The Great Acting Blog: “A Lesson From Our Creative Work”

The Great Acting Blog: “A Lesson From Our Creative Work”

Whenever we have a problem focusing on a task, we might, in order to get ourselves back on track, want to reflect on our creative work where there is usually no such problem.

When we work on a script, we pick an objective which is exciting to us, and while pursuing it we ignore anything which is not essential to our accomplishment of it. We do not become distracted: imagine if an actor suddenly pulled out his Iphone to check his Twitter feed in the middle of a performance –  it might cause a temporary ruckus but ultimately it would probably spell the end of his career. The extremity of this example shows us that the stakes are high in performance. Not only that, but our work is important to us, we do everything in our power to ensure that it is as good as we can possibly make it. Focussing is not an issue.

What does it mean if we are having problems focussing away from our artistic work then? Well, probably the stakes aren’t high enough on whatever it is that we’re doing (ie – that if we fail at it, then nothing very bad happens or we don’t lose very much). It means that we haven’t picked an objective which is particularly exciting to us (or the results of attaining it are not exciting to us). Further, it’s probably something we don’t care much about, and/or it’s not an essential task.

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