What’s right for your future?

My apologies. It’s been a long while since I wrote anything. There are a variety of reasons for my absence. To quote Mark Twain, “…rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated”.

OK, so what happened to me? One, I was very involved in helping to cast two shows but that is a pretty poor excuse since it really only took around 15 hours a week….
My second piss poor excuse I will blame on technology and those who would sell/promote it. I thought I had someone who was going to help me get this site up to the standards that I believe will take it to the next level and help as many people as I can to get their acting career to the levels I know we can all achieve. It turns out that the people who were going to help me aren’t as organized as they claimed and after repeated contacts and promises from them, I am still in the same state as I was before. What this means is that I wasted a lot of time waiting for them to do something and dropped the ball on my own site, depending on others to share my passion and desire to take this to the next level.

So, I think there has to be a lesson here. No one has more responsibility for your success than you. Getting agents/managers casting directors and the like on your team is great, but you remain the CEO and full hiring and firing responsibility, and there’s no point in keeping someone around if they aren’t pulling their weight because in the end the only one who is really going to suffer is you, but on also on a more altruistic note, you are not doing them any favors either. It’s the same with children…if you let them get away with anything, it only comes back to bite you in the rear because they are formed by the lessons they learn and if you treat your team with kid gloves, they will learn that it’s OK to walk all over you.

You must have rules and policies in your corporation of one and both you and your team members must follow them or after an appropriate warning, be released and replaced with more responsive team members. There are a variety of reasons why people don’t perform to your/their expectations and the best advice I can give is not to get involved in them. Deal only with the facts…that if they cannot or will not perform as to your initial agreement, you let them go. If it’s a temporary situation, you can consider bringing them back when they are able to perform their duties, but unless you want to bankroll other people’s problems, you have to be cold and calculating about this. If you decide to become a professional actor (and by professional I mean business-like) then do as a business would do. Grant maternity leave if you must, but only once you’ve found a temporary replacement that can do the same duties. If not, move on with no hard feelings.

The other thing I’m learning by trying to create this online acting presence is that you have to remain focused on the end goal. Many ‘shiny things’ will present themselves and give you the early indication that they will solve all your problems with little or no effort, but rest assured that to my knowledge none of them actually do as claimed or if they do actually work, it is only as a result of you adding all your sweat, toil and knowledge to them to make them do as described…usually the more automated something is, the more complicated it is so you often need technical skills to match your artistic skills. Unless you are prepared to get informed on a particular technology, I would avoid gimmicks and tools that take more of your time than they save.

You must decide whether getting fancy is worth either the expense or the distraction from your main goals. If you want to act, then assess whether whatever you are doing is getting you closer to either acting jobs or auditions. The process by which to do this is fairly simple. Simply skip ahead in your mind to the result you want and then work your way backwards step by step and see if your new ‘thing’ might be part of that process.

I have been watching countless videos and reading tons of PDF’s that have nothing to do with acting, but have to do with technology and trying to decide which technology might help me. So far, it’s been a morass of partial solutions and disappointments and I’ve found that you need to know a lot about technology in general to make most of these tools work for you. Good marketers might be good at making sales for themselves, but they don’t necessarily know how to really help you. You may be able to learn how to market yourself simply by watching how they market to you…but be warned that if you can’t deliver the goods (as they often can’t) you will piss a lot of people off who put their trust in you. Sure maybe you will get that one audition, like you bought that one product from the shyster, but they likely won’t be calling you again. How happy is a child if they receive a huge, beautifully wrapped gift, only to find a brick inside? Life is that simple. And adults react exactly the same as children…they are just not as honest about it. It is so important for the present to match the packaging.