The Zack Arnold Podcast

"I've been tuning into what feels right for me versus what I think I should be doing." Melissa Costello  is a transformational eating coach who has spent the last 15 years helping people who struggle with emotional eating (including me, which you can hear all about in  my first interview with Melissa ), but is now in the middle of what she calls “the messy middle” of a major career tra...

"In this industry we are conditioned to believe that our voice is not important." Erica Wernick , former graphic designer and founder of  Hollywood Success Coach , has always been goal-oriented, systems-based, and a Type-A personality (at this point I’m convinced we’re separated at birth). But when she found herself during the pandemic wandering aimlessly without a clear goal and unable to...

“It’s your duty as a professional working with a director & producer that you tell them when it becomes impossible to do the job on your own.” Eddie Hamilton, ACE  is the editor of  Top Gun: Maverick , the last 3  Mission: Impossible  films,  Kick-Ass 1 & 2 , and  X-Men: First Class , just to name a few. And in my second interview with Eddie ( here’s part 1  if you haven’t listened yet), h...

Eddie Hamilton, ACE  is the editor of  Top Gun: Maverick , the last 3  Mission: Impossible  films,  Kick-Ass 1 & 2 , and  X-Men: First Class , just to name a few. And in my first interview with Eddie ( here’s part 2  where he talks about editing  Maverick  specifically), he and I talk about his early career choices and how he was able to become one of the top feature editors in the world…witho...

What I’d love to do is give you an insider’s glimpse into the world of my Optimizer coaching & mentorship program and what we call the ‘Hot Seat.’ What you’ll hear today is a recording of an actual live session with an Optimizer student where on the Hot Seat we tackle various questions about career transitions, productivity, workflows, networking, burnout, habit formation, resumes and websites...

What I’d love to do is give you an insider’s glimpse into the world of my Optimizer coaching & mentorship program and what we call the ‘Hot Seat.’ What you’ll hear today is a recording of an actual live session with an Optimizer student where on the Hot Seat we tackle various questions about career transitions, productivity, workflows, networking, burnout, habit formation, resumes and websites...

What I’d love to do is give you an insider’s glimpse into the world of my Optimizer coaching & mentorship program and what we call the ‘Hot Seat.’ What you’ll hear today is a recording of an actual live session with an Optimizer student where on the Hot Seat we tackle various questions about career transitions, productivity, workflows, networking, burnout, habit formation, resumes and websites...

What I’d love to do is give you an insider’s glimpse into the world of my Optimizer coaching & mentorship program and what we call the ‘Hot Seat.’ What you’ll hear today is a recording of an actual live session with an Optimizer student where on the Hot Seat we tackle various questions about career transitions, productivity, workflows, networking, burnout, habit formation, resumes and websites...

"You have to think how can I create those moments, those celebrations, the appreciation, the presence in this moment so that I can actually enjoy the accumulation of my life of days rather than trying to hang it all on one momentous achievement." - Michael Bauman As a freelancer or entrepreneur, it’s easy to get caught up in “the grind,” endlessly pursuing what others define as “success,”...

What I’d love to do is give you an insider’s glimpse into the world of my Optimizer coaching & mentorship program and what we call the ‘Hot Seat.’ What you’ll hear today is a recording of an actual live session with an Optimizer student where on the Hot Seat we tackle various questions about career transitions, productivity, workflows, networking, burnout, habit formation, resumes and websites...

What I’d love to do is give you an insider’s glimpse into the world of my Optimizer coaching & mentorship program and what we call the ‘Hot Seat.’ What you’ll hear today is a recording of an actual live session with an Optimizer student where on the Hot Seat we tackle various questions about career transitions, productivity, workflows, networking, burnout, habit formation, resumes and websites...

At the epicenter of the conversation last August during the most contentious portion of the IATSE contract negotiation was perhaps the IA stories  Instagram account where literally hundreds of thousands of  IATSE  members discovered they weren't alone in enduring the horrors of working in Hollywood: Burnout, abusive working conditions, and sacrificing everything - including even their lives -...

What I’d love to do is give you an insider’s glimpse into the world of my Optimizer coaching & mentorship program and what we call the ‘Hot Seat.’ What you’ll hear today is a recording of an actual live session with an Optimizer student where on the Hot Seat we tackle various questions about career transitions, productivity, workflows, networking, burnout, habit formation, resumes and websites...

What I’d love to do is give you an insider’s glimpse into the world of my Optimizer coaching & mentorship program and what we call the ‘Hot Seat.’ What you’ll hear today is a recording of an actual live session with an Optimizer student where on the Hot Seat we tackle various questions about career transitions, productivity, workflows, networking, burnout, habit formation, resumes and websites...

As creative professionals, we constantly have to reinvent ourselves to stay relevant (and frankly just to survive the insanity of our industry). The pressure to come up with new ideas and be daring is stressful at best, and debilitating at worst. Many of us are under the illusion that this pressure we place on ourselves gives us our edge - that it helps us continue to perform our best. But instead...

From the outside it often looks as if the dominant factor that determines whether someone achieves their careers goals or not is luck (And you all know how I feel about “luck.”) From an insider’s perspective, having helped hundreds of people successfully make career transitions, I believe luck is simply when their hard work intersects with the right opportunity. And this intersection is no acciden...

As 2021 winds down and we approach the New Year, it’s so easy to get caught up in the chaos of the holiday season and write off the end of the year as a loss, putting our goals and intentions aside and telling ourselves “We’’ll start fresh again in January.” But then inevitably when the new year hits and we create resolutions, life still gets in the way which leads to over 92% of New Year’s resolu...

As 2021 winds down and we approach the New Year, it’s so easy to get caught up in the chaos of the holiday season and write off the end of the year as a loss, putting our goals and intentions aside and telling ourselves “We’’ll start fresh again in January.” But then inevitably when the new year hits and we create resolutions, life still gets in the way which leads to over 92% of New Year’s resolu...

As 2021 winds down and we approach the New Year, it’s so easy to get caught up in the chaos of the holiday season and write off the end of the year as a loss, putting our goals and intentions aside and telling ourselves “We’’ll start fresh again in January.” But then inevitably when the new year hits and we create resolutions, life still gets in the way which leads to over 92% of New Year’s resolu...

As 2021 winds down and we approach the New Year, it’s so easy to get caught up in the chaos of the holiday season and write off the end of the year as a loss, putting our goals and intentions aside and telling ourselves  “We’’ll start fresh again in January.”  But then inevitably when the new year hits and we create resolutions, life still gets in the way which leads to over 92% of New Year’s reso...

As 2021 winds down and we approach the new year it is so easy to get caught up in the chaos of the holiday season and right off the end of the year is a loss, putting our goals and our intentions aside and telling ourselves, "We're going to start fresh again in January." But then inevitably, when the New Year hits and we create resolutions, life still gets in the way, which leads to ov...

One of the most challenging things we deal with as freelance creative professionals is the constant feast & famine cycle of either always working or always looking for the next gig. I’m sure at some point you’ve had the experience of agonizing for hours, days, or weeks debating a job opportunity (or multiple opportunities). You may have also agonized about whether or not to take low pay (or un...

"There are two kinds of people in the world - people who are burned out, and people who know they are burned out." - Greg McKeown There is an epidemic of exhaustion and burnout in not only Hollywood but globally across countless industries. The culture of overwork and exploitation specifically in the entertainment industry is beyond toxic at this point, and something needs to change. My th...

Hello to all of my Optimizer readers & listeners. Today’s episode is gonna be a little different in that I’m not the host, I’m the guest. This is a recent interview I did with Michael Bauman on the Success Engineering podcast. You will hear me talk very candidly about the identity crisis I suffered several years ago while seemingly at the height of my career editing Empire when I was spending...

There are turning points throughout our lives where we have a choice to either accept the status quo and continue being “comfortable” or take a stand to affect real change. Whether it’s change on an individual level or even on a larger scale, to take a stand requires courage and “brave honesty” (to borrow a term from today's guest), and most importantly real change requires stepping into the d...