I was watching a special about John Mellencamp last night on VH1.

In his early years, John was known of course as Johnny Cougar.

He hated that name.

But it was either accept it or go back to Indiana and “pour concrete”.

He accepted it.

And look where he is now after 35 years in the business.

A Rock and Roll hall of famer.

At one point, John recalls how he paid $35 for 60 minutes of recording time.

He came out of that with 3 songs.

That was his first demo.

He started sending the demos out to record companies and got rejection letter after rejection letter.

He says he was rejected by each of the record companies 10 times.

But he didn’t give up.

He simply repeated that process.

During this time he was broke, married and had a kid.

He’s had numerous top hits since.

Because he held on.

He stayed with his passion.

In  …

Oct 31, 2008 -  I spent the first part of this morning in downtown Austin, Texas at Paul Carrozza’s RunTex Riverside store filming Paul for our upcoming video for Austin’s Mayors Fitness Council.

Paul and his wife Sheila, founded RunTex in 1988 and have since built their business into the Nation’s largest store devoted exclusively to running. In addition to  …

Scott York and I have been collaborating secretly on a new documentary about fitness competitor Adela Garcia. We had kept it under wraps for a while, but now things are starting to happen that I think might give some insight into the process for those of you interested in shooting documentary style. So we are going to “open it up”, work out our problems and have our conversations HERE on the forum rather than privately by email.

One of the interesting things about this project is that it is a long distance collaboration. Scott lives in Texas, I’m in Pennsylvania. We have never met face to face but have forged a partnership through email and phone conversations alone.

For the as yet unnamed “Adela Project” Scott will be the videographer and I am acting as the  …