing is love. I hate to bury love – not calling it out first or last – but it is in the middle of everything that matters. Doing the work I do – I do it because I love people. Love their stories. Love wanting to help them preserve their stories. Love helping people invest in their families – the ones who came before, the ones who will come. Love helping people who have businesses or people who have organizations tell those stories. Love helping them succeed. Love helping people thrive. I think that having love and pursuing love and sharing it well is transformative.

The final thing is faith. I think that if we have faith that everything will work out or faith in ourselves, that can be misguided. It can take us to some whacked out places, because we could pursue a destructive thing far, based on that kind of faith. But a faith in God – in Jesus – that faith is never misplaced. He is as the Bible says, “in all things,” and “the giver of every good and perfect gift.” We really are made for a purpose, and when we put our faith in Him, we open the very best doors. These doors always lead to good places, even if along the way there are challenges. When our faith is in Him, we have confidence that we’ll get through the challenges.

One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?

I’m very interested in building partnerships and collaborations.

I think there are probably people who work in genealogy, estate planning, end of life planning, and history who would be fantastic partners in helping identify people who have great stories, and who want to help tell them.

I am always eager to partner with other people in creative services and I think that having collaborators helps us refine our work and our products, so I love being pulled into a production or having people who I could pull into a production.

An area where I know little is in distribution of films, and generally my clients aren’t looking for distribution. However – some are. That’s a new request, an I’d love to find partners who specialize in this area.

Anyone who has a company, or is part of a community, or who just has a personal family story they want told – of course I want to talk to you, too! I’d love to hear your story and learn how we can work together to record it through a film.

Contact Info:

Image Credits

Photo of Teeg behind rock: Image Credit Noah Herman

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