The previous two weeks have been some of the busiest and craziest of my life. I started that stretch riding one of the most energetic highs I’ve ever felt. The entire time, there was a whisper in the back of my head: this won’t last, you’ll be sad again, you’ll fail.

And, in many ways, that whisper was correct. This past week, circumstances came to pass which caused Dagobah, the first professional film project I’ve ever produced, to be delayed yet again. Our crowdfunding campaign is thousands of dollars behind and I need more money than I originally budgeted. It has become painfully obvious to me just how little I know about film production. The high didn’t last, I did get sad again.

At this point in my life, the cycle of failure feels like a routine: get excited about something, get kinda good at it, and then fall into crippling depression when I hit the first hard barrier. This whisper speaks from experience.

But this time, the whisper is wrong about something: I am not going to fail.

There’s a Macklemore song called 10,000 Hours. It plays off of Malcolm Gladwell’s theory that one needs 10,000 hours of experience to master a discipline. I first heard the song back in college when I was ready to drop out. There was one line that drove me through that rough patch:

The greats weren’t great because at birth they could paint, the greats were great because they paint *a lot.*

Recently, I taped that quote over my bed — right before I started this crazy stretch. Every hour I spend doing anything related to filmmaking becomes a tally. The tally currently stands at 60 hours, though I have yet to include today’s work.

This past week I felt the heavy depressive episode start again — pulling me down, welcoming me back. However, for the first time in my memory, I didn’t let it take control of my life. I would wake up and feel the weight, but then I opened my eyes and there was a blank paper above me, waiting for another tally mark. The bad days became just that: bad days. They didn’t stick, they didn’t hold me back. They sucked, and then they were gone. Likewise, the good days felt good. They didn’t come with an asterisk indicating they were fake or empty victories. They were just good days.

That’s never happened before, and I know why I’m able to do it now: I finally believe in what I’m doing. After all these years of trying things that I’ve never felt committed to, I’ve found the one thing I want to pour myself into. I’m going to be a filmmaker, and I’m going to be a damn good one at that.

Your passion isn’t the thing you’re good at. It’s not the thing people tell you you’re good at. It isn’t even a thing you enjoy doing. Your passion is the engine that revs when all of your other energy has been expended. When you stop to question whether you can, your passion is the thing that smacks you across the face and tells you what to do next. Find that, follow that, and you can accomplish absolutely anything.