Spike Lee: Find a trade you love and work hard at it

Film director Spike Lee, one of the few African-American filmmakers to achieve widespread success, prescribed a formula recently to college students who want to follow his example: Find a trade they love, hone their skills and work hard even when they don't feel like it.
"Do not believe this thing called overnight success -- there is no such thing," he told a throng inside the David Lawrence Hall on the University of Pittsburgh campus last week. "Anyone who's a success had to bust their (rear) for it. That means when you're tired, when you're grumpy, when you're sick, you have to do more."
Lee, whose films include "Do the Right Thing," "Jungle Fever" and "Malcolm X," was invited to speak by the university's Black Action Society.
A Brooklyn native who had just finished his sophomore year at Morehouse College in the summer of 1977, Lee shot his first raw footage during the blackouts, disco parties and widespread fear created by the Son of Sam murders. The footage ultimately became 'Last Hustle in Brooklyn' and was the beginning of Lee's passion for filmmaking -- a passion he found after two years of drifting through college with mediocre grades, he said.
Now, Lee said, he thanks God every day for letting him do work he loves. Partying at college is fine, Lee said, but students also need to find their passion and figure out how to make a living at it -- even if that career doesn't match other people's expectations of them.
"The majority of people on this earth go to their graves after slaving their whole lives at a job they hate," he said.
(E-mail Amy McConnell Schaarsmith at aschaarsmith(at)post-gazette.com)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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