Paid in Sweat

If you’re reading this blog and you haven’t read the last two, can I suggest that you click back here. and start at the beginning with this.

Success as an actor, a writer, a director, a business person, a roofer, a visual artist, a manager, a singer-songwriter, a physician, a scientist or fitness coach is all based on graft. If you are not willing to put in the work, you simply won’t get there. Those lucky people, those people that succeeded, they’re only luck in your eyes. In their eyes, they earned that place with the sweat on their brow – and other places for the fitness coach and the roofer.

Success coach Brian Tracy says something very obvious but very true: Success is like a canteen and not like a restaurant. In the canteen, you pay for the meal before you enjoy it.

Success means giving up on your excuses, your blaming, your putting things off until you’ve got time, it means paying for it now.

It’s going to mean quite a lot of self denial. And a lot of people, actors and other people too, will not be able to do that. They want to be actors, but they want a big home and a good car BEFORE they hit their success. So they put their energy and focus into that and eventually, the dream of acting, or the small acting career that could be big, slowly, slowly, disappears.

Success as an actor isn’t magic. It’s not even luck, it’s having a plan, and doing something to get closer to it EVERY DAY.

So let’s look at how to do this, you will need a pen/pencil and several pieces of paper, preferably a notebook would help.

ACTIVITY ONE: SETTING GOALS

TAKE A NOTEPAD AND WRITE ON THE TOP OF A PAGE –TO BE A SUCCESSFUL WORKING ACTOR and the DATE at the top. (You can CUSTOMISE your GOAL of course!)

Write the numbers 1-20 down the side of the paper. Now write down all the things you can do to make this happen in the next 12 months. Don’t WORRY about HOW you will achieve these, just write down the things you can do to make it happen. Get an AGENT, Appear in a Show at the Edinburgh Festival, Write my Own Show, Get Known By Theatre Directors, Get Known by Casting Directors, whatever it is. The first 5 will be easy, the next 10 will be harder, the next 5 will make your brain cry. But write down 20 small individual HOWs.

Now the key to success in these little goals is EASY and SIMPLE. Put each one of these as the heading (like you did with your main goal)at the top of a new page of your notepad. Now write 1-10 under these and write out 10 things you will need to do to achieve these smaller steps, it works best if they are now tasks. If you really don’t know how to, you don’t know what tasks will help you, ASK OTHER PEOPLE, or read about how other people have achieved it, there’s always plenty of books and blogs. Remember, trying to believe that other people got there by LUCK is just another way of letting yourself off the hook. If they did it by luck, then no matter how much work you do, you can’t achieve it without luck. SCREW THAT. Do this exercise. Break it down into chunks and stop giving yourself an excuse.

The key to success is breaking down your overall goal into small manageable steps that you can work towards EVERY. DAY. Every day. EVERY DAY. I’m saying it again if you didn’t get it. EVERY. DAY. Days of Rest. Holidays. Every Day. Self Denial first. Pay for the Meal in the Canteen and THEN you can eat it. PAY IN SWEAT now and you can enjoy the rewards later.

If you have the self discipline to do this, you will succeed. If you don’t. Well, you’ve only yourself to blame, haven’t you?

Tomorrow, we’re going to work on combating problems BEFORE they arise.