The Truck Driver Who Made $6 Billion

James Cameron is a movie director who has directed 3 of the 5 highest-grossing movies of all time. Together, his movies have made over $6 billion and his personal net worth is over $800 million.

Lesson 1: Everyone Will Doubt You (Even After You're Successful)

• James Cameron was asked if his parents were supportive of his ambitions: "My father was completely unsupportive in any way, shape, or form. He was waiting for me to fail so he could say, 'Aha! I was right, you should have gone into engineering.'"
  • Cameron said that it made him "mad enough to get good" so that he could prove his dad wrong. 
  • Cameron's dad wanted him to get a "real job," but as Calvin and Hobbes creator, Bill Waterson, said: "A real job is a job you hate."
• "You have to not listen to the naysayers, because there will be many. And often they will be more qualified than you." – James Cameron
• When Cameron was filming Titanic, everyone (the producers, the critics, the media) said it would flop and make no money. It became the biggest grossing movie ever. It was #1 for 16 straight weeks and made almost $2 billion.
• Cameron says that the production company (or the book publisher or the venture capitalist) will never trust you completely, even after you make the biggest movie (or book or startup) ever. They'll always be skeptical about the success of your next project.

Lesson 2: Start Today, With What You Have

• What should you do if you want to be a director? "Be a director. Pick up a camera. Shoot something, no matter how small or cheesy. It doesn't matter if your friend or sister stars in it. Put your name on it as 'director'. Now you're a director. Being a director is a state of mind." – James Cameron

Lesson 3: Choose ONE Thing and Go All-In

• "You have to foreswear all other paths because you can't keep a foot in directing and a foot in cabinet-making. You can't keep a foot on one job and a foot in another. Directing is a total and all-consuming thing." – James Cameron
  • Why do you have to be 100% focused on one thing? Because you're in competition with people who have committed themselves 100% to that one thing. If you're 60% focused, the person who's 100% focused will destroy you.

Lesson 4: "Every Ambitious Move Is a Gamble." – Lord Baelish, Game of Thrones

• Before shooting Avatar, James Cameron offered Matt Damon 10% ownership to star in it. But Damon was working on a Jason Bourne movie, so he declined. That Avatar ownership would be worth ~$250 million today. It was the biggest mistake of Damon's career.
  • Understand opportunity cost: The cost of doing the Jason Bourne movie was missing out on Avatar.
  • Understand 2nd-order consequences: Missing out of Avatar 1 caused Damon to miss out on Avatar 2 (and Avatar 3, 4, and 5). Each movie probably would have had a $200+ million pay check.

Lesson 5: Everything Is A Remix

• "I see some of the scenes that I've done, that I know were inspired by scenes from other movies. Then I see other filmmakers picking up on my scene and iterating on it. It's part of an ongoing creative process that is self-perpetuating...I think of myself as a link in a chain of cinematic ideas." – James Cameron
  • Steal like an artist: take the best ideas from other people's work.
  • Most great things are the 2nd or 3rd derivative of other great things.
• The idea for Terminator came to Cameron in a dream.
  • Steal ideas from your dreams.
  • Carl Jung and Salvador Dali said that creativity comes from the unconscious/dreams.
• Cameron says the ideas for Avatar originally came to him in a dream: “I have my own private streaming service that’s better than any of that shit out there. And it runs every night for free.”
  • “I woke up after dreaming of this kind of bioluminescent forest with these trees that look kind of like fiber-optic lamps and this river that was glowing bioluminescent particles and kind of purple moss on the ground that lit up when you walked on it. And these kinds of lizards that didn’t look like much until they took off. And then they turned into these rotating fans, kind of like living Frisbees, and they come down and land on something. It was all in the dream. I woke up super excited and I actually drew it. So I actually have a drawing. It saved us from about 10 lawsuits. Any successful film, there’s always some freak with tinfoil under their wig that thinks you’ve beamed the idea out of their head. And it turned out there were 10 or 11 of them. And so I pointed at this drawing I did when I was 19, when I was going to Fullerton Junior College, and said, ‘See this? See these glowing trees? See this glowing lizard that spins around, that’s orange? See the purple moss?’ And everybody went away.”

Lesson 6: Be Bold

• "You never really get an opportunity, you take an opportunity." – James Cameron 
• "You need to be able to recognize an opportunity and seize it. Do not wait because it will pass." – James Cameron 
  • Cameron says: "You need to prepare yourself for the opportunity through study and hypothesizing what it will be like when you're in the situation. If you don't do this, you won't be prepared to take advantage of the opportunity [because opportunities require you to have certain knowledge and skills]. Half of your theoretical projections [your hypotheses about how the opportunity will unfold] will be wrong. But half will be right, and the half that's right is what will carry you through to success."
• "You have to be constantly pulling on somebody's sleeve and saying, 'Hey, I want to direct, I want to direct, I want to direct, I want to direct.'" – James Cameron

Lesson 7: Have Extreme Self-Confidence

• Cameron has always been a person whose "confidence preceded his achievements." 
• "Self doubt is not really necessary, you can set that aside. What you need is a lot of confidence to stand up to the barrage of negativity." – James Cameron 
• "You always have self-doubts. But when you're working in a public art form, like film making, you don't really need self-doubt because if it's bad you're going to hear exactly what's wrong with it. And if it's good, you'll hear what's good about it." – James Cameron
  • "Success brings with it a tremendous amount of scrutiny and anticipation for what's going to happen next." – James Cameron
• James got confidence from working on movie sets and seeing directors fail: "I know I may not be very good at [directing], but I know I'm better than that guy [...] and that was kind of a critical moment. When you realize that you can at least be better than someone else who's already doing it, then you can visualize yourself doing the job."

Lesson 8: Encouragement Can Create Confidence

• Cameron's biology teacher once told him, "I've seen your aptitude tests and we believe that you have unlimited potential." Cameron said that this gave him a ton of self-confidence.
  • A single comment or conversation with a teacher or mentor can change your life.

Lesson 9: Work Hard

• "The harder I work, the luckier I get." – James Cameron (in a 1999 interview)
  • This line was also in Titanic.
• “I like difficult,” Cameron told GQ. “I’m attracted by difficult. Difficult is a fucking magnet for me. I go straight to difficult. And I think it probably goes back to this idea that there are lots of smart, really gifted, really talented filmmakers out there that just can’t do the difficult stuff. So that gives me a tactical edge to do something nobody else has ever seen, because the really gifted people don’t fucking want to do it.”
• "What other people call obsession or passion, for me is just a work-ethic. I think it comes, a little bit, from an insecurity that I'm not good enough. That there are other people out there that I admire, that I grew up admiring, and now I have to compete with these guys and women." – James Cameron
• Cameron can supposedly do any job on a movie set even better than the people he employs.

Lesson 10: Marketing = Making Interesting Stories

• When working on Titanic, Cameron spent $6 million to scuba dive to the real Titanic ship. He said that it should be accounted for as part of the marketing budget because it's a big story that the media companies will cover.

Lesson 11: Learn How to Manage People

• James was asked: Were there any moments of panic when you were making Titanic? "Pretty much every day but when you're in a leadership position, you can never show the panic that you feel inside." – James Cameron
• "In any group project, the outcome won't be exactly as the director envisioned it. It will be the sum total of the group's individual visions. One group member may do something different than you envisioned and (as long as it's still great) you have to be ok with that. So choose your group well. You're a band leader." – James Cameron

Lesson 12: Read… A Lot

• It was while working as a truck driver in his 20s that Cameron decided to become a filmmaker, and so he taught himself filmmaking. He’d go to the stacks at the library at USC, home of a vaunted filmmaking program Cameron couldn’t afford. “I’d find somebody’s 300-page dissertation on optical printing,” Cameron said, “and I’d be going through it and I’d think, Well, I got to get this. So I’d pull the staples out and I’d photocopy the entire 300 pages. And then I just kept doing the same thing, week after week, for about six months. I basically gave myself a college education in visual effects and cinematography while I was driving a truck.”
• "I tried to read a book a day and averaged a book every other day." – James Cameron
• "It was a steady diet of science fiction." – James Cameron
• In high school, he became obsessed with history and ancient civilizations.

Lesson 13: It's Never Too Late to Start

• "I didn't find my true course until I was 25. I think you have time, just don't wait until you're 45. But even then, there's a legion of people who don't find their true calling until they're in their 40s or 50s." – James Cameron
• James once interviewed a woman who was 105 years old for Titanic. She was an artist and none of her significant work had been done until she turned 90.

Personal Life

• After James Cameron’s Avatar came out in 2009 and made $2.7 billion, the director found the deepest point that exists in all of earth’s oceans and, in time, he dove to it. When Cameron reached the bottom of the Mariana Trench, a couple of hundred miles off the southwest coast of Guam, in March 2012, he became the first person in history to descend the 6.8-mile distance solo, and one of only a few people to ever go that deep.
  • Sometimes, Cameron seems like a man in search of a problem to solve, or a deadly experience to survive, but he is emphatic that there is a purpose to the challenges he takes on. “There’s plenty of dangerous things that I won’t go near because they’re dangerous, but they have a randomness factor to them,” Cameron said. “Whitewater rafting? Fuck that.”
• "Some things must just be genetic because I look back at who I was at 9 or 10 years old and I'm the same person now, in essence." – James Cameron
• "If you wait for the right time to have a child, you'll die childless." – James Cameron
• Cameron loves science fiction. He made a documentary series about sci-fi in which he identified 6 major themes:
  • 1. Aliens
  • 2. Space
  • 3. Monsters
  • 4. Dark futures (dystopia/apocalypse). Cameron's recommendations: I Am Legend, Planet of the Apes, The Hunger Games, The Matrix, Robo Cop, Mad Max, The Twilight Zone, The Handmaid's Tale, The Walking Dead.
  • 5. Intelligent machines (AGI)
  • 6. Time travel
• He got the love of arts from his mom and the love of engineering from his dad.
• He skipped 2 grades to 4th grade. In high school, he won every academic award and was president of the science club.
• Cameron kick boxes.
• Cameron's movie influences: 2001: A Space Odyssey/Stanley Kubrick. He studied Kubrick's directorial process. Star Wars, Woodstock, Catch 22, Easy Rider, The Graduate, The Godfather.
• Cameron convinced his friends to quit their jobs and do film making with him. They all successfully work in the industry now.
• Cameron is on his 5th marriage. (Having many marriages and divorces is common with successful people like Michael Bloomberg, Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Dianne Feinstein).
• In the early days of the pandemic, Cameron and his wife gave up their home in Malibu and became full-time residents of New Zealand. They live on a 5,000 acre farm. I asked Cameron if it had been lonely, moving halfway around the world. “I don’t have any friends, so it’s okay,” he said, with only a hint of a smile.