My business partner Shawn Coyne has a term that he can’t utter without personal and emotional abhorrence.

“Third party validation.”

He HATES it. He hates the very idea of it. When he sees it in others, he shakes his head. When he discovers even a glimmer within himself, he’s horrified and moves heaven and earth to eradicate it.

What is Third Party Validation?

3PV is the need for approval from someone else.

Be it said, all of us crave approval and validation. We’re human. Our DNA was formed over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution where survival meant life in the tribe, in the primitive hunting band, where exclusion from the group meant death.

It’s in our blood, the need for Third Party Validation. 

That doesn’t make it any less of a vice.

Can you read your own stuff and form an objective opinion? Can you screen your film and know which parts work and which don’t?

We can collaborate with editors and producers. We can listen deeply and heed their counsel. But in the end, we must develop our own nose for the truth.

The film director must have the final word on his picture. He and he alone must be the judge of when it’s ready for release to the world.