The Great Acting Blog: “Which Road Should I Take?”

The Great Acting Blog: “Which Road Should I Take?”

When one set of objectives has been accomplished (or not as the case may be), another set must be decided upon. This is always tricky because we are effectively signing-off the next few months or years of our life. The view however, is very different once we’ve scaled a new height, accomplishing objectives changes us and we perceive the world slightly differently. This new insight means we need to reassess what we want. We have to take responsibility, there is no-one else to blame if we get this wrong. We can also use the new insight to reassess what we think is doable. Yes it needs to be challenging,  it needs to take us out of our comfort zone but we need to have a realistic chance of getting the thing done. So how to decide on what to do?

When Alice asked which road she should take in Wonderland, the Cheshire Cat replied; “where do you want to end up?” It’s a question you might want to ask yourself.

It could be that you have an idea of where you want to end up eventually, you life’s goal as it were,  but are unable to get there in one leap. So you need to work-out the steps in between.

All this is made doubly-difficult for actors because there are no hard and fast rules. Whatever you do will be a gamble, that’s part of the attraction of the lifestyle. If you do the things all other actors do then you risk becoming just another face in the crowd, reliant on the lottery that is the casting process. But if you strike out and do your own thing then it needs to be very, very good. Also, so much of the actor’s future is seemingly not in his control. In the best case scenario, you can beaver away furiously in one direction but something can fall in your lap from another. In the worst case, you beaver away furiously without reward.

This is why I say that we need to control as many of the steps as we can in our career. Once we have identified what those steps are, even if they are extremely difficult to accomplish, we can set about doing them if we control them.

The best way forward is to decide on a spread of objectives and list them in order of how much control we have of the steps to accomplish them. At the top should be the objective that is most under our control, then list the rest using that same criteria. This works because if we select only objectives which are not in our control, then we are liable to go nuts if we feel we’re not getting anywhere after a few months of slog. On the other hand, it is unlikely that everything we want to accomplish is within our control, so we will want a mix.

Subscribe to The Great Acting Blog