Find Your Voice

I don’t tell a lot of people what I’m about to say. Not that it’s embarrassing, it’s actually quite the opposite... 

I find that it’s so unique and unexpected, it draws attention away from almost anything else about me. Even though it isn’t even about me.

Call it a chip on the shoulder, a shadow, etc…

My grandpa, Sherwood Schwartz, created the TV shows “The Brady Bunch'' and “Gilligan’s Island.” He wrote, produced, and even wrote the iconic theme songs. He became a television pioneer (and eventually legend) of the early 1960s and 1970s. 

Sherwood, along with my father Lloyd, put things out into the world that billions of people have enjoyed, from all walks of life and across multiple generations.

I often hear one of these shows mentioned in daily life still today. Simply put, they have made an impact bigger than most of us will achieve. 

And I think about that all the time…

Me, however, I’ve always struggled to find what it is I really want to say or do. Like so many of us, I let my self-doubts as an artist, family expectations and more, creep in and stop me from following my true calling.

(More on this later…)

What I do know is that my grandpa didn’t do anything out of the ordinary, for an artist.

He and my Dad wrote jokes and ideas based on their personal experiences, which they genuinely found funny and entertaining. As with any good sitcom, stand-up routine, or any artistic work really… and it was the unique time, place, and medium of primetime network television that took these creations to the masses.

So the question became: do I have something to say or anything to offer? If I can’t write the next hit TV show or national bestseller, is it even worth it?

Instead of just writing.

Isn’t this something most of us do in some way? Whether that’s art, a scientific thesis, or starting a business? We talk ourselves out of it before we start, we get intimidated by others or what they’ll think, and we suddenly don’t trust ourselves or our own instincts… even if it feels like something we were born to do.

It’s like when Lena Dunham, while playing a version of herself in the 2010s HBO show “Girls,” says to her parents that she thinks of herself as the voice of her generation.

Or at least… “a voice… of a generation.”

It seemed a little far-fetched in the show, but in a meta way, didn’t she become one of the more important voices in real life, at least for a moment?

The point is: maybe all of us have a voice worth listening to… not necessarily literally… or maybe literally!

Maybe it’s all about believing in what you’re good at… and then, just starting to do it. And then to let your work impact the world in whichever way it does. Rather than the other way around.

Rather than not doing anything or thinking you have nothing to offer.