Joel Bergvall of Shareability: 5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Became A Filmmaker

It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. Make cool things and share them with the world. Love the ones you’re with. Always stay humble and kind. Walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. This too shall pass.

As a part of our series called “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Became A Filmmaker”, I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Joel Bergvall.

Joel Bergvall is a Swedish-born filmmaker known for his Academy Award nomination for his 1999 short film “Victor”. He currently leads the charge in the emerging field of StoryTech as Partner and Chief Story Officer with Shareability. Bergvall got his start in television and documentaries in Stockholm, working professionally as a cinematographer and editor, freelancing for local and national networks. Transitioning to international work, he was assigned to numerous European networks in Israel, the Palestinian territories, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Croatia, and other hotspots. In 1997, Bergvall partnered with Simon Sandquist to produce and direct the short film Victor, winning him numerous accolades, including a 1999 Academy Award nomination. In 2002, they partnered again to direct the theatrical feature Den osynlige (The Invisible); receiving accolades in eight international festivals. It was also sold to Spyglass, in partnership with Disney, becoming the first film in a wave of English-language remakes of Swedish films, The Invisible. Bergvall has since been attached to several high-profile projects at various Hollywood studios, including Fear Itself at Intermedia, Books of Magic at Warner Brothers, The Imagined at Fox, and Trap Door at New Line Cinema. Bergvall’s first English language feature was Possession (a.k.a. Addicted), starring Sarah Michelle Gellar.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Our readers would love to get to know you a bit better. Can you tell us a bit of the ‘backstory’ of how you grew up?

Of course, and thanks for having me.

I was born and raised in Sweden, to very young parents who thought of me as a happy accident. My mom was only 17 when she got pregnant, and my dad was only a few years older. It was the 70s, so they were being rebellious and choosing their own adventure, I’m simply lucky the adventure they chose happened to involve me.

From an early age, I was fascinated by telling stories. I wrote poetry and short stories, often with vivid imagery, both in written and illustrated form. I also loved photography. There was something about capturing the world inside a frame that gave it a unique point-of-view that spoke to me in very instinctual ways.

This led me to a love of telling stories with moving images. The cinematic language was one that I seemed to understand much more intuitively than my native Swedish. This probably explains why I never felt quite at home in Sweden and always had visions of being a much more global citizen, of living somewhere else.

My love of visual storytelling led me to an early career in documentary work, eschewing all ideas of further education for a path of learning-by-doing, grabbing a camera, and editing equipment and traveling all over the world, meeting fascinating people and diving deep into real-world storytelling as a form of creative expression.

After an award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker, and a stint in some more commercial and corporate work, I turned my eye to the big screen, throwing my life savings into a short film. This became a whirlwind adventure that gave me the love of my life, as well as an Academy Award nomination, a few features under my belt, and several years of making a living as a Hollywood screenwriter.

When seeing the Hollywood machine from the inside finally made me look elsewhere, I found joy and happiness in digital and social storytelling, and I now happily find myself at Shareability, building shareable brands and having a ton of fun telling stories with some of the most creative and loving people I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing.

Can you share a story with us about what brought you to this specific career path?

When I was 11 years old, my great-grandmother gave me a double-8 camera and simply said: “I think you should have this.” That summer, I got a hold of some film cartridges and started telling stories with moving images. We’re talking super rudimentary, a stop motion car chase and a love story between soft toys, stuff like that. All the cars crashed and burned, and in fact, my brother just reminded me that he still hasn’t gotten his plastic toy cars back…

I always think of this as the key symbolic moment that got me started. Of course, the truth is probably far more nuanced. My love of storytelling and imagery, the fact that my mother went from being a factory circuit board welder to becoming a journalist when I was in my teens, that my dad brought a fancy invention called the VHS camera back from work, and that I ultimately chose a high school where some of our class time was dedicated to theater, photography, and film studies… All of these things were obviously hugely informative and contributed greatly to my desire to spend time telling stories with moving images.

It’s also led me to always be very confused when people ask me about my career path. I’ve never thought of what I do as a career, something that has certainly been to my own detriment. I’ve always just applied myself wherever I find an intersection between my passion for storytelling and a banker willing to fund my endeavors.

This is probably why I’ve had so many “careers” in my life. I’ve been a documentary cinematographer, producer and editor, a live show switcher, colorist, crane operator, director and producer, a journalist, published author and screenwriter, a music video, short and feature film director, and executive producer… An endless list of disparate yet connected job descriptions and titles.

Wearing many hats and being able to do any number of jobs is not unusual in my native Europe. In the US, it’s not as common; people love to put other people in boxes, to help define them in far more black-and-white terms. If you are a filmmaker who has made one scary movie, then you can only make more scary movies, right? Why would we trust you to try your hand at a drama or a love story?

Nowhere is this dichotomy better expressed than in football. Europeans look at football as a group of eleven individuals out on the pitch with loosely defined roles and tremendous flexibility to get the job done. Americans look at football as upwards of fifty players, all taking turns on the field, each with a very clearly defined role to do exactly one thing as well as possible. In European-style football, anyone can kick the ball into the goal, even the goalkeeper on rare occasions. In American football, you have a specialized individual whose only job is to kick the ball whenever kicking is required. Sometimes you even have two, for two different levels of kicking! This abundance of manpower would never happen in Europe, where you take pride in getting the job done with as few people as possible, not only in football but also in filmmaking and storytelling.

My sense is that both sides can probably learn from each other.

Can you share the funniest or most interesting story that occurred to you during your filmmaking career?

I have too many funny and interesting things to choose from…

I know firsthand that Yasser Arafat had a severe case of gingivitis…

I once threw a stuntman off a 12-story building for no good reason…

I’ve been known to burn children’s drawings in an abandoned mental institution…

I once asked Cristiano Ronaldo to make toast for me…

I helped make Dua Lipa walk on water….

The most interesting story, and certainly the most impactful, is really mine by association: I met my wife because she broke into the Academy Awards.

This was way back in another millennia, in 1999, when I was nominated for a short film called Victor. Louise, my now wife, and I had mutual friends through the filmmaker I was nominated alongside with. Louise is Australian and she was teaching English in Japan at the time, taking leave to come to party with us in LA.

On show night, she watched us not win an Oscar from a bar in Santa Monica, then headed downtown with some friends, to the Chandler Pavilion where the show was being held that year. Shunned from the main entrance because, well, they had no business being there, they went looking for a phone to give us a call. This was 1999, so phones were still used to make phone calls, and often attached to walls. We had a fancy mobile version, but they needed a landline to reach us.

In their search, they find a random side door to the building and wander inside. No phones, but an elevator. They get in and Louise hits 4, because that was the floor she worked on at the time. They ascend, the doors open and there’s men in tuxedos and women in taffeta dresses everywhere.

Holy shit, they are at the Oscars.

“We can’t be here, we should leave” one of them says.

Not Louise. Her response is: “F%#k that, we’re going in.”

They enter, wander about for a bit, gawking at celebrities and generally looking completely out of place.

No payphone to be found. But some more doors…

They wander around, somehow finding themselves in the empty orchestra pit, then back out on the red carpet outside the Governor’s Ball.

A stern voice calls out: “Can I help you?” A security guard has finally come up to them, and this time, one of Louise’s friends steps up: “Yeah, we’re looking for a phone.” “Oh, of course,” he says, “there’s one right down this hallway, on your left.”

Phew. They find the phone, get ready to dial, and…

“You have the number?”

“No, I thought you, had it?”

Turns out, none of them have our number.

They wander back outside, and this is where I find Louise, on the red carpet, in jeans and a suede jacket. I’m surprised to see her (even though she still claims she couldn’t tell) and quickly suggest we get the hell out of here. We hit an after-party, then go back to our hotel to keep going, and, well, two mini-bars later, we now have two kids and have been happily married for soon to be 20 years.

If this was the only thing my filmmaking career had ever brought me, it would have been more than worth it.

Who are some of the most interesting people you have interacted with? What was that like? Do you have any stories?

So many… Let’s talk about the time I got to give John Cena the best surprise ever.

The year was 2017. I was in a Hollywood soundstage with a small remote in my hand. An insignificant little button. Once I pressed it, there was no turning back.

We were at the tail end of a big production, and there were over a hundred people scattered around the place, but only a very select few in a certain staging area, and only one of them was important, the man in front of me, the WWE wrestler turned movie star with a heart of gold, John Cena.

John thought he was here for some simple fan appreciation, to read some letters from fans and give us his reactions. What he didn’t know was that those same fans were waiting in the next room, ready to give him the surprise of a lifetime.

We had gathered these people from all over the country, and they all had incredible stories of how John’s mantra of “Never Give Up” had helped support them through their own personal challenges. There was a woman who had lost a leg, a man with diabetes, and a young kid named Tyler whose mom was a cancer survivor. They had all faced incredible difficulties and John Cena was the guiding light that got them all through, that helped them all to “Never Give Up.”

We had ten letters. We told the busy superstar he only needed to read three. Of course, John would never dream of it. He read each letter out loud, word for word, taking them all in and absorbing every ounce of emotional gratitude.

Once he was done reading, I pulled up my laptop and showed him a video we’d filmed earlier that morning. It was Tyler, telling his story:

“My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer…”

Tyler’s emotion is genuine and kicks you right in the gut. It kicked John in the gut as well, listening to this brave young man explains that “John Cena’s message helped my family because I got his wrist band…”

The clip fades to a home video of Tyler at a WWE event, and John giving him one of his iconic wrist bands as he walks past. It’s brief and means the world to Tyler.

“When my mom was having her six-hour surgery” Tyler continues, “I gave her that wrist band and I told her ‘Never Give Up’ and… she is now cancer-free.”

The video ends. The room is dead silent. As if everyone stopped breathing.

John takes his time. Soaking in the emotion, allowing himself a sniffle and a moment to collect himself before he speaks, his every thought focused on Tyler: “At such a young age he has such a great perspective. It’s sort of the coolest thing, I…”

He trails off, the big man lost for words, open, vulnerable.

I press my button. Blam! The center backdrops are slammed into the room, the paper wall ripped to shreds with a startling noise. John jumps in his chair, spins and turns to see…

Tyler, in the flesh, stepping through the paper and onto the stage.

John cracks and laughs, still sniffling. Tyler, nervous as any kid would be when meeting their hero, steps to his mark and starts reading lines he’s prepared, his voice small and unsure: “Thank you for everything you’ve done for my family…”

“Stop. Stop.”

John literally stops him, puts his letters down and gets up.

“Come on, get over here.”

He walks over. Tyler meets him and they embrace in the biggest bear hug imaginable. The young boy buried in John’s massive arms.

They stand there for an eternity, neither capable of speaking. Then John pats him on the back and says, quietly, to Tyler only: “Coolest surprise ever.”

I get to press my remote ten more times, sending Tyler’s mom into the room with the wristband, then everyone else, one by one, all telling John their personal stories about how his message has inspired them and impacted their lives.

John is in tears several times over. He gives his hat away, signs shirts, gives away so many wristbands he runs out, then takes the two he’s wearing off and gives them away, promising to get more. It’s an absolute love fest that ends in a massive hug from John to all of them before I finally release him, on time as promised.

John doesn’t leave. He stays for what seems like an eternity, well beyond what his schedule allows, making sure he gets the chance to talk to each and every one of his fans individually, that they all get to understand how much he cares and how much their passion for his work means to him in return.

Filming this was every bit as emotional as watching it, and it’s definitely a moment that all of us who were there will always remember very fondly. It’s a great example of what can happen when a brand and a superstar both have a level of trust with a creative team that allows them to dig deep and go for emotion.

It was also a great example of the power of building a Shareable Brand. Over the time we have worked together, Cricket Wireless has not only crushed their competitors in terms of securing an engaged audience, but they have doubled their subscriber base. That’s real and measurable impact, and the ultimate power of Shareable Storytelling.

None of us can achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

There are countless people who have enabled me to do what I do, from family and friends, to mentors, reps, colleagues, and coworkers. Rather than single out individuals, I’d like to take the opportunity to recognize my inherent privilege.

I didn’t grow up with a silver spoon in my mouth. If anything, I grew up working class, and when I came of age, I had to make my own way as much as anyone. But I did have two very distinct advantages… I’m white, and I’m male.

That puts me two big steps ahead by default.

While my cultural voice may be marginally different than your quintessential white American male, I’m not that far off. I might as well be from Wisconsin.

We need to hear more often from people who are less like me, who traditionally have not been afforded the opportunity to be heard. We need more voices of color and of varying cultural, ethnic, and societal backgrounds to be at the forefront of all our conversations. We need our culture to reflect our reality, which is a wonderful mix of humans from all walks of life.

Thankfully, I feel like the world has made great strides over the last few years. We have a long way to go, but the revolution is ongoing.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

My family are Whoovians, meaning we are big fans of the longest-running Sci-Fi show in TV history, Doctor Who from the BBC. It’s only fitting that one of my favorite quotes also comes from one of my favorite showrunners of that show:

“We’re all stories, in the end. Just make it a good one.”

~ Steven Moffat, Doctor Who, The Big Bang

I think this quote hides more truths than you’d think, and in terms of life lessons, I think the biggest one is that we are truly defined by the stories we tell ourselves. That means we are free to change. Don’t like the story of your life? Change it. Become who you want to be, and then who you were, was simply a phase you needed to go through to get you where you wanted to go.

I find that comforting.

I am very interested in diversity in the entertainment industry. Can you share three reasons with our readers about why you think it’s important to have diversity represented in film and television? How can that potentially affect our culture?

Human beings define themselves through storytelling. Stories are who we are. Our entire human culture, in any form, has been created from nothing more than the stories we tell ourselves. Every aspect of our existence, from religion, money, legal systems, language, nations, and our ability to cooperate in large groups, all the way to how we understand basic physics and our place in the universe, all human civilization is simply made up of stories we all choose to believe.

If these stories are homogenized and only reflect a small portion of humanity, we are obviously hurting our own development and limiting the opportunities we must learn from each other. By telling stories from diverse viewpoints, we are broadening the human experience. We are including more people, inviting more of us into the conversation. This isn’t only important, it’s imperative.

Through stories that represent who you are, you can feel empowered and capable, finding new ideas and new inspiration, a new courage to go after your own real-life accomplishment. This will help bring more talent and more diverse thinking to the forefront of our everyday lives, and that will only help make us all better humans.

Another reason why this is so important: The entertainment industry is at the forefront of culture.

The very term “entertainment industry” is always shifting and changing. It used to be defined by the old distribution systems of networks and airwaves, today it includes social media, internet video and digital publishing, tomorrow it will include creative expressions on the blockchain.

No matter how you define it, human beings are always looking for stories, and powerful stories rise to the surface, becoming part of our collective consciousness, impacting the way we think, the way we speak and the way we act.

This mechanism isn’t inherently good or evil, it just is. Like a force of man-made nature. We’ve seen it violate the principles of democracy and bring fascist leaders to the very pinnacle of presidential power, and we have also seen it overthrow oppressive regimes and help fuel a revolution of the people.

From blockbuster entertainment to political messaging in disguise, ensuring a level of diversity in the stories we tell will help them reach wider groups of people, empowering voices that have been silent for too long, and, in a perfect world, help bring us closer together.

In addition, as a third reason why this is so important: It’s about time!

American culture blankets the world in a way that rivals British or Roman empires at the peak of colonization. The US may have the most powerful army in the world, but the entertainment industry has done far more to sway the hearts and minds of people across the globe.

Because the socio-economic realities of American society have been driven by systemic racism since its inception, our media landscape has been predominantly white and male for longer than anyone reading this has been alive.

No matter how you slice it, it’s been unjustly biased for too long, and it’s time to recognize that and come together to work for change. The way stories shape and impact our everyday lives is too important for our entertainment industry to continue to be controlled by some homogenized group of white men.

The time for change is long overdue, and we can all play our part.

What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now?

I’m very intrigued by the new opportunities being born in the Web 3 space. It’s a bit of a gold rush now, and people can’t have a conversation without mentioning blockchain fifteen times, but I do believe it’s a huge opportunity to break into a whole new frontier.

If blockchain can be allowed to flourish, the technology has the power to decentralize the internet, taking power away from the large corporations that traditionally hoard it, and putting it back into the hands of the people.

At its best, blockchain has the power to diversify the voices, to unify people across otherwise unbridgeable divides, and to help level the economic playing field for individuals across the globe.

While that utopia may not come to fruition as cleanly as we’d like, even taking steps in that direction can change the world for the better.

While I can’t talk about some of the projects we’re doing in this space just yet, you will see a lot more announcements coming from Shareability and our partners over the next few months.

Which aspect of your work makes you most proud? Can you explain or give a story?

Outside of seeing the people I work with grow and evolve over time, which is always an unbeatable feeling, my favorite moments always center around the reactions of others when they absorb anything I’ve been a part of creating.

You get this feedback in a ton of different ways. As a writer you get it when people ask probing questions or talk to you about how they felt when they read what you’ve written. On social platforms, you get the feedback in terms of engagements, meaning reactions, shares, and comments. As a filmmaker, the best feedback comes from screenings.

I’ve always been a filmmaker who loves test screenings. Not the friends-and-family variety, where supposed “experts” who are invariably *not* your audience, are invited to have opinions on your work. I like test screenings with a real audience. I love sitting in the dark and hearing them laugh, cry or hold their breath at all the right moments.

I think filmmakers often tend to get lost in their craft. It’s very easy to focus on the work and to build something for your own enjoyment, fulfillment, or pride, but if you’re not focused on what the audience thinks, what’s the point?

At Shareability, we often screen things companywide to invite feedback, and we think of the Internet as the world’s largest focus group. We frequently run tests on the stories we put out to see how the audience will react, tweaking different aspects to perfect their experience before releasing the final version into the wild. I love the iterative nature of that experience, and the surprises you inevitably get back.

When all the stars align and you create something that truly connects, and you get the audience feedback that tells you it worked… There’s no better feeling.

Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview.

What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why. Please share a story or example for each.

1) It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

Alright, so that’s not entirely true, you absolutely need to know your stuff. The saying should probably be more along the lines of: “It’s not just what you know, it’s also who knows that you know.” It just doesn’t sound as good that way.

Point being: The impact of networking on the types of opportunities that you will find available to you cannot be overstated.

For me, this is a real point of weakness. I learned this lesson way too late, and in many ways, I still don’t think I’ve absorbed it. I suck at networking for networking’s sake. If I’m friendly with you, it’s not because I want something from you, it’s because I enjoy your company, or I find you interesting, or we have something fun to talk about. I can’t network for the sake of getting to know more and more people. I am Swedish after all, and we are generally a grumpy and isolated sort…

2) Make cool things and share them with the world.

It’s really that simple. If you make things people might enjoy and you put them out there, someone might find them, and your world can change overnight. And the more you put things out there, the higher your chances are of that happening.

In my youth, I wanted to be a poet, so I wrote a bunch of poetry. I printed a whole collection (because I’m old as rocks, so this was almost pre-internet) and sold them at my school to pay for a summer trip. I even got published a few times.

In my 20s I took my life savings and buried them in a short film I knew would never make its money back, and it was the best film school I’ve ever had. Not only did the film get me nominated for an Academy Award, but more importantly, it put me on track to meet my wife.

It’s very easy to forget this lesson along the way. Life tends to get in the way, and as soon as you get close enough to something you have been aspiring for, you get blinded by proximity and the whole mess of it all. It’s much easier to see what needs to be done from a distance, and the busy work of surviving any endeavor can truly blind you to what’s important.

This is especially true as you find yourself in a position of authority or being responsible for others. While it’s true that losing yourself in working for others is the greatest thing you can do, it can also risk you forgetting about what lit that spark in you all those years ago, and why you thought that doing a certain type of thing with your life was so important.

When this happens, you get busy with busy work, and you forget to keep creating and sharing yourself. This is a trap. Don’t fall for it. Take a chance, put yourself out there. You never know how the universe might respond…

3) Love the ones you’re with. This means a few things for me:

a) You need to spend time with the ones you love. No matter how passionate you might be about whatever project you are working on, it should always come second to your friends and family. This is a tough one in our business, but that only makes it more important.

I have missed enough key moments over the years, including moments with people who are no longer here, moments I can never get back. I have learned, the slow and painful way, to spend time with my family as often as I possibly can.

b) You need to love your cast and crew. It’s flabbergasting how often this is forgotten or neglected. If you don’t love and respect your team, how can you expect them to do their best work?

Coming from a hyper-independent background, I had very little experience on a real crew when I was first put in charge of one. I had no understanding of the mechanics of filmmaking on that scale, and I frequently communicated things the wrong way to the wrong people, or not at all. The only thing that saved me was the fact that I cared about the cast and crew.

If you are serious about working in an industry that runs like a machine, spend as much time working in that machine as you possibly can. Otherwise, you might find yourself in charge of it, with no clue how it runs. Just like I did.

c) Sometimes people don’t work out. That’s ok. Everyone’s not for everyone. Don’t put up with a broken relationship out of habit. Painful as it may be, you are better off with a clean break, or at least a level set. That doesn’t mean you’ll never see them again, only that there are some clear and specific ground rules that you won’t see broken, and if that doesn’t work for them, you’re better off parting ways.

I have had many working relationships over the past several decades, and I have had a fierce sense of loyalty to all of them. I will never let my sense of loyalty waver, but I’d like to think I’ve learned to pick up on the warning signs a bit better over time, and I’m prepared to drop a lost cause way sooner than I used to.

4) Always stay humble and kind.

Great Tim McGraw song, and the sentiment is so true, even if I’ve not always managed to live up to it. The folly of youth comes with a great degree of arrogance, some of which can be like rocket fuel for your creativity. It can also set you up on a very high horse, ready to buck and kick you off at any moment.

Humility is the great equalizer. If you approach things with confidence alone, you will find yourself crashing hard at times. If you can add a hint of humility, you might just get a softer landing. If you can add kindness, you will make friends along the way and you will all be stronger together.

For me, finding the absurd level of success that an Academy Award nomination brings at such a young age certainly had me believing my own hype for quite a while. It was only once I realized the level of serendipity involved and stopped taking the quality of my work for granted that I started to find ongoing success.

5) Walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.

This is a favorite expression in our house, and it’s all about empathy and understanding. Because we all live in our own heads, it’s important to do whatever we can to experience the world through other people’s points of view.

For example, too many rich white men think they understand what it’s like living in poverty as a black woman in America. No, they don’t. They can’t. It’s literally impossible to truly experience, on an emotional level, what it’s like living someone else’s experience.

We must recognize that this is impossible, and even embrace it. We need to come to each other with open hearts and allow the truth of someone else’s life to be every bit as real as our own, even if we don’t understand it. This is to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. With any luck, it will get you to a place where you can start having a dialogue.

6) This too, shall pass.

As a bonus, I think the depth of this phrase is easy to miss. We often mistake it for speaking only to negative moments, but it’s every bit as important to remember in reverse, in that the moments that bring you true joy and happiness are also fleeting. If you remember this in both directions, it makes the pain easier to get through, and the joy all that more meaningful and important to both seek out and hold on to.

When you create a film, which stakeholders have the greatest impact on the artistic and cinematic choices you make? Is it the viewers, the critics, the financiers, or your own personal artistic vision? Can you share a story with us or give an example about what you mean?

This is a very loaded question, and one that doesn’t have a straightforward answer. It’s also a large part of why I have left Hollywood behind, because the power ascribed to certain people in the process of making a movie can be so disruptive as to break a project apart, literally turning creative ambitions to naught.

A great example of this is the movie Possession which I helped direct. While there are some scenes and moments in that movie that aren’t bad overall, it falls apart completely, and the ending is probably the most trite and predictable ending to that story ever imaginable. This all happened because the project had a lot of people with a lot of power attached, and it was pulled in so many different directions that the result was something none of the parties could be proud of.

These were all wonderful people, and they were all just wanting to help ensure we made the best movie possible, but their version of the best movie was completely different than other people’s version, and we didn’t have enough power to unify everyone around a singular vision.

It didn’t matter that the vision we had for the movie was what everyone agreed to upfront, or that it was the solution that got the movie green-lit in the first place. Other people had more power over the movie than we had, and those people had not only one conflicting vision, but several, and they were all pulling as hard as they could in different directions.

In the end, the movie was like a medieval victim of quartering, tied between four horses pulling in different directions until the subject is literally torn apart.

In the world of Shareability, we aspire to deploy a more objective approach. Sure, we have conflicting directives at times, but we avoid the trap of taste-wars, largely through objective data. We think of the internet as the world’s largest focus group, and when we can’t test things in the public eye, we do large group conversations and test screenings to gather as much information as humanly possible, always trying to make the best decisions for the project, not for any one individual ego.

Every time we deploy our team against a creative story problem, I can feel my old Hollywood scars healing just a little bit more.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

Ha! I think the rumors of my influence are greatly exaggerated. I wish I had that kind of power, to wave a magic wand and drive meaningful impact.

Where that power does exist is within Shareability. We are building a substantial media services company, and we are starting to stand up some very real owned and operated media brands, and because storytelling defines our culture, there is some real power in all the stories we tell across all our platforms.

Therefore, we always try to tell powerful, uplifting, meaningful, thoughtful, and inspiring stories whenever we can. By actively working to counter-program racism, sexism, and all the other negative- isms, we hope to contribute to more positive conversations. Through aspiring for inclusion, we can hopefully make it easier for LGBTQ+ people to recognize themselves in the stories we tell. By shining a light on people doing good in the world, we can hopefully inspire others to do the same.

We are also spending our own internal resources and abilities on creating projects under a “Shareability for Good” banner, where we do projects just because it’s a good thing to do. Our first outing was a video with Jay Shetty where we tackled female self-esteem. While that video alone drove over 20 million views, we still feel like we have only taken baby steps. Hopefully, we are leading by example and showing everyone in the company that we take the impact of our work seriously.

In terms of a movement that fits this mantra, it would be to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. To see the world from the point of view of others. If there was a way to systemize this, to encourage people from different walks of life to spend meaningful time with each other, to see each other as people, rather than anonymous and homogenized groups, that would be a movement I would get behind in a heartbeat.

We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might see this. :-)

I would love to turn this question around and offer up myself to anyone who might be looking to get into our field. I’m not doing this out of some ego-driven hubris, rather out of a genuine passion for opening doors and bringing diverse voices to the conversation. Rather than me try to grab more privilege, I’d like to offer to pay it forward. If you feel you have the right passion and talent, but you are struggling to find a way in, hit me up. I can’t promise to help, but I promise to try.

How can our readers further follow you online?

Because so much of my life is spend driving the social reach of others, I keep my own social channels very private and sporadic, so the best place to find me is on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelbergvall or simply through our website: www.shareability.com.

This was very meaningful, thank you so much! We wish you continued success!

Thank you! Hope this all made sense. Please don’t hesitate to follow up. J