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Are You Ready to Stop Self-Sabotage?

People write me to ask for favors, to ask advice for their situation or to refer them to an agent or studio executive. The requests cover the spectrum from reasonable to you must be kidding. Something interesting is how many people write me personally asking for help, but don't give their name. By that I mean no name in the email address and no signature block in the email.

People (I have to assume they're people; they don't have names) also write to ask me to recap everything they missed at ScreenplayLab last week (they RSVPed, but weren't there) and to also pass along an unsolicited script to the speaker. It would be easy to think it's ignorance or even bad manners, but I know better. People are doing these things in order to fail.

Many people sabotage their careers because they consider themselves unworthy of success. Not saying who they are or not coming to the point when asking for help are just a couple self-sabotage techniques. Here's a good one. Sometimes writers send scripts to me that have spelling errors on every page. I once asked a writer, who'd written a pretty good script, why he sent me a script full of spelling errors. He said he knew I wouldn't like it anyway!

Unfortunately, we all engage in self-sabotage sometimes. We assume a person is angry when he's really just busy. Or, we're in a hurry ourselves and don't extend as much courtesy as usual. Maybe we start writing a screenplay and never finish it. Or, get an agent interested and not call back. Whatever the reason we do these things, we need to remember that we're all artists worthy of success.