The Path That Is Yours Alone to Travel

There's nothing wrong with formal training and credentials. At the same time (unless you're planning a career in brain surgery), they're not always necessary. If you do your homework (inner and outer) commit to your passion, surrender to its demands and find the heart-centered discipline that keeps you moving forward, you will discover gifts, talents and resources (inner and outer) that you never suspected were available to you.

Take my situation: Nothing I have ever done and succeeded at (and made money at) have I gone into with any formal experience or training. In most cases, I didn't even know that were passions until they came knocking at my door!

In conventional terms, I knew nothing about novel-writing when I wrote The MoonQuest, my first novel (now an award-winner), nothing about memoir-writing when I wrote Acts of Surrender: A Writer's Memoir and nothing about screenwriting when I wrote my first screenplay, an adaptation of The MoonQuest, which is in early preproduction as part of The Q'ntana Trilogy Movies.

I have no art training, yet have sold my drawings. I have no photography training, yet two of my photos were published in Toronto's The Globe and Mail newspaper, and I have sold several others. I have no formal training to teach, coach or speak, yet have been in demand in all three areas and wrote an award-winning book on writing and creativity, The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write.

Now, I'm launching into the daunting world of filmmaking as director of an epic fantasy trilogy with no directing experience. Am I scared? Absolutely. Will I let my fear get in the way? No way! I spent too many years letting my terror hold me back to relapse into that old pattern.

Bottom line: You do what you feel called to do, you move forward as honestly and confidently as you can, and you know that if you have been called to the task, you have all the support you need. Whatever your passion is, forge ahead....on the path that is yours alone to travel!

• Photo: "The Path" (c) +Mark David Gerson

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• Acts of Surrender Book

• The Q'ntana Trilogy Movies

• The MoonQuest book

• The Voice of the Muse book

• Mark David Gerson

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