I have a confession to make.
The first Star Wars movie I ever saw was Star Wars Episode 1, The Phantom Menace.
I was 13 and it just hit the Dollar Theaters, pour one out for the Dollar Theaters,
when my friend invited me to go see it with him.
He realized I had never seen the original trilogy or Eridge Tridge when I was surprised that,
Spoiler alert, Quigong Jin died.
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.
This movie started my love of the franchise.
So I thought, in honor of May the 4th, I'd share with you what solopreneurs can learn from Star Wars, particularly from a
Systems and Automations Point of View.
Hey, everybody, and welcome to another episode of The Streamline Solopreneur,
the show that helps you automate your business so you can take time off worry-free.
I'm your host, Joe Casabona, and may the fourth be with you.
I'm a huge Star Wars nerd, and while most of my analogies fall into the realm of baseball,
I do love talking about Star Wars.
So I'm going to go over three ways, or really three lessons from the Star Wars franchise that
solopreneurs can take to run their business better.
The first will be do the work.
The second is nothing is permanent.
And the third is you can't do it alone.
So let's start with do the work.
One of the reasons, the prequels, and for clarity here, I will refer to the original trilogy
or the Eridge Tridge as episodes four, five, and six. That is the ones starring Mark Hamill,
Harrison Ford, and Carrie Fisher. They are A New Hope, Empire Strikes Back, and the Return of the Jedi.
So those are the original trilogy came out in the late 70s, early 80s.
The prequels are the early 2000s movies.
Episodes 1, 2, and 3, the Phantom Menace,
attack of the clones and revenge of the Sith, starring Ewan McGregor,
and Hayden Christensen, and Natalie Portman.
And then the sequel trilogy, episodes 7, 8, and 9,
are the ones that came out in the mid-tens.
So those are the ones starring Daisy Ridley and John Boyega and Adam Driver.
So that's what we're working with.
That's the naming convention that I and many Star Wars fans use.
And so I'm going to talk about the prequels right now.
One of the reasons the prequels were panned so badly is because of how good the Euridge Tridge was.
Those movies told a compelling story of good versus evil, of redemption,
while also pushing the boundaries of special effects at the time.
My kids and a smattering of younger folk will ask me
why the Star Wars movies are considered so great.
And sure, 50 years on from the originals,
or at least the first original, it's kind of hard to see maybe sometimes
because the movies have permeated our culture in such a way
that it's really hard to understand just how groundbreaking these movies were
and they were groundbreaking the most in the special effects department.
The things that they were doing at the time were never seen in movies before.
And so they used the technology they had to push the boundaries to tell stories in a different way to make great storytelling happen.
The prequels didn't really have either of those.
They had neither a compelling story nor were they pushing the boundaries of special effects at the time in a way that aided storytelling.
Instead of telling a compelling story, they largely lacked a main character in any movie.
This is like an ineffable quality of the movies until you realize it.
But if you go back and you watch The Phantom Menace, you'll realize that there's not a single hero in the story.
We don't watch a hero's journey.
We just watch a bunch of things happen to people.
And that is not good story.
And there is a lot of stuff that could have been unpacked here that wasn't.
And Trey Parker and Matt Stone talked about this in a lecture they did for NYU.
As far as I can tell, for a part of MTVU's stand-in series.
So they taught a lecture at NYU about good storytelling.
And this is what they have to say about that.
So this is a clip from that lecture that I found on YouTube.
I'll all link to the video below.
We can take these beats, which are basically the beats of your outline.
And if the words and then belong between those beats, you're f***ed, basically.
You got something pretty boring.
What should happen between every beat that you've written down is either the word, therefore, or but.
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.
that. Just like, this happened and then this happened and this happened. That's not a movie,
you know, that's not a story. Like Trey said, it's those two, but because, therefore,
that gives you the causation between each beat, and that makes, that, that's a story.
And Star Wars, the prequels were basically just a series of events, right? And then, and then, and then, and then,
and then. But that's, that's really not the point that I'm telling you about here, right?
Right? It's like they were panned because, you know, it was not a good way to tell stories.
And those events took one of the coolest bad guys of all time and reduced him to a whiny, sniveling twerp.
But the lack of story was, in my opinion, reinforced by the overreliance of a relatively new technology at the time.
and that is CGI.
This, coupled with heavy, heavy use of green screens,
gives you a mostly boring, mostly emotionless movie
that fails to connect with the viewers, right?
If you are talking to CGI, whatever,
and you're not given a ton of direction,
and you're just doing stuff in front of a green screen,
You need exceptional story and exceptional direction to bring that to life.
And we saw that with like Roger Rabbit, right?
Like they devised a way to make it seem like Bob Hoskins was actually talking to Roger,
a fully realized cartoon rabbit.
So why am I telling you all this?
Well, the first lesson is do the work.
As a solopreneur, we want to be more like the original trilogies and the prequels.
The originals actually used technology to assist in making something great while still relying on a great story and the human element.
The prequels leaned too much on technology doing the work for them.
and the movies fell flat.
So as you use technology in your business,
use it to build better systems to help you do better work.
Don't use it to replace you in the actual work.
Or don't use it to carry you through the work,
which is what we saw with the prequels.
So that's the first lesson, do the work.
The second lesson is nothing is permanent.
Now, if you're not Gen X or an elder millennial like myself,
you might be wondering where all the hate from the prequels is coming from.
You don't remember them being that bad.
Certainly not as bad as the mess that is the sequel trilogy, right?
I mean, we'll talk about that in a minute.
But, man, talk about not being able to pick a lane.
And this really brings me to my second point, right?
the prequels have enjoyed an incredible resurgence and a rehabilitation that's due to a bit
of retconning.
And if you don't know, retcon means retroactive continuity.
And these films have had nearly 30 years of it, which makes me very sad because I was a
teenager when the Phantom Menace came out.
So it existing for three decades upsets me.
Now, the retconning took place in books.
that took digs at the idea of midi-chlorians,
which really upset Star Wars fans, right?
Because it took the force from being this magical,
mythical thing to something that could be measured.
But it also benefited from novelizations
that actually took the time to explain
and like big spoiler alert here, I guess,
if you're listening with your kids.
Novelizations that actually took time
to explain Anakin's transition to the dark stuff.
instead of just like a couple of cut scenes of him looking really angsty out a window.
They had entire, they have entire comic book series that explores Bader's trauma and TV shows
that give the prequel's room to breathe.
And according to Claude, I asked Claude this because I wanted to make sure.
But Recconning actually has more of a negative connotation than I thought, which makes sense, right?
it's like you would say, oh, they reconed this.
Like they recond Asoka.
And she's inexplicably missing from the original trilogies,
even though she was around for them.
So I'm not going to use the term retcon
when I talk about the Clone Wars,
which is the animated series,
that probably is the single biggest savior of the prequels
because it adds depth.
It adds context.
It adds emotional anchors to the prequels.
It's the connective tissue that was lacking between attack of the clones and revenge of the Sith.
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.
Like it added a bunch of the becausees and thens, or the becausees, right, and therefores.
And so while it did add its own continuity problems, the point is that nothing is permanent.
As solopreneurs, we can experiment and try things and iterate to create something great.
So start simple.
Start with simple automations and build them into bigger systems.
Start with the most basic podcast that you can think of.
Start with a super simple CRM in something like Google Sheets.
And then iterate into a bigger system that grows with you.
Most of us aren't doing something that is permanently unchangeable.
We don't have to hit a home run every time.
and rushing through something to get it done causes more harm than good.
Right?
We hear with, oh, AI lets me do stuff faster.
Faster is not better.
I would say if you want to do something faster, do a smaller version of it and do it well.
Don't try to do the whole thing as fast as possible.
Dave Faloni, the showrunner and mastermind behind the Clone Wars and many other
post-Disney acquisition Star Wars content.
He loves what George Lucas built.
So he took the Star Wars franchise.
He deepened the stories and he helped rehabilitate the prequels.
And the story of Dave Filoni working with like John Favreau and Kathleen Kennedy and George Lucas himself
actually brings me to the third and final lesson from Star Wars for solopreneurs.
And it's a big one.
it's that you can't do it alone.
The original trilogy is an incredible testament to teamwork, collaboration, and iteration.
Lucas would do something, which by the way, George Lucas was heavily inspired by like spaghetti
westerns and Japanese film for Star Wars.
So his inspiration came from somewhere.
He did something.
And then others, directors, writers, editors would come in and iterate on that and fix some of the
things that didn't make sense. Lucas only directed a new hope. Other people like
Irvin Kersner and Richard Mark Kwan directed the other movies, right? Empire Strikes
Back and Return of the Jedi, respectively. So they took these things and they iterated on them.
The prequels did not have that luxury, though they could have, right? There was a lot more money
for the prequels and there was for the original trilogy.
George Lucas basically took a first draft best draft approach,
wrote the scripts and took very little feedback.
There are videos behind the scenes of people suggesting changes
and him just straight up shooting them down.
He got to do what he wanted because he had the clout
and the rights to do it.
And the end result was a worse product.
But just because multiple people are involved doesn't make it de facto a better product.
I told you that we would talk about the sequels.
Here we are.
Look at the sequels.
Two directors and largely discreet films, as in largely separate films.
Things were set up in episode seven that had no payoff in episode eight.
Episode eight basically erased what episode seven said and changed them.
bunch of things, and then episode nine, because J.J. Abrams, they brought J.J. Abrams back
into direct seven, even though they had somebody else, he decided to completely ignore eight.
And all the things that were set up there and just pay off the things that he set up two movies
ago. And so the lesson here is you can't do it alone.
but have a vision.
Get help when you need it
and be willing to work with other people.
Build systems that allow you to delegate.
Being a solopreneur doesn't mean doing everything yourself.
You will end up with a better product when you work with other people
to help execute a vision.
That's what the sequels lacked was an overall vision
of what needed to happen.
The prequels had that vision,
but it was poorly executed
because there was no help.
So you need to find balance.
So there you have it,
three things that solopreneurs
can learn from Star Wars.
Thanks so much for listening to this episode.
Let me know what you think
over at streamlinedfeedback.com.
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at streamlined solopreneur.com.
Thanks so much for listening.
And until next time,
may the fourth be with you.