The Great Acting Blog: “The Toil And Glory Of The Right Road”

The Great Acting Blog: “The Toil And Glory Of The Right Road”

Mediocrity is comfortable. It’s cosy and popular because it enables us to maintain that pleasant feeling of complacency. Mediocrity is safe, it’s blameless, it’s nice and quiet. Mediocrity means we never break into a sweat, it makes us seem as though we are in control, our vanity is never punctured. It’s not an exciting place to be, and the results aren’t great, but at least it makes us feel as though we are part of the club.

Reaching for excellence is a very different place to be. It’s like being in a blazing furnace, drenched in sweat. It requires total commitment and constant improvement. It creates self-doubt, stress, pressure. Our fear of failure means that it constantly pre-occupies us. The demands of it humble us because they expose our weaknesses and limitations. Sometimes it leaves us scrambling around in the dust. But every now and then, we feel the exhilaration of reaching the next step in our development. We enjoy the self-respect and feeling of independence which comes from seeing our work benefit from all that effort. The glory is in knowing we are on the road to becoming the artist we want to be.

 

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