The Sky’s the Limit (Beyond That, You’re on Your Own) By Steven W. Alloway

If you could do anything, what would you do? Any creative project at all. No limits on time, budget, people, resources, or anything else.  What would you do? What would you create? I want you to picture it in as much detail as possible. What would this project look like? What would it involve? Who would it involve? In a world without limits, what form does your ideal project take?

Have you got it in your head? Great. Now, go do that.

What’s that? You DON’T have unlimited resources? There ARE limits on time, budget, and everything else? Your dream project is way too big and impossible for you to execute it, on a practical level? Well, OK. In that case… Go do it anyway.

Oh, you want to know HOW? Fine. Let’s figure it out.

The Impossible Dream

For me, dreaming up impossible projects is kind of a hobby. I have a long list of things I’d do with unlimited resources, which includes hosting a masquerade ball/charity gala across the stations of the Metro Red Line (L.A.’s subway system), building a time travel-themed amusement park, and mounting a Shakespeare play on the International Space Station.

All of those things are way beyond not only my current resources, but my current talents and abilities, even WITH unlimited resources. So how do I accomplish them? Well, what can I do with the resources that I do have? What IS within the realm of my talents and abilities?

It helps to start with the Whys. What is it about each of these projects that calls to me? What do I want to accomplish with them? For the time travel park, I’d love to create a fully immersive world where people can experience firsthand the cool aspects of different eras, from food to transportation to entertainment—what it was like in the past and what it could be like in the future.

I can’t afford to build a theme park. But what if I took some of the eras I want to explore and built an event around them? Some sort of immersive show, where the audience can interact with people from history, eat food from history, see important moments unfold. An immersive show is something I can do. (In fact, I have a show along those lines planned for next year, and I’m super excited about it.)

The masquerade ball stems from my fascination with the stations of the Metro Red Line, how each one has its own aesthetic and its own personality—and wanting to create something that connects them all in some sort of surreal and fantastical way.

I have no idea if whoever runs the L.A. Metro system could even be persuaded to allow an official function in their subway stations, even if I could afford to mount it. But I do have friends who are generally up for an adventure, who might be willing to explore the different Red Line stops with me and even plan some activities there.

For the play on the space station… I think it would be awesome to have a show mounted in zero gravity. Complete with extravagant musical numbers, if possible. So instead of launching into space, I could just… Umm… OK, that one’s a little more challenging. I guess the sky’s the limit, after all.

Building Up

In general, though, the point stands: get to the heart of what you want to do and why, and figure out what you can do right now that feeds into that.

Does that mean I’m telling you to scale back your goals and think smaller? I really hope you know me better than that by now. If I ever tell you to give up on your goal and replace it with a scaled-down version, that’s your clue that I’ve been replaced by an evil doppelganger. No, what I’m saying is, you should approach your impossible goals the same way you should approach any other project or task, creative or otherwise: one step at a time.

Anything seems impossible when you view it as one giant task. So you break it down into smaller and smaller pieces. And while many of those pieces may still be out of your reach, at least a few of them probably aren’t.

Start with what you can do now, with the resources you have. Create something that’s along the lines of what you want to do. Call it a test run or a proof of concept, or just a fun experiment. As you create it, you push your boundaries further. You acquire more resources, you gain more talent and experience, you connect with more people who can understand your vision.

By the time it’s finished, you’re closer to your big, impossible goal than you were before. If your dream project is a really, really extravagant one, then you might not actually feel closer. You didn’t build a theme park; you produced a show. But again, that’s only the first step. There’s still a long, long journey ahead of you.

So what’s the next step after that? What can you do with your new resources and experiences that will put you closer to your dream than you were before? Figure that out and do that. Then repeat. And keep repeating. Every step brings you something you didn’t have, every step teaches you something you didn’t know, and every step makes that big, impossible dream seem just that tiny bit less impossible.

Doors and Walls

We’ve talked about working towards a specific dream or a singular goal, but let’s look at things a different way. Imagine that, starting tomorrow, every door starts to open for you. Every opportunity comes your way, every person or community you want to work with is eager for the chance, and everything you do, you succeed at. What would your life look like five years from now? After five years of nothing but yeses and successes, what does your average day look like, from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed? How do you spend your time? What do you work on, and whom do you work with?

Have you got it? Great. It’s not going to turn out like that.

“But I thought we were talking about achieving the impossible and creating without limits!” Yes, but that doesn’t mean there won’t also be failure. In fact, there SHOULD be failure. There has to be, to get you to your goal. Can you imagine a world where, for five years, you didn’t have a single failure, and nobody ever told you no? You’d never learn or grow. And you’d be insufferable.

It’s a fun exercise for figuring out where you want to be in life. But the actual path to get there isn’t through a bunch of open doors. Some of them will open for you, sure. Others you’ll have to bang on until you’re knuckles bleed. Some of them, you’ll have to break down. You may even have to squeeze through a window or two. 

Sometimes there’s no door OR window. Just a brick wall, too strong to break down, too high to scale, right in the middle of your path. The only way forward is to find a different path that will take you a completely different direction. But if you stay on that path and navigate it well, you might just find that, somewhere down the line, it intersects with the path you were on to begin with and will ultimately take you to the same destination—just by a more circuitous route.

We don’t always recognize that at the time, though. It’s easy to think that going off on another path is tantamount to giving up, to accepting limits. But in fact, what’s really limiting us is staying on the current path, banging our heads against the brick wall we can’t get past. Taking another path might not feel like moving forward. But it’s still moving, which is better than standing still.

When to Hold ‘Em and When to Fold ‘Em

I recently started writing a script wherein the lead role would be perfect for Keanu Reeves. An impossible dream, to be sure, but there’s certainly a path to it. So I’m writing the script with Keanu in mind. And someday, when the script is finished and ready to go into production, I’d love to look into what it would take to get him on board.

But what if I decided I would ONLY accept Keanu Reeves in the lead role? I’m so committed to producing this project exactly the way I envision it that I won’t even consider any other actors. What then?

Even if I am somehow able to pitch him the script, there are a thousand other things that could prevent his being cast. He could hate it. He could love it but be too busy with other projects to get involved. He could ask for too much money. He could just say no. What happens to my project? Well, I’d be stuck at the brick wall, banging my head against it, and my script would never come to fruition.

It’s important to remember that yes, you can achieve your dream… But the finished product will never look exactly the way you envision it today. Nor should it. Especially when you’re working on something long term, plans grow, change, and evolve over time, as you gain more experience and new perspectives. And as you roll with the punches when things don’t go according to plan. If you can’t do that, then you’re not creating without limits. You’re letting your narrow focus on your vision be the thing that limits you.

So how do you know whether you’re at a door you can break down or a wall you’re banging your head against? How do you know when to commit to the vision and when to pivot to a new path? It helps to go back to the Why.

Why are you creating this thing? Why are you working on this project? What do you hope to achieve? And this thing that you can’t seem to do… How important is that to the Why? If you give up on this one thing and take a different path, will it still be the project that you want to create? Or will it turn into something else—something you don’t have the passion for?

With that in mind, let’s look at my Keanu Reeves script again. The reason I envision Keanu is because he represents a very specific character archetype, which would be helpful in telling the story. But, as iconic as he would be, he’s far from the only person who could play that role. And my goal in writing this script isn’t to cast a specific actor. It’s to tell a particular story. And that story can be told in any number of ways, by any number of different people.

So what if, instead of Keanu Reeves, my film starred, say, Hans Obma? The film would have a different vibe, to be sure. I’d be sacrificing my “impossible dream” of casting Keanu. But for those of us who know Hans, you know that in no way could he be considered a step down. I have no doubt he could nail the role. He’d bring something different to it than Keanu would, but those differences ultimately would serve the story, not hinder it.

In fact, in writing about this, I chose Hans’s name almost at random, as a member of the Epiphany community whose name and talents most of us would be familiar with. But now that I’m picturing him in the role… It really would be an amazing film, and he’d kind of be perfect for it.

I Think I Can, I Think I Can

There’s a saying I’ve heard, with regards to working toward your goals: Whether you believe you can do it, or you believe you can’t… You’re right. In other words, if you have confidence in your abilities, then you’ll succeed. But if you go in believing you’re going to fail, then you’re setting yourself up for failure.

Is the saying true? It depends on how you look at it. If you’re thinking about it in the short term, then no. If you become more confident, it may help you be more successful, but it doesn’t mean you won’t still fail sometimes. Every day, thousands of people walk into auditions or job interviews, confident that they’re going to land the role or be offered the position—only to be disappointed. In any Olympic event, there are dozens of athletes who believe they can win the gold medal—but only one actually can. As I’ve said, failure is inevitable sometimes. And it’s part of the journey.

But if you’re thinking of things in the long term, then yes, I do believe the saying is true. Succeeding isn’t about not failing. It’s about not letting failure stop you. It’s about understanding that failure is just another step toward achieving your impossible dream. But if you don’t believe you can do it, then you’ll never get to that next step.

There was a segment on SNL’s Weekend Update a few years ago, wherein Leslie Jones illustrated this point perfectly. If you’re able, I recommend watching it (the video’s only 30 seconds long), but if not, here’s a rundown:

“You know what happened to Oprah at 23?” she asks the audience. “She got fired. Imagine firing Oprah.”

“Yeah, well, that was a mistake,” interjects Colin Jost.

“No, it wasn’t,” Leslie counters. “Because she wasn’t Oprah. She was just some 23-year-old punk who needed to get fired, so she could BECOME Oprah. Sometimes you gotta fail to succeed.”

With that mindset, I believe it’s true that whether you believe you can or you believe you can’t, you’re right. Believing you can do something doesn’t mean you won’t lose the medal, fail to book the audition, or even get fired. It just means you have a choice. You can let those setbacks discourage you and keep you from pressing on. Or you can pick yourself up, learn from what happened, and try again. And again. And again. Until eventually, you achieve your impossible dream.

So yeah, if you believe you can do it—and you’re willing to put in the work, one slow, painstaking step at a time—then there’s nothing you can’t create, with the possible exception of Shakespeare in space. And even then, performing and creating art in zero gravity is still not outside the realm of possibility. It is on an airplane, though, not a space station, so technically, the sky is still the limit. But it’s a long way between here and the sky, and within that space, there’s more that can be done than we could ever dare to dream.