The Great Acting Blog: “Self-Control Beats Big Problems”

The Great Acting Blog: “Self-Control Beats Big Problems”

*Big projects are difficult because they take time to do and usually involve many pieces, and so there is plenty of scope for bad days and for things to go wrong. These difficulties however, are more often than not just bumps in the road, and not catastrophes. When they arise, they tend to arouse our fears; that we are useless after all, or incompetent, or that we haven’t got the right contacts, or we’re too young, or too old, or too inexperienced, or too battle scarred, or we don’t have the right back ground, or that we knew it would never work anyway. There are a myriad of excuses and we all have our pet ones which we use to justify bailing on big projects.

Really, the only question that matters is whether we’re going to see the project through to the end or not. Everything else is just fluff. When something goes wrong in the project, it’s just a new piece of information, it’s not evidence of our worthlessness. Difficulties challenge our pre-conceptions, they invite us to remodel our original thinking. That’s all they are.

The trick is to expect difficulties, to expect problems, and respond to them in a productive way. This, frankly, comes down to self-control.

*Personally, I think a big project can be an individual performance or production, but it can also mean building a career or a body of work.

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