Some Advice on Becoming an Actor
You have a dream of becoming an actor. Stop dreaming and starting taking the first step. For me, the first step you have to take is the acknowledgment that this is going to take time. It’s true some people have success easy, but they fade quickly too. Are you willing to invest 20 years or 10,000 hours? Do you have what it takes to do that? If you don’t have it, that’s okay, but that’s what’s going to get in the way. Along the way there will be many obstacles: family members, education, financial problems, ‘growing up’, getting a proper job, all that stuff is likely to come your way whether you’re talented or not. So it’s not about that stuff, it’s about how you deal with that stuff that counts. It’s not the knocks you take on the journey, but how to respond to the knocks.
You’re going to make mistakes, but make sure that you learn from them and stop yourself from making the same ones over again. Everyone makes mistakes but the fear of failure keeps many people from doing what they want to do. Thirty years down the track, what will you think of yourself as you look at the ‘lucky’ ones doing the thing you want to do? Fear of failure is just your survival instinct trying to stop you getting hurt. You gotta skin your knees and elbows if you want to learn to ride a bike.
Don’t refuse to learn something because it clashes with your current philosophy or ideology. There’s no one way, whatever works is the best way.
You need to take action. Wanting something is good, it gives you desire. Desire is good, it’s burning passion, but wanting, desire and burning passion are useless without you taking the steps that we call action. Take the steps. What’s your first? What’s the smallest possible step that you could take RIGHT now? Search on Google for Acting Classes? Call up a school and get an acting coach?
Take the smallest step today, take another tomorrow. Don’t worry about success or finding an agent or how you will make a living. Concern for those things ALWAYS stops people fulfilling their dreams – long LONG before they set out on the pathway of action. Junk all that stuff. Take action, or find something else to do.