A Short Lesson on How to Fail

Good Evening, and thank you for being on time, most of your future employers will appreciate this too. It says that you’re ready, you’re keen, you want to please and that you respect the basics guidelines of professionalism. So, thank you for that.

I want to tell you something and it’s really important, so please listen closely. You see, getting good at acting has nothing to do with how talented you are right now, not how smart you are, nor how good you were before you came here. Do you understand?

Please listen to this again. It doesn’t matter how much talent you have, nor how clever or intelligent you are. It doesn’t matter. So congratulations on getting through the audition, but that was just an institutional way of keeping the nutters out.

What matters, what really matters is what you do now.  Those students that feel they are talented will spend the next ten weeks attempting to prove it to the rest of us. They will not grow or gain because they are spending their time in class, the effort that should be placed on growth, protecting what they believe they currently have. Those students that are willing to fail, to look silly, in short those willing to risk their status as ‘talented’ and stretch themselves, fail, be disappointed but then get back on the horse, those are the ones that are going to be excellent.

Excellence you see is not a fixed thing, it is a constant evolution. You can get better and better from now until you die. It’s not the same for ballerinas, they’re bodies won’t allow it, but you actors, you can keep getting better and better, and keep getting more and more interesting roles.

But you have to have the desire, you need to want it, and that can be difficult, so that means that every time you seem to get better, I’m going to make things more difficult for you. This will keep you stretching, and sometimes you will not like it because it will mean that you look like a fool in front of others. If you can put up with that, you will learn an important lesson.

Unfortunately, those of you that are attempting to protect your talent will learn very little from me. You will spend your time making sure that I and all the other students know that you’ve got some talent. You’ll take the opportunity to tell and demonstrate your knowledge, your intelligence and your abilities. But I’ll be honest, it won’t impress me. The reason is that I know that when your abilities are really challenged your work will be less interesting than that of ‘less talented’ students. When you’re challenged you will curse and swear and blame everyone else. But you can change this. If you feel that you’re doing this. Stop. Pause. Breathe. Think for a moment. Do I really want to get better or just prove to everyone that I deserve to be here? If you are willing to change your mindset, you can grow, you can truly grow.

You already deserve to be here. You all do. You have nothing to prove, you have everything to gain. This is how I tell from the very first contact hours whether a student has the capacity for greatness as an actor. Unfortunately, so many previous teachers have fanned the ‘talented’ students egos, they’re already scared to fail, they don’t want to risk this inflated status.

But you can change. The decision is yours. You’re not hardwired to be like this. It’s the software that you’re running and it can be upgraded, it can be changed, but only if you want it. And that part, that’s entirely down to you.