Fail Today, Succeed Tomorrow

All actors hit walls in their work. It’s an inevitable reality in the evolution of your craft. However, only you can answer how much effort you’re really putting into your craft on a daily basis.

We do not often test our talent—really test our talent on a daily basis because the result might not lead to miraculous breakthroughs. It might only show small, incremental amounts of growth. Yet, you must embrace this reality, even more than your ability to memorize, network and get the perfect headshot.

The ‘10,000 hours’ timeframe to master any craft has been addressed well in books like The Tipping Point and The Talent Code. They show us that greatness doesn’t come from divine intervention it’s born from our conscious effort to reach towards greatness in our craft.

Each addresses the disciplined process required to move your talent from the conscious to the unconscious. They also address something that is a fundamental to my approach as a teacher of acting: the ATTEMPT at something just outside of our current skill set accelerates the mastering of that task through FAILURE.

Failure ignites our whole system to LEARN. We do it over and over until it becomes an instinct, and not a conscious attempt. The time we take to go through the uncomfortable failures not only builds our talent, but it defines each and every one of us in our work, and our lives.

So, the next time you feel stuck in your work, ask yourself this simple question:
What can you do today to risk and possibly fail?

Then go forward and risk something in your exercises or your scene work. If you find you’re not failing, then you’ve uncovered why you feel stuck in your acting growth:

It feels better to do something well today, than to fall short and do something great in the future.

Get your ego out of the way and fail. You’re ego will benefit from the risk tenfold moving forward.

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