#35 George Lucas: A Life

**David Senra** (0:00)
I want to tell you about a one time only limited event that I don't think you're going to want to miss. I am doing a live show with Patrick O'Shaughnessy from the Invest Like the Best podcast in New York City on October 19th. Patrick has interviewed over 300 of the world's best investors and founders for his podcast. I've read over 300 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs for my podcast. We'll be talking about what we learned from seven years of podcasting, sharing our favorite ideas and stories and doing a live Q&A. There will also be special event-only swag. If you live in New York City, I think it's a no-brainer. But if not, I think it's a great excuse to fly in. I've already heard from a bunch of people that bought tickets, they're flying in from other cities. Some people are flying in from other countries. That's setting the bar really high, so I will have at least four shots of espresso or four energy drinks before or during the show so we can make it a night that you'll never forget. If you're interested in attending this unique live event, I will leave a link down below. I highly recommend you get your tickets today, and I hope I get to see you in New York on October 19th. George Lucas unapologetically invested in what he believed in most, himself. As a result, the film empire he created would empower not just him, but other filmmakers to produce movies exactly as they envision them, without a studio imposing its own priorities, grousing about budgets, or micromanaging the process.
George Lucas, the small-town son, had said no to the family business, then built a cinematic empire based on his own uncompromising vision of the film industry, not as it was, but as he thought it should be.
Much of that vision lay in the possibilities presented by new technology, technologies Lucas developed with his own money, an inherent ability to hire the right people, and a knack for asking the right questions.
I can't help feeling that George Lucas has never been fully appreciated by the industry for his remarkable innovations, said the director Peter Jackson.
He is the Thomas Edison of the modern film industry.
And that was an excerpt from the book that I want to talk to you about today, George Lucas, A Life, by Brian Jay Jones.
In case you're new to founders, every week I read a biography of an entrepreneur and then I share some of the ideas that I learned. So I want to tell you how I found the idea for this book. Last week, I did a podcast, a creative podcast on Ed Catmull, which was one of the founders of Pixar and based on his book, Creativity, Inc., which was absolutely fantastic book. And in the book, he mentions George Lucas a lot because he went to work for George Lucas. And the beginnings of Pixar actually were contained within one of the companies that George Lucas founds, which is Industrial Light and Magic. In Creativity, Inc., Ed Catmull talks about a lot of the ideas that George Lucas had for business. A lot of these ideas, I thought, were really interesting. I included them in last week's podcast, if you want to learn a little bit more about that. So that made me go look for a book on George Lucas. So I ordered the book and read it. And not surprisingly, there's a lot of useful information in here. So I want to share some of those ideas with you today. So let's get into the book. So one thing that's very common, studying the biography of George Lucas, he was very much thought from first principles. So we even see this at a young age. He's raised Protestant, and he starts to question from an early age. And let me just read this part. Let's get started. He found himself wondering, what is God? But more than that, what is reality? What is this?
It's as if you reach a point and suddenly you say, wait a second, what is the world? What are we? What am I? And how do I function in this? And what's going on here? And you'll see this later on in the book too, where he just analyzes the film industry and then even the technologies that they're using. And he's like, this, what is this? This doesn't make sense. Why are we doing things like this? Something I found interesting, skipping ahead a little bit. He didn't like school, but he loved to read. And he was obsessed with comic books. And a lot of the stories that he learned as a kid wind up in the Star Wars movie later on. So this is Lucas talking about that, about his love for comic books. I was addicted to them, said Lucas. I used to love to read those books. It started me on a lifelong love of history. And as a kid, I spent a lot of time trying to relate the past to the present.