The one that'll change your life

the daily taryn - nov 16th

Hi — hope your day/morning/night is lovely and all the nice things.

I’m finishing some work for the day and am about to go hop on the peloton and read a bit before dinner, but I was just reminded of a seemingly boring story that makes me really, really hopeful.

So there’s a lady named Marta. It’s 1975, she’s an acting student in college, and she is cast in a university production. Nothing big, but exciting for her nonetheless.

It does nothing for her career, other than it’s where she meets this guy David who’s also acting in the play. They instantly become best friends, then fall in love and have a baby, and that baby is Zac Efron.

I’m kidding. Marta and David act in this play together, don’t become good friends or fall in love, and actually don’t talk for 2 years. Just acquaintances.

Two years later, Marta and David are both in a directing course where she finds out she needs to direct a play and remembers David, asking him to be in it. He says no but offers to direct it with her, because like Marta, he has given up on acting.

Now, these two become a powerful best friend duo who creates things together. Over the next few years, they wrote a critically acclaimed play that caught some buzz, but nothing wild.

This (very amateur) television agent attends the play, then blindly reaches out to Marta and David telling them she thinks they’d be great at writing for TV. They basically shrug and say, “I guess?” then proceed to write 10 shitty TV show concepts.

One gets picked up, but never produced. This happens a few more times. Does this make them TV writers? Are they on the right track? If I were them at this point, I would probably have gone back to playwriting.

At some point, the TV agent finds a slightly tangential job working on a screenplay with a new guy, so they’d go from being a duo to a trio, and they had one day to decide.

Marta is sitting in the back of a cab, thinking this through, wondering if they should take this opportunity and bring someone else in on what they know to be a power duo that could make big moves, once something finally hits. While she’s agonizing, she looks up and sees that the cabdrivers’ name was also David.

At this point, I’d think, “okay… Could be a sign, but also just be because David is a popular name.”

What does Marta do? She takes that as the sign that she’s meant to work with David and only David, so they don’t take the opportunity and instead double down on TV writing and relocate to LA.

If the names Marta Kauffman and David Crane don’t ring a bell yet, they’re not bothered. You know who they are.

Marta and David went on to co-create a little show called Friends.

I’ll let David end this for me, and feel free to apply it where you need it:

“The meeting that you think is not going to yield anything is the one that’s going to change your life. If success should happen, you have no idea how it’s going to happen.”

Luck? Hard work? Fate? Being at the right place at the right time? None of it? All of it? You get to decide. Enjoy the daily dose of hope, cuties <3

Talk soon.

Your friend,

Taryn

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