WEBVTT

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I have a confession to make.

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The first Star Wars movie I ever saw was Star Wars Episode 1, The Phantom Menace.

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I was 13 and it just hit the Dollar Theaters, pour one out for the Dollar Theaters,

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when my friend invited me to go see it with him.

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He realized I had never seen the original trilogy or Eridge Tridge when I was surprised that,

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Spoiler alert, Quigong Jin died.

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We fixed that quickly, but this movie, despite being considered one of the worst Star Wars movies of all time, I would say it’s probably bottom two.

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This movie started my love of the franchise.

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So I thought, in honor of May the 4th, I’d share with you what solopreneurs can learn from Star Wars, particularly from a

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Systems and Automations Point of View.

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Hey, everybody, and welcome to another episode of The Streamline Solopreneur,

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the show that helps you automate your business so you can take time off worry-free.

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I’m your host, Joe Casabona, and may the fourth be with you.

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I’m a huge Star Wars nerd, and while most of my analogies fall into the realm of baseball,

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I do love talking about Star Wars.

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So I’m going to go over three ways, or really three lessons from the Star Wars franchise that

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solopreneurs can take to run their business better.

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The first will be do the work.

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The second is nothing is permanent.

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And the third is you can’t do it alone.

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So let’s start with do the work.

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One of the reasons, the prequels, and for clarity here, I will refer to the original trilogy

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or the Eridge Tridge as episodes four, five, and six. That is the ones starring Mark Hamill,

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Harrison Ford, and Carrie Fisher. They are A New Hope, Empire Strikes Back, and the Return of the Jedi.

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So those are the original trilogy came out in the late 70s, early 80s.

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The prequels are the early 2000s movies.

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Episodes 1, 2, and 3, the Phantom Menace,

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attack of the clones and revenge of the Sith, starring Ewan McGregor,

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and Hayden Christensen, and Natalie Portman.

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And then the sequel trilogy, episodes 7, 8, and 9,

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are the ones that came out in the mid-tens.

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So those are the ones starring Daisy Ridley and John Boyega and Adam Driver.

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So that’s what we’re working with.

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That’s the naming convention that I and many Star Wars fans use.

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And so I’m going to talk about the prequels right now.

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One of the reasons the prequels were panned so badly is because of how good the Euridge Tridge was.

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Those movies told a compelling story of good versus evil, of redemption,

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while also pushing the boundaries of special effects at the time.

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My kids and a smattering of younger folk will ask me

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why the Star Wars movies are considered so great.

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And sure, 50 years on from the originals,

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or at least the first original, it’s kind of hard to see maybe sometimes

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because the movies have permeated our culture in such a way

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that it’s really hard to understand just how groundbreaking these movies were

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and they were groundbreaking the most in the special effects department.

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The things that they were doing at the time were never seen in movies before.

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And so they used the technology they had to push the boundaries to tell stories in a different way to make great storytelling happen.

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The prequels didn’t really have either of those.

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They had neither a compelling story nor were they pushing the boundaries of special effects at the time in a way that aided storytelling.

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Instead of telling a compelling story, they largely lacked a main character in any movie.

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This is like an ineffable quality of the movies until you realize it.

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But if you go back and you watch The Phantom Menace, you’ll realize that there’s not a single hero in the story.

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We don’t watch a hero’s journey.

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We just watch a bunch of things happen to people.

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And that is not good story.

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And there is a lot of stuff that could have been unpacked here that wasn’t.

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And Trey Parker and Matt Stone talked about this in a lecture they did for NYU.

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As far as I can tell, for a part of MTVU’s stand-in series.

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So they taught a lecture at NYU about good storytelling.

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And this is what they have to say about that.

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So this is a clip from that lecture that I found on YouTube.

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I’ll all link to the video below.

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We can take these beats, which are basically the beats of your outline.

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And if the words and then belong between those beats, you’re f***ed, basically.

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You got something pretty boring.

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What should happen between every beat that you’ve written down is either the word, therefore, or but.

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And that’s why you get a show that feels like, okay, this to that, to this to that, but this, here’s the complication.

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that. Just like, this happened and then this happened and this happened. That’s not a movie,

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you know, that’s not a story. Like Trey said, it’s those two, but because, therefore,

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that gives you the causation between each beat, and that makes, that, that’s a story.

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And Star Wars, the prequels were basically just a series of events, right? And then, and then, and then, and then,

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and then. But that’s, that’s really not the point that I’m telling you about here, right?

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Right? It’s like they were panned because, you know, it was not a good way to tell stories.

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And those events took one of the coolest bad guys of all time and reduced him to a whiny, sniveling twerp.

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But the lack of story was, in my opinion, reinforced by the overreliance of a relatively new technology at the time.

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and that is CGI.

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This, coupled with heavy, heavy use of green screens,

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gives you a mostly boring, mostly emotionless movie

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that fails to connect with the viewers, right?

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If you are talking to CGI, whatever,

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and you’re not given a ton of direction,

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and you’re just doing stuff in front of a green screen,

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You need exceptional story and exceptional direction to bring that to life.

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And we saw that with like Roger Rabbit, right?

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Like they devised a way to make it seem like Bob Hoskins was actually talking to Roger,

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a fully realized cartoon rabbit.

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So why am I telling you all this?

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Well, the first lesson is do the work.

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As a solopreneur, we want to be more like the original trilogies and the prequels.

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The originals actually used technology to assist in making something great while still relying on a great story and the human element.

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The prequels leaned too much on technology doing the work for them.

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and the movies fell flat.

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So as you use technology in your business,

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use it to build better systems to help you do better work.

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Don’t use it to replace you in the actual work.

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Or don’t use it to carry you through the work,

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which is what we saw with the prequels.

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So that’s the first lesson, do the work.

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The second lesson is nothing is permanent.

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Now, if you’re not Gen X or an elder millennial like myself,

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you might be wondering where all the hate from the prequels is coming from.

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You don’t remember them being that bad.

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Certainly not as bad as the mess that is the sequel trilogy, right?

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I mean, we’ll talk about that in a minute.

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But, man, talk about not being able to pick a lane.

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And this really brings me to my second point, right?

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the prequels have enjoyed an incredible resurgence and a rehabilitation that’s due to a bit

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of retconning.

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And if you don’t know, retcon means retroactive continuity.

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And these films have had nearly 30 years of it, which makes me very sad because I was a

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teenager when the Phantom Menace came out.

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So it existing for three decades upsets me.

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Now, the retconning took place in books.

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that took digs at the idea of midi-chlorians,

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which really upset Star Wars fans, right?

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Because it took the force from being this magical,

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mythical thing to something that could be measured.

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But it also benefited from novelizations

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that actually took the time to explain

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and like big spoiler alert here, I guess,

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if you’re listening with your kids.

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Novelizations that actually took time

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to explain Anakin’s transition to the dark stuff.

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instead of just like a couple of cut scenes of him looking really angsty out a window.

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They had entire, they have entire comic book series that explores Bader’s trauma and TV shows

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that give the prequel’s room to breathe.

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And according to Claude, I asked Claude this because I wanted to make sure.

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But Recconning actually has more of a negative connotation than I thought, which makes sense, right?

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it’s like you would say, oh, they reconed this.

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Like they recond Asoka.

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And she’s inexplicably missing from the original trilogies,

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even though she was around for them.

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So I’m not going to use the term retcon

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when I talk about the Clone Wars,

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which is the animated series,

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that probably is the single biggest savior of the prequels

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because it adds depth.

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It adds context.

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It adds emotional anchors to the prequels.

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It’s the connective tissue that was lacking between attack of the clones and revenge of the Sith.

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And it was that connective tissue in a way that made them more relevant today that provided enough backstory that it didn’t just seem like a series of events.

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Like it added a bunch of the becausees and thens, or the becausees, right, and therefores.

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And so while it did add its own continuity problems, the point is that nothing is permanent.

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As solopreneurs, we can experiment and try things and iterate to create something great.

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So start simple.

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Start with simple automations and build them into bigger systems.

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Start with the most basic podcast that you can think of.

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Start with a super simple CRM in something like Google Sheets.

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And then iterate into a bigger system that grows with you.

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Most of us aren’t doing something that is permanently unchangeable.

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We don’t have to hit a home run every time.

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and rushing through something to get it done causes more harm than good.

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Right?

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We hear with, oh, AI lets me do stuff faster.

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Faster is not better.

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I would say if you want to do something faster, do a smaller version of it and do it well.

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Don’t try to do the whole thing as fast as possible.

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Dave Faloni, the showrunner and mastermind behind the Clone Wars and many other

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post-Disney acquisition Star Wars content.

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He loves what George Lucas built.

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So he took the Star Wars franchise.

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He deepened the stories and he helped rehabilitate the prequels.

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And the story of Dave Filoni working with like John Favreau and Kathleen Kennedy and George Lucas himself

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actually brings me to the third and final lesson from Star Wars for solopreneurs.

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And it’s a big one.

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it’s that you can’t do it alone.

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The original trilogy is an incredible testament to teamwork, collaboration, and iteration.

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Lucas would do something, which by the way, George Lucas was heavily inspired by like spaghetti

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westerns and Japanese film for Star Wars.

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So his inspiration came from somewhere.

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He did something.

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And then others, directors, writers, editors would come in and iterate on that and fix some of the

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things that didn’t make sense. Lucas only directed a new hope. Other people like

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Irvin Kersner and Richard Mark Kwan directed the other movies, right? Empire Strikes

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Back and Return of the Jedi, respectively. So they took these things and they iterated on them.

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The prequels did not have that luxury, though they could have, right? There was a lot more money

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for the prequels and there was for the original trilogy.

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George Lucas basically took a first draft best draft approach,

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wrote the scripts and took very little feedback.

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There are videos behind the scenes of people suggesting changes

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and him just straight up shooting them down.

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He got to do what he wanted because he had the clout

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and the rights to do it.

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And the end result was a worse product.

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But just because multiple people are involved doesn’t make it de facto a better product.

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I told you that we would talk about the sequels.

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Here we are.

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Look at the sequels.

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Two directors and largely discreet films, as in largely separate films.

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Things were set up in episode seven that had no payoff in episode eight.

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Episode eight basically erased what episode seven said and changed them.

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bunch of things, and then episode nine, because J.J. Abrams, they brought J.J. Abrams back

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into direct seven, even though they had somebody else, he decided to completely ignore eight.

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And all the things that were set up there and just pay off the things that he set up two movies

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ago. And so the lesson here is you can’t do it alone.

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but have a vision.

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Get help when you need it

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and be willing to work with other people.

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Build systems that allow you to delegate.

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Being a solopreneur doesn’t mean doing everything yourself.

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You will end up with a better product when you work with other people

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to help execute a vision.

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That’s what the sequels lacked was an overall vision

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of what needed to happen.

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The prequels had that vision,

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but it was poorly executed

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because there was no help.

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So you need to find balance.

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So there you have it,

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three things that solopreneurs

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can learn from Star Wars.

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Thanks so much for listening to this episode.

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Let me know what you think

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over at streamlinedfeedback.com.

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And if you want more stuff like this delivered

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to your inbox,

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you can sign up for my mailing list

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at streamlined solopreneur.com.

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Thanks so much for listening.

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And until next time,

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may the fourth be with you.