Perhaps you might not be the producer or the director but you could still be a star The things that you did or didn’t do ”yesterday” add up to your success or failure today. 7 months ago I saw a trailer for a movie called the YES Movie (www.theyesmovie.com). YES stands for Young Entrepreneur Society. So as soon as I saw it, I said, WOW! That is cool, the folks in my community would love that and could benefit from it. So I wanted to get us involved with it. As evidenced in Exhibit A: Translation- The comments section of the video that is at the end of the post, I asked the Producer of the movie at the ground level- how can I get involved? And he promptly commented back (very much appreciate that) and said that I could help with the promotion of the video. Who else would ever see that comment? I don’t know… So I contacted the Director of the movie and founder of the YES Concept and Community Louis Lautman (always call from the top) and I asked how can I help YOU promote your movie? And he basically said, I am grateful of whatever way you want to get involved.

The Young Entrepreneur Society – Movie Trailer from Bernard Bonomo on Vimeo.

So I requested a logo from him and put up a banner on the Renegade CEO’s sidebar (and YES, 7 mos later it is still there). Some of my teens clicked through and they asked when will the YES Movie (www.theyesmovie.com) be out? And I said it is coming, just get on the update list. In the weeks and months that followed, I thought of ideas and concepts, gave feedback, tried to spread the word with others in my entrepreneurship community. I worked with Louis and did warm intros to some people in my network. And it seemed that he did many more in return. 

• Did I care if my ideas and suggestions were taken? Nope.
• Did I care if I got paid? Nope.
• Did I care if I got credit? Nope.

In the end it is not my vision, it is Louis Lautman’s vision. Being that we easily forget or are forgotten, I just wanted to remain quietly in the backround and support and encourage what I thought was a really, really, really cool concept created by a fellow entrepreneur. In the meantime and in between time I was still on the move. I met my Working Angel Michael Michalowicz, The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur (www.toiletpaperentrepreneur.com), commented on his blog regularly, traveled to his studio in NJ and recorded my TPE video before he launched his book, bounced ideas off him; I heard Dr. Farrah Gray speak at an event and I created and mailed him some Washington Redskins winter gear to prepare him for the blizzard I was about to send him in the middle of the summer (inside joke, you have to hear his speech to get it). I created a “GrayScale” Package which was basically a colorful collection of pictures, testimonials and visions from some of the youth (I met at the event) who attended that conference and wanted to share their vision on a larger platform i.e the power of many; I heard Delatorro McNeal speak a couple of months ago at AAEW. He did a very inspirational speech called ‘Caught Between a Dream and a Job’ and I personally gave him an autographed copy of one of my books; I met Michael Simmonds, author of the Success Manifesto at a NFTE National Business Plan competition this past fall and Sheena looked like she was about to pop anyday [I suppose she has already had her baby, Congrats! if so]; I had been back and forth in touch with the Executive Director of Mark Victor Hansen’s Foundation helping her with some outreach stuff for some of their youth oriented philanthropic events that they recently hosted; I have been helping a young emerging CEO from Singapore who has been working closely with Hezekiah Griggs III over the past year; and I expect that I will meet Ryan Allis in about 2 weeks at Yanik Silver’s Underground 5 Online Seminar (which the Renegade CEO’s is co-sponsoring). Well the cool, cool, thing about this is that they are ALL featured in the YES Movie.  I just saw the launch for the cast today and I never knew.

So bottom line…Get your butt out there, get in the mix and do good every day in every way because before you can say that you ‘MADE IT’…you would have to have been “MAKING IT”!