We were lucky to catch up with Amy Guth recently and have shared our conversation below.
Amy, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.
My life’s motto is “figure it out” and I believe deeply in the power of starting. So often, I see creatives waiting to have a full map of an idea before they begin, but the reality is that what’s mentally and creatively accessible to us at the start of a project is often only a fraction of what opens up to us along the way, so not only does waiting unnecessarily stall us, but it also severely limits the potential scope of what we’re working on.
Which is not to say we should go off and wing everything–it’s important to be confident in what we’re doing and know we can trust ourselves–but that very sense of self-trust is what can guide us through the project as long as we can see the overall vision for it, and it can help us remain open to possibilities to grow and shape the project as it unfolds.
When I was a kid, around four, I learned to swim by being thrown into the deep end of a pool. My dad and I were on the side, and he picked me up to get a better look at the drain, deep under the water. Suddenly, he threw me in and when I popped up, he said something like: I’m not going to let you drown, but you need to figure out how to swim back here. Unorthodox? Sure. The path I’d take with a small child? No. But, it was a gift in its way because what I remember about that moment is about one second of panic, followed by… swimming. I figured it out because I needed to. And, in that moment, I became wired to trust myself to always figure it out. I’ve leaned on that over and over in my life and it’s helped me avoid getting stuck in fear time and time again.
But, I unpacked this even more a few years ago when I was invited to jump out of a plane with the US Army Golden Knights team, which was a huge honor. I was so nervous about it but set the intention that I wanted, deeply, for the experience to be affirming and be an exercise in surrender– that once I was out of the plane, I had very little control over how things played out, and that no matter what I was going to embrace that. And that is not my nature at all, but that idea was clear in my mind so I went with it. On the day of the jump, we’re in this tiny plane and climbing higher and higher and my nervous system was starting to freak out, which is very human! The purpose of fear, after all, is to keep us alive and unharmed. But, fear can also talk us out of incredible things because it perceives what it thinks is danger. I reminded myself I was in good hands, that I was about to jump with some of the most elite skydivers in the world. And, I decided, in the most powerful sense of the word, that I was not going to chicken out and come back down to the ground in the plane. I decided with a force that I remember even at the time thinking was clear and powerful.
And, then this idea took over in my mind that all I had to do was the very next thing: and in that moment, my entire job was just to sit there and breathe. Then my task was to sit there and breathe while the team did double safety checks on everything. Then to walk to the rear of the plane where the door was open for the jump. Then to jump out with my tandem partner. I didn’t have to solve it all and remember everything all at once; I just needed to do the next best task. I could have decided the next clear task was to freak out, but the next best task was to breathe and be in the moment and I knew it.
That kept me calm and let me stay in the moment for a totally life-changing experience– and that, too, helped me really hone this idea as it relates to creative work: decide powerfully, prepare deeply and cut no corners in preparing, do the next best task, and stay open. That leads to pretty incredible things.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I’m a film producer and screenwriter, journalist and speaker. I never consciously chose my industry; I always knew I belonged here. I started a little neighborhood newspaper when I was seven armed with my little blue plastic typewriter (which I now have tattooed across my right shoulder) and was always just drawn to the power of story.
I wrote fiction, essay and some reporting and playwriting early on, then moved into journalism full-time and worked in newsrooms including the Chicago Tribune, and did only that for a while, then added the broadcast element, moving into hosting talk radio and later some television in Chicago. And, film felt like a very natural extension of journalism, and I quickly found that producing brought all of my skills together in a way that felt so aligned– I love to solve creative challenges, I love the business end as much as the creative end of the film industry, and I’m obsessed with the idea of “intentionally independent,” because I think now more than ever we can absolutely be strategic and intentional and build a great deal of autonomy and professional sustainability into our creative careers.
And, as a screenwriter, I found that the skills I sharpened working the newsrooms translated extremely well to that format– journalists are natural story structuralists, posses the ability to condense a lot of complex information into a single narrative in a cohesive and even way, and can usually do it fast, even in chaos. I especially like adapting work to screen and really love the challenge of adapting stories to screen in which the action largely occurs inside a person’s mind and that start with very few external visual cues.
A thing I encounter a lot is this idea that I have somehow jumped from one discipline to another, but in reality, all my work is very tightly focused around powerful stories, regardless of platform.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
I love to talk about my social media journey. A few things happened early in the social media era that became really defining moments for me. One, I remember a lot of my writerly and journalism friends were complaining about social media early on, and drawing lines in the sand about never wanting to use it, how it would ruin everything and so on. But, I decided that it was coming whether we liked it or not, that our readers were starting to congregate there and have conversations whether we liked it or not, and that the best course of action would be to start learning about it, decide the best way to use it for ourselves, and not worry about liking it or not.
I had a book coming out in late 2006 and right before, my publicist lost her husband, quit her job and went to go find herself. Which is understandable, but which also left me in a lurch. I again decided it was an opportunity to learn everything I could about digital media and do it all myself, and I am so glad I did. I ended up doing a lot of creative things like crowd-sourcing book tour stops, and holding tweet-ups (remember those??) along the way, and it was a hill of fun!
Somewhere in that, my grandfather, of blessed memory, asked me what the fuss was all about, and wanted me to explain social media to him. I showed him some home improvement brand accounts that I knew he trusted, and on that particular day, there happened to be a customer service issue getting resolved through a social account. My grandfather got excited and said something like, “this is a return to the person-to-person business model, like when I knew my baker and my grocer and if something went wrong, even if I didn’t get my way, I knew a person was going to hear me. This is moving away from just me with an 800 number calling some company’s phone tree.” And, that really became my north star from there on out. I never thought about social media like “person bellowing down from the mountain” but just a person-to-person conversation. It’s the cocktail party where you’re supposed to talk to strangers.
Mind you, social media has changed a lot since then, and to be sure, we weren’t really thinking about AI or bots then so much, but I still think of every interaction like a person-to-person one. I’m not trying to shout to everyone; I just want to talk with my people.
Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?
Culturally, we live in a space in which the idea of modesty lives at extremes, with one end of the spectrum being wild self-aggrandizement and the other being completely negating ourselves and our accomplishments, yet so few are talking about the rich and rewarding space right in the middle of just being straightforward about our accomplishments.
Indeed, the less represented we may feel in a given space, the more likely we are to undermine our own accomplishments, and that is real and valid to want to pre-empt challenges, but also, what it took me years to understand is that first of all, it’s not cute or helpful to anyone to downplay our credentials or accomplishments at all, and more importantly, if we think about the facts of our lives and accomplishments as simply the facts that they are, and think about them as keys that can open the doors of bigger conversations and unlock other opportunities and help others, the game completely changes.
We’re largely socialized (especially women) to play small, and I’m just not here for that. I cringe when I see anyone, but especially a woman, do something amazing, and then sort of joke that it was all a stroke of luck, when we all know she busted her butt to accomplish that thing. We have to learn to straightforwardly name it and claim it without squirming– we’re talking about actual facts!
The other thing I wish I understood earlier is the power of honoring out true selves instead of what and who we think we need to be. The biggest one for me was accepting that I love autonomy and independence in my work, and do my best work when I have it, so instead of grumbling about it, I instead built my business through that frame and with that priority. Even when I do client work, I tend to work with self-starting go-getters who value that framing, too.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.amyguth.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amyguth/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/amyguth
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amyguth/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/amyguth
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCALjUGnVMxQY3hCvuF0B-3g
- Other: Blue Sky: https://bsky.app/profile/amyguth.bsky.social Threads: https://www.threads.net/@amyguth Substack: https://guth.substack.com
Image Credits
It’s a selfie!