Work Your Way Up- A Documentary About Entrepreneurship
February 18, 2009 | by brett | Permalink
Every once in a while I’ll receive a request of a book or documentary to review. Last night I received a documentary called Work Your Way Up by Patrick Sargent. It’s a documentary about entrepreneurship. I’d like to give a brief review of the sixty minutes I spent with Patrick’s product.
The opening of the doc says it best- ‘Think about how many people fail. Then think about how many people don’t even try. The beauty of entrepreneurship is to climb the mountain, look down, and say I made it.’
Although Patrick’s documentary about entrepreneurship won’t be debuting in Sundance anytime soon, he certainly has made a documentary- which is more than a lot of people can say- including us.
Here’s a couple things that I took away:
1) Ryan Allis, the CEO of our newsletter service and Patrick’s poster child for ‘working your way up,’ said one thing that struck me. “It takes about 3 years to really see if a business opportunity might work out. It takes 8-10 years to build a successful business. If you look at the course of your life, you really only have the chance for 10-15 business opportunities- if you start when you’re young. And then, someone can only build 3 or 4 really successful business over the course of their lifetime.” I thought that was an interesting way of looking at a life of entrepreneurship.
2) The doc features interviews with 8-10 entrepreneurs. At the end, they were asked about their lifelong lesson. About half of them said something along the lines of, ‘Pursue the passion.’
I do this write up on Patrick’s doc to strictly give him some promotion because I understand how much effort it must have taken to get the product out the door. The doc itself. Interviews and editing. The cover design. The DVD production. The DVD case production. Shrink wrapping the DVD case. Dipping into the pocket for production costs. Paying $1.68 to ship it from Rhode Island (Patrick’s home base) to Arizona (my home base).
So peep the trailer, and get at Patrick on his site:
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