By Tom Vaughan in The Mental Battle — Mar 3, 2026

Comparison is the thief of joy.

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I was back in Los Angeles several years ago to visit the set of a movie I had a huge hand in writing.

Now, I've spent half of my adult life in Los Angeles, and always as a professional screenwriter. But LA feels different when you go away for six months and then come back.

Things that only attack your subconscious when you live there become front and center when you're visiting.

On this trip, it was the billboards and posters of movies and TV shows. They are ALL OVER Los Angeles. You will see them sprinkled about in other cities, but in LA, they are plastered like wallpaper.

Every street corner, buses, fences, and posts. These advertisements are everywhere.

I immediately started to get that old, familiar "I'm not doing enough" feeling.

"Other people are getting movies made. People are making more money than I am. I have to step up my game!"

That low murmur of anxiety I sometimes feel when I am afraid I am underachieving was now a loud, abusive scream. I was feeling it physically, too — always the telltale sign you've lost control of this train.

What brought me back to reality and suddenly had me laughing was the realization of why I was in Los Angeles in the first place.

I was back in LA because a movie I helped write was in production, and I was visiting the set.

This was deserving of celebration and a pat on the back.

But I was stressing out because all I could see was what everyone else was doing instead.

The mental battle.

I focus a lot of energy on discussing the mental battle because I know how much I lost that battle in the 90s and early 2000s. I still fight little skirmishes like the one above.

Sometimes the stakes are low. It's your mood or your productivity.

But the stakes can be quite high, too. They can be your entire career, your dreams, and, far too often, the stakes can be relationships.

But it's a battle we all must wage, and some are less prepared for it than others.

How much of this business is a mental battle is one of the things I wish I understood better when I first started.

Do not compare yourself to others.

This is, of course, easier said than done.

It is human nature, after all. Social media exploits it, marketing uses it, and we're all too willing to throw fuel on it.

Entire ideologies are built on resentment of what others have that we don't!

But outside of aspirational and cautionary, I just don't see much use for it. The scarcity mindset has never done anything for me but make me unhappy.

And at times, it has made me very unhappy.

Seeing people achieve success that I thought could be mine. Seeing writers (even teachers!) get bigger paychecks for what my ego was determined to believe was lesser work.

That crushing feeling that I am far behind everyone else.

None of this has ever made my writing better. None of it has ever negotiated me a better deal, and it has never gotten a film of mine closer to production.

But it has absolutely undermined all these things.

And it's not just writers and other artists.

Some of the most self-destructive people I have known in this business have been producers and agents. This behavior stems from their own deeper psychology, but it manifests itself in the same way:

A resentment of what others were getting that they weren't.

We all run our own race.

When I have pro writer guests in the Story and Plot Pro community, I make a point to focus on process, approach, and other repeatable things we can all learn from.

I spend little to no time on the origin story, the “How did you break in?” question.

Everyone’s story is so damn different that it might very well be interesting, but it’s rarely instructional.

The movie business isn’t law school. There isn’t a clear set of steps to achieve and then a reward at the end. You don’t know what path you’re on based on your school admissions.

One person’s big break is rarely repeatable, and once you realize that their lucky break is actually a series of lucky breaks, it becomes even less so.

We never know anyone else’s full story.

So comparison is based on a narrative in our head more than reality.

We all have our own obstacles.

And yes, we may have more or less than some, but resenting the world for being unjust doesn’t make our job easier.

Being mad at the traffic doesn’t make the cars move any faster.

But accepting the traffic makes the ride easier. And then calmly looking for possible shortcuts may get us to our objective quicker.

Define victory.

Know what success looks like. What do you want out of this endeavor?

My goals have shifted over the years, but right now, it’s right back to the first goals I had when I started:

I want to make a living as a writer.
I want audiences to see my work.

Unless you get super wealthy, the first is a challenge that never really ends. Each year is a new battle, and I usually do okay.

That second one, however, has proven more elusive than I would like. I don’t think my work is well reflected in the movies I’ve had produced.

But remembering my goals, keeping them front and center, reminds me to be grateful that I get to do what I love.

I may not be as financially successful as some, but 1) I’m successful enough, and 2) my career ain’t over yet!

Goals can and probably should shift.

Many years ago, I had lunch with an old friend. She started as a producer, became a writer, and co-created and served as showrunner of a successful series.

That had been her goal for a long time, and I asked her what’s next. She said, “I want two shows on the air now. I need to prove this wasn’t a fluke.”

At the time, I thought, “She’s never going to be happy.”

But this was based on my own experience when I bottomed out in my drinking. I had achieved so many of the things I wanted to achieve, and when I was less happy than ever, I was terrified!

But my friend was not like me. Again, we all have our own battles.

She didn’t expect the goal to make her happy. For her, chasing the goal was what got her excited.

She ended up with three series on the air at once!

I asked her then what she was excited about next, and she said she wanted a big producer deal at a studio because she didn’t think they would be offering them for too much longer.

That summer, during the streaming boom, she signed a $60 million development deal with a studio. And she was right about them not making too many of those deals anymore, too.

I need to check in with her soon to see what her new goal is.

Your goal is yours. No one else’s.

Why are you doing this? Is a long career the only way to define success?

Perhaps it's just making small movies? Or is writing a hobby? An aspiration and challenge you do on the side?

You don't have to let anyone else define what success looks like to you.

You are competing more with yourself than you realize. Your past self is your most consistent competition.

It’s true, you might be up against other writers for an open writing assignment, but an OWA isn’t hockey, where the score is objective.

It’s ice skating. You have judges. And THEY choose the score.

Your job is to do YOUR thing to the best of your abilities. That is ALL you can do. Everything else is up to someone else, and it’s not always rational, let alone objective.

You have to enjoy the process.

This is perhaps the singular most important factor in longevity. It always goes back to the process.

Goal-oriented is different from result-oriented.

If you only want the result but not the work that gets you there, there is too much resistance in this business for any longevity.

Too much rejection, too many obstacles, and too much self-doubt.

You will never be present. You will always be looking ahead to the fantasy of promised rewards.

And those rewards don’t always come.

In addition, when you look around, you will only see other people’s results. And since you do not enjoy the actual process, the results will be the only way to measure worth.

In this business, this is almost always a losing proposition.

Find community.

This is the best solution to the corrupting influence of scarcity thinking. As Harrison Ford said when he received the SAG Lifetime Achievement Award, in actors, he found his people.

For years now, my advice to artists has been to find community. Find a creative home. Find like-minded people you can root for, encourage, challenge, and inspire, and who will do the same for you.

Over the 40 years I have focused my life on film and theatre, the most rewarding and productive periods were those when I belonged to a community.

This was whether it was high school theatre, college, the Houston theatre community, the L.A. improv scene, or the WGA strike. And sure, there was competition in these places, too. But it was always tempered by the excitement of seeing friends succeed.

Great work emerged, along with great memories.

But more than anything else, I felt less alone. And it made everything a little more worthwhile.

You do not always know where you are in this business.

Just about every big break I got in my career came out of the blue. Often, at what I thought was a low point.

I had one sale come from Sony Screen Gems, giving a producer a 12-year-old screenplay of mine, saying, “We like this script.”

My agents and my lawyers had no idea what screenplay they were talking about. Somehow, Screen Gems got hold of it, but I hadn’t sent it to anyone in eight or so years!

To this day, I have no idea how they obtained that script. And here they were sending it to a producer, “Here is one we like.”

The biggest mental battle is to just keep going.

Just keep writing. Keep doing what you do. Create. Get your work out there.

We need more happy warriors. We need more members of the community. We need more people adding value, not sucking the energy out of others.

Your job is to always get better. Find new challenges. Compete with yourself.

This is my job, too.

“Because tomorrow the sun will rise. Who knows what the tide could bring?”

This business comes down to how many nos you have in you.

If you can hear “no” one more time, you’re still in the game.

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