Making sense of my silly life with Eiji Han Shimizu

Eiji Han Shimizu is a purpose driven filmmaker and creative entrepreneur who discovered the many different ways we find happiness by making the movie Happy.

During this conversation we find out about his pursuit of happiness and how he got greedy for it.

Having ticked off all the different paths to happiness the last one on his bucket list was to find meaning.

He says that we all have different elements to our lives that seem like a set of senseless dots but when you’re able to connect them that’s when we find meaning and purpose and achieve the focus to make the impossible happen.

His latest movie is True North, a manga style animation about the plight of political prisoners in North Korean concentration camps. Animated movies are expensive to make and having been unsuccessful in finding a backer he had to bootstrap its production. While the budget required was still beyond his savings he found a way.

It was his calling and it helped him “make sense of his silly life”.

He shares many pearls of wisdom during this episode one of them being that when things get hard the secret to keeping going is to play the theme tune to the Indiana Jones movie in your head. That’s the soundtrack to success.