The Great Acting Blog: “How Vision Creates A Sustainable Career Path”

The Great Acting Blog: “How Vision Creates A Sustainable Career Path”

If you don’t have some sense of where you want to end up as an actor, if you don’t have a vision for your work, then you are placing yourself at a huge disadvantage to those actors who do.

There are innumerable opportunities in the acting world, a myriad of possible directions we can go in, but we only have a limited amount of resources, especially time, which is irreplaceable. Having a vision will enable us to focus those finite resources on the things which really matter and stop us from wasting them on those that don’t. In other words, we stick to the actions which help us to realise the vision and discard the rest. Before undertaking any course of action then, we might ask ourselves; “how does it contribute to my vision?” If you don’t have a vision then that enlightening question is not available to you.

Sticking to long terms goals is not easy however. They are tested when we go any period of time without work, the pressure mounts and suddenly that Toilet Duck commercial begins to look like Hamlet. It takes great strength of mind to ignore the siren call of the quick buck and remain fixed on our path instead. Again, if you do not have that vision of your work, making tough decisions becomes even tougher. It’s counter-intuitive for an actor to rule out any sort of work, however, unless he has that caste-iron direction he is unlikely to survive over the long term.

Furthermore, choosing to do the wrong kind of work can be debilitating. It may relieve the pressure of unemployment today but what effect will have it tomorrow? I knew an actor who consistently chose to do work that didn’t interest him (his excuse was that it was all he could get) and after a while, he walked away from acting because he became demoralised and just wasn’t enjoying it anymore. Doing the wrong work can have a corrosive effect.

Trying to live off random acting jobs is a sure fire way to fail. Creating a vision for your work and dedicating yourself to realising it, is the only way to build a sustainable career path.

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