Flying the Plane before You’ve Built It

As actors, we all want to fly. Immediately if possible. I understand, I want a book, I download on Kindle or Audible, I don’t need to wait any more.

Unfortunately, you will learn the hard way that skill doesn’t grow like that.

The mythology of our industry says, ‘go out there and do it, the best training is doing.’

Of course doing is better than talking about it, but doing in a safe, low risk environment, will at least allow of the acquisition of skill before you attempt to test those skills in public.

But we all want to fly the plane before we’ve even built it.

There’s nothing wrong with getting out there before your training is done, but the trouble is, that chances are, if you were ready, someone would have told you.

Now you shouldn’t wait for permission, but here’s the deal:

When the plane is ready to fly, EVERYONE knows. That’s when we have a test flight. Once a few test flights are done, we can fly the plane, but no pilot is getting in that cockpit until their skills are down.

Until then, we can spend some time in the simulator, it’s very close to the real thing, it’s doing the real thing, but in a safe environment, and it saves a lot of crashes.

By all means act, and produce, and write and direct now, but if your skills are average and half learned, you’re not going to do your best work. In fact, some of it may be embarrassing, and the sad thing, no one is going to tell you, so you will continue in the same vein.

What you need is guided practise. And lots of it.

The Atlantic Theater Company did 30 productions together informally before they want pro.

They have a LOT of Tony Awards.

They learned to fly, they practised in the simulator while they built the plane, and then they flew the plane when it was ready.

Listen up: the chances are if your skills are half learned, you won’t use them when tested. As you move towards a performance, you’ll barely use them, because they have not become habit and as we all tend to panic under pressure, anything that isn’t nailed down, goes out of the window.

If you can have a little patience, you can have it all.

But you probably don’t have the patience. 

So you’ll fly the plane before it’s built. If you’re lucky, you’ll just about keep it in the air.  

Impatience is a kind of distraction from the purity of learning form.

Of course I’d rather you’d be good now, than possibly great later, but I’d rather you be great later than terribly mediocre now.