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There’s only one way to do anything, and that’s to actually do it. So that’s why I’m here.
It’s Feb 22 and I’ve been anticipating the promised blizzard that is supposed to be hitting New York City all day. I prepped my shovel. I took my kid out to catch snowflakes on his tongue. I figured out where I’d left my gloves. I’ve salted my sidewalk twice. So far however, I’ve mainly been waiting. Waiting for the storm to happen and thinking about getting started.
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I’ll be honest, the idea came around 5:45am when I unexpectedly woke up and asked Claude “What is the easiest way to expand my footprint on platforms other than LinkedIn in a way that builds my brand and builds an email list so I can sell my film when it’s finished directly to the consumer?”
You see, I’m producing a movie. My second feature — a paranormal thriller called PRIME MATTER — which is shooting in May. And unlike the first one (which unexpectedly ended up earning 5x its budget), this one actually NEEDS to make money, which means we need to have a plan for how to do that. And since I’m the person legally responsible, I’ve been obsessively thinking about how this movie, set in my home neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, has the best chance of cutting through the noise, capturing its audience, and making an impact, for us and an audience.
The answer to all my hopes, dreams and anxieties, according to the LLM I pay a monthly subscription fee for, is a Substack… and so here I am. Writing my first post about why DOING always supersedes THINKING.
Ostensibly, I should just be re-hashing and expanding upon the LinkedIn posts I’ve already written on the topic. Over the past number of years I’ve spent a lot of time thinking, and a little bit of time writing, about what I’d call a “Philosophy of Making”, a compendium of ideas and concepts that have revealed themselves over two decades as a working actor, producer, project manager, and above all a committed MAKER of things: from films, to systems, to a family.
And while my intention IS for this Substack to have measurable impact on the direct sales of PRIME MATTER, I also think it will be best used as a personal training ground to continue articulating and testing the principles which make up the spine of this Philosophy of Making.
Some of the significant principles I’ve come up with:
1. Name what you’re making, then make it accordingly. Art & Commerce are NOT the same thing, and it is a disservice to confuse the two. Not because one is bad and the other is good, but comprehending which you’re doing at any given moment allows you to make more strategic decisions about everything else.
4. Specificity is the only path to truth. Vague goals produce vague results. The more precisely you can name what you want, what’s in the way, and what you’re willing to do about it (Objective, Obstacle, Tactic) the more likely you are to actually get there.
8. The record matters. Making things in public creates a shadow of the work that outlasts the moment. Posts, podcasts, this Substack — these aren’t marketing, they’re evidence that something happened, and there is nothing more valuable than a BODY OF WORK at the end of a creative life.
10. DOING is the only proof of thinking. Ideas that begin and end as thoughts never become anything else. Planning, talking, and strategizing may feel like progress but THE WORK is the only evidence that any of it was real.
I’ll save the other numbers for later, since of course I need to entice you to hopefully come back.
But for today, I’ll start with NUMBER 10, which despite being last in the list, is really a PRIMARY PRINCIPLE, without which nothing else can get done:
“There is no way to THINK a thing into existence. A thing can only be MADE by DOING. And so the act of DOING is essentially the prologue to MAKING.”
So there we are.
Over the next few months, I’ll be recording our progress on PRIME MATTER and exploring how what we’re doing every week on that film informs, supports, or disproves the more theoretical principles above.
I don’t know yet what this will look like in 8 months when PRIME MATTER is beginning to be introduced to the world, but I’ll aim to commit to the DOING of it until then… which is the only way we see what it eventually adds up to.
Now, it’s time to go shovel.
—Max Woertendyke
in Brooklyn, 2/22/26