Any doctor in the US became a doctor in roughly the same way: pre-med coursework in college, then med school, boards, internship, residency, maybe a fellowship.

But any two directors or producers or screenwriters likely took completely divergent career paths to their current jobs.

Which, essentially, is both the good and bad news.

On the plus side, in a world like film, you can get where you want to be much sooner. There’s no way to circumvent a decade of medical training, but a lot of brilliant features are made by early 20-somethings.

On the down side, you can also end up never getting to where you want to be at all. While the vast majority of med school grads go on to practice medicine, the majority of film school attendees never make even a first feature film, much less a career’s worth.

So, in such a nebulous world, how do you carve out a plan?

First, you need to look at what it takes to get a movie made. In the next post, I’ll lay out the three-leg stool theory of greenlighting films. Which, in short, says there are three things you need to somehow line up on every single project you do if you want to roll camera.

Then, you need to look at potential jobs as ways to build your experience with and access to each of those three legs. It’s a functional approach, and one that may lead you to jump around from company to company, job type to job type. And it also may dictate that you should be spending nearly as much time and energy pursuing side projects and networking opportunities.

But, first and foremost, you need to accept that figuring it all out is your responsibility. There isn’t a straight line you can default to, or a job you can take now that will take you to where you want to be just by putting your head down and working hard. Instead, you need to think, to carve out a path of your own, with the end in mind, and with savvy decision-making along the way.