How Sylvester Stallone Helped Me Stay True to My Vision
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Forty-five years ago this year, Sylvester Stallone donned a rented tuxedo and went to the Oscars, where his movie Rocky had garnered 10 nominations and ultimately won three, including Best Picture. It was such an unlikely turn of events, like a jackpot lotto win, that every time I hear it, I’m re-inspired and set back on course to live the life I really want.
Two years earlier, Stallone was living in a scabby apartment in Hollywood with a mere $106 in his bank account and a dog he couldn’t feed. One night, sitting in a movie theater, he saw a fight between Chuck Wepner, an underdog nicknamed the Bayonne Bleeder, against one of the greatest boxers in history, Muhammad Ali. Miraculously, Wepner won.
The 1975 fight between Wepner and Ali inspired Stallone’s screenplay, which he famously wrote in three and a half days. It tells the story of a down-on-his-luck local boxer named Rocky Balboa who gets the opportunity of a lifetime to fight the heavyweight champion of the world—Apollo Creed (played by the inimitable Carl Weathers). While he doesn’t win in the ring, his indomitable spirit and endurance is a win in life, a personal victory, a truer triumph.
Interest in the script was immediate and overwhelming. He was offered an ever-increasing slew of offers, all the way up to $360,000 (valued at $1 million today) for the rights to the script, but only if he ceded the lead role to an established actor. He refused. Finally, Irwin Winkler, the Hollywood heavyweight producer whom Stallone recently called out for not giving him back the rights to Rocky, agreed to pay him $75,000 for the script and acting duties.
Stallone’s bold faith in his vision, refusing a life-changing sum of money while living in a slum, hovered over me while I was offered a job last winter that would have made my younger professional self wave a hand through the air in disbelief as if to say, Come on! Am I really going to earn a good living in publishing? The job would have paid me more than I’d ever earned as a senior reporter, and my words would have lived on the website of one of our country’s most esteemed publications.
But the offer came after a series of life-changing events, along with the natural progression of age and change in perspective: the whiplash pace of life ushered in by the internet, causing widespread burnout and stress; falling in love, marrying, and welcoming a beautiful baby girl into the world; a global pandemic and a three-year battle with severe anxiety, insomnia, and depression. I wasn’t the same person anymore—I had no ambition for the usual metrics of success, like a well-paying job that would grant me respect and esteem from others and a larger bank account.
Six months before the offer arrived, I’d actualized a long-time dream: founding School of Hard Facts, a media literacy program to teach kids how to spot and stop the spread of misinformation.
I felt in cosmic alignment with my purpose, as well as happy and hopeful that I could turn it into a full-time job I’d actually love with my full heart. Enthusiasm for the program attracted almost immediate interest from well-endowed organizations and schools. I needed to strike while the iron was hot.
But unlike Stallone, I didn’t listen to myself—I took the job. I was 45, and it felt irresponsible not to help build wealth and provide security for my family. I started descending into “should” thinking, moving further and further away from myself.
After I accepted the offer, I didn’t sleep for six nights straight. I had an emergency session with my doctor, who increased my anti-anxiety medication. My partner said, “Literally, you can’t do this job. Your body has rejected the offer.” Half alive and half awake, I was in a group meeting with the founder of the organization, a lovely, kindhearted man, hearing him talk about next-level ideas to continue the upward ascent of his company, but I couldn’t stop thinking: I have my own company that’s building momentum. Why wasn’t I using my time and energy to prop up my own project? That moment crystalized for me what I needed to do: With embarrassment, I stepped down for health reasons.
When I did, another lifelong dream—writing a meaningful book—came within grasp: A literary agent from one of the biggest talent agencies in the country asked me to write a proposal based on a book idea I sent him.
It seemed that once I shook off my fears and stepped into my purpose, a new world opened up for me. My depression lifted.
Going forward, I’ll continue to keep lessons I learned from Stallone front and center:
Seize your opportunity
During a casting call for a part in another movie, Stallone gave the producers an elevator pitch for the script he’d written. They told him to bring it by. He did, and they loved it. He made his own luck, inspiring me to do the same. I was in my dermatologist’s office when the program supervisor for my kid’s after-school program came in. We chatted, and I later used that initial connection to pitch my program. She loved it and decided to roll it out into seven schools in our district.
Keep your life simple
Stallone once told a media outlet: “‘You’ve got this poverty thing down. You really don’t need much to live on.’....I was in no way used to the good life. So I knew in the back of my mind that if I sell this script and it does very very well, I’m going to jump off a building if I’m not in it.... So this is one of those things, when you just roll the dice and fly by the proverbial seat of your pants and you just say, ‘I’ve got to try it. I’ve just got to do it. I may be totally wrong, and I’m going to take a lot of people down with me, but I just believe in it.’”
Learning to do with less created the right mental condition for me to follow my dream. Can we scale back on going out? Can we lose Hulu since we have Netflix? Can we buy fewer books and check them out at the library? Learning to adapt to less, as Stallone did, helped me worry less about what I don’t have, settle into what I do, and get busy hatching my dream. I always turn to this ethos when money worries start clouding my resolve.
Stay true to your vision
Stallone insists he would have let Rocky rot in the weeds and dirt if movie executives refused him the lead part: “I never would have sold it,” he says now. “I told my wife that I’d rather bury it in the backyard and let the caterpillars play Rocky. I would have hated myself for selling out.”
I got sidetracked by the world of shoulds, the world of cultural imperatives that compel us to stifle the voice, the vision, the dream within, but listening to my body, my unsettled gut, helped me find my faith and return to my real work, which has made me the happiest I’ve ever been.
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