Meet Dr. Jack Spelling who, in a past life, was a Chief Clinical Officer of a mental health clinic, specializing in depression and addiction with families, teenagers and the adult children of the Hollywood elite. He left to pursue his dream of a career in screenwriting and achieved his Hollywood ending, but one day realized the life he’d authored was one of disconnection. It turned out the life he lived… hadn’t been lived at all.
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I’d been living vicariously through the characters in my head, some darker than the ones I’d dare put on the page. Meanwhile, I was spinning stories about the characters I loved in my own life, until they exited the scene completely.
It was the same story from my time as a clinician: I could give advice but never take it. That pattern repeated when I became a screenwriter: I could craft a hero’s journey for my protagonists, but never live one myself. I was a spectator in my own life, watching the same tired scene play out as I numbed myself with booze, Xanax, and whichever antidepressant (SSRI) that I’d been prescribed that month.
I’d had writer’s block for months, with studio deadlines looming, but my mind was fixated on unresolved questions from my past life as a clinician: health and happiness go beyond a session on a therapist’s couch or any increase in your prescribed or unprescribed drug or distraction of choice. But what if I could combine my experience editing characters—both in therapy sessions and on the page—to create a new form of entertainment?
I was in my bungalow in Beverly Hills, wasting away late at night on my couch, ignoring a deadline for a script, instead brainstorming what that new form of entertainment might look like.
And then as if on cue, my phone rang. My tortoise shell glasses, the ones that made me look smarter than I felt, fell to the floor. It was a call for help from my childhood friend from St. Louis, **Riverfront Tim.** He was excited. He had a plan. I never knew whether he was brilliant, or batshit crazy, but it was probably more than a bit of both.
“Save the soul of St Louis? How?” I humored him.
He replied, “We must show the way for St Louis, to…
Together, United, country, county, and city,
St Louis was once a light on a western front, a gateway to The West, an arch that bridged across the Mississippi river of rage that once divided our land, and seeks to divide it again.
…between a future ruled by technology, and a past ruled by people.
Leaders build bridges. Bridges are strong enough to be walked on.
He opened a book on his shelf, mentioned it was a book from a high school friend of ours from John Burroughs, flipped to the last chapter—Talk SHIFT #22, and began to read the closing lines of the book muttering something about how “writers save the best word for the very, very End…”
the closing words of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller, 22 Talk SHIFTs: Tools to Transform Leadership in Partnership, in Business and in Life.