Fearless Persistence: Creative Life, Creative Work, and the Ten Laws of Culturenomics

Most advice about getting ahead focuses on motivation. Most stalled progress has nothing to do with it.

Fearless Persistence is about the systems that quietly determine whose work moves forward and whose work stalls. That applies in business as much as it does in the arts, because both run on much of the same machinery. Drawing on decades inside film studios, cultural institutions, and the classroom at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, Adam Leipzig looks at how power, pressure, time, belief, and structure shape outcomes, regardless of talent or effort.

This isn't a book for "creatives" as some separate category of person. It's for anyone building something whose value can't yet be proven: a product, a strategy, a team, a company, a career. It's for anyone who has put in the work and wondered why the results haven't followed.
Leipzig argues that persistence, done well, isn't grit or hustle. It's design. It's the deliberate construction of structures that allow your work to survive when conditions change, as they always do.

Clear eyed, practical, and grounded in real experience across entertainment, media, and technology, Fearless Persistence helps executives, founders, managers, and every kind of builder see the system underneath the story, and then think about how to build work that can endure with integrity and impact.

Success is shaped by systems, not sentiment. This book shows you how to build a career and a life that can thrive inside them.

Adam Leipzig is a producer, educator, and advisor whose work spans film, media, technology, and business. A former senior executive at Walt Disney Studios and President of National Geographic Films, he has spent decades working inside the systems that shape what gets made, funded, seen, and remembered.

He teaches creativity, leadership, and strategic communication at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, working with graduate students and senior executives on the challenges of building ideas, organizations, and careers that endure.

The author of Fearless Persistence, Filmmaking in Action, and Inside Track for Independent Filmmakers, Leipzig brings together practical experience from the creative industries and the business world to examine how creativity, leadership, and systems shape what moves forward.