Failure Guaranteed

You are going to fail. It’s inevitable. You will miss experience terrible flops and you will tank audition opportunities. You have to face it. It IS going to happen.  And oh, it’s going to hurt. That’s the bad news.

The good news is, so is everyone else.

Failure is a part of the process. The trouble is that it doesn’t feel good, it’s disappointing, and we associate the feeling of failing with inability. How many careers have ended because the actor doesn’t understand that failure is part of the road to success.

Andrew Stanton made the phenomenal Finding Nemo, and then went on to make John Carter. It doesn’t matter your size, you are going to experience failure. You just are. Apple changed the personal computer industry forever, but the Lisa was a total flop. Failure is guaranteed in all situations. Do Apple seem like failures to you?

Failure WILL happen. But developing a healthy attitude to it will allow you to overcome it.

But when things fail, things fail – you are not the failure. Yes, we have invested personally, or emotionally into a project or performance. But you are not your performance, even if it usually feels that way. Your performance is a complex cluster of action, perception, reception and context. You can only control a single element of that cluster.  The trick is to feel the emotion and then leave it behind you.

We will all fail, often many times, the true test of your character is who can out-fail the others to success.