Be Extraordinary And Accept Adversity | The Great Acting Blog
“But man is not made for defeat,” he said. “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
– Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man And The Sea
It seems my last post, Be Comfortable Not Knowing, about anticipating adversity, has received some pushback for somehow offering a “negative” image of the future. But I fear this misses the point.
Let me explain…
When it is going well we are carried along by the flow of momentum. And that’s fine. But for actors or artists (of any sort), it is not going to go well all of the time, there will inevitably be times during the year when adversity strikes(!).
Again: which adversities are likely? You can’t get work / you can’t get the work you want / lack of opportunity / you can’t get your project off the ground / problems in your personal life distract you from your work.
Given that we know roughly what the problems are going to be, is it not reasonable to equip ourselves with a little philosophy in order to help us cope with them?
We are less likely to blow-up, less likely to grow frustrated, less likely to become pessimistic (ie – believing adversity to be permanent and pervasive, rather than temporary and isolated) and therefore less likely to fold like so many before us. Be one of the remarkable, become extraordinary by staying fixed, by continuing to strive, by accepting adversity. Let the complacent, the arrogant, the self-helpists and the phonies fall away, because they surely will. But you will not fall away, you will remain steadfast, and become richer for the experience.
Remember: adversity will pass just as inevitably as it arrived.
It is not “negative” to prepare ourselves for the realities of the artist’s life, anymore than it’s “negative” for the captain of a ship to prepare for a storm.
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