50% off today and every day!!!…or How to Hack Your Work in Half

http://www.youtube.com/get_player

More later…Huh, you may ask?…
What are you selling? What I’m selling is my ability to teach you to how to eliminate at least 50% of the time/effort/cost it takes you to get your acting career going to the point where you don’t have to watch it like a hawk and can start enjoying your life instead of being a desperate actor forever. I’ve been a desperate actor and one who is making a living at it, and I far prefer the latter.

This brings me to Hacking. Hacking is a term that has received much attention from the media over the last several years. Only yesterday did we learn that there was a massive hacking network operating in China designed to steal and modify a great deal of sensitive and valuable information from India (I’m sure it wasn’t limited to India!). For more details on this story…(weird, I was going to paste a link here but can’t seem to paste (whatup google?), so…search “Canadian researchers uncover China-based online spy network.” (very interesting stuff…if the government of India can’t keep it’s stuff safe, how the heck are we?)

So while the online version of hacking infers something illegal and very bad, the word has been adapted to the offline (or legal online) world to mean something good…at least for the hacker…and potentially even for those who are the hack’d (the hackee?…sack?). For our purposes, it basically mean exploiting gaps in a system to your own benefit (possibly breaking or eliminating apparent rules…but not doing anything explicitly illegal). Hacking is extremely controversial and goes against our instincts, because it goes against what we are taught in almost every stage of our development. Our whole lives, we have been told to do things to help make us part of the system, not remove us from it or work outside it. Obviously if everyone was a hacker, there would be no system left to hack…although I’m not sure that is a bad thing either, and eventually the best hacking would become the guide for a new system. That’s pretty much what consultants to. They go into a company, bringing with them expertise brought from their outside experience and show how companies can eliminate and automate much of what they currently do. Did I just rename the consulting industry into the hacking industry? In any case, that’s what I’m going to try to help you with.

Very few people are comfortable hacking in any form because there is the risk of ostracization from the community/system that one is trying to hack….and this applies to the entertainment industry perhaps more than to any other industry so be prepared for some blowback and some criticism! Ruffling feathers can make people uncomfortable, but if you do it quietly, you can steal the eggs without waking the chckens (sorry for the mixed metaphor). If you can’t handle going it somewhat alone and on occasion and overcoming some objections along the way, this is probably not for you. Every situation is different, so sometimes you will be cracking the safe, while other times you will be blowing it up. One way creates very little ruckus, while the other will result in a 911 call.

Why hack? There are lots of reasons to try to hack something…Hacking can…

1. Save you time
2. Save you effort
3. Personal satisfaction
4. Current rules are outdated given current circumstances (inner hollywood still operates largely offline, but that is finally changing)
5. System is crowded with participants (too many actors for too few jobs)
6. Life is short! (you will always regret not trying something, and rarely will you regret trying it) The status quo will always be happy to have you back.

What does this have to do with having an acting career in Hollywood? Great question. An acting career seems like a simple thing to do, difficult maybe, but simple. If I recall when I started out, I figured that if I took some acting lessons, and was pretty good at it, I could then get an agent, the agent would get me auditions and I would soon be working. I didn’t really expect to be a star, but I did think from what I had seen on television/movies that “I could do that”. Doesn’t everyone. You see someone talking on television and you say, “What is so hard about that?”. Then you try to do it and you think, “That is F-ing hard! Why is that so hard?” Even so you still figure, “OK, it’s hard but the steps to success are still the same, right?” As you will find, there is no single path to success, but there are many things you can do to skip several steps that may seem to be necessary. I know actors who have worked their butts off, taking literally hundreds of hours of class and have not made any progress. I also know of actors, who just ‘have it’, and with relatively little apparent effort, have had great success. There are also people who have had little overall talent/looks, but through sheer will have made a living at acting. These people may actually be working harder than people doing 9-5 jobs, but it is doing something they love (or at least convinced themselves they do) so they don’t count the hours, but if they did, might find they are earning less than a starbucks employee (and without starbucks benefits). What I’m all about is achieving the greatest amount of success with the least effort. If that sounds good, I’m happy to have you on board. If ‘work ethic’ is more important to you than actual achievments, I sadly will have to suggest that you find another Yoda. I’m not a believer in work for work’s sake. I’m inherently lazy (not sure where I inherited it) and my preference would be to sit on a beach in Hawaii between gigs because I’ve hacked into the entertainment system matrix and have the codes. Heck even if you like to work hard, you might as well work smarter.
What you achieve is really up to you. While you may be at the mercy of others to choose you for a film/tv project, there are an infinite number of projects to present yourself for and you just have to be right for some of them. I believed for a long time that I just didn’t have a face for television (seriously, I was convinced). I was having no luck getting an agent or getting called in from my own submissions, and being someone with naturally low self-esteem, I just figured it was the way I looked. Then the next thing I know I am working on ER, CSI, Veronica Mars and a Pilot, all within a few months! Now I don’t know exactly why that happened, but I believe that I had basically created critical mass in my acting career to the point where I could not help but work. Of course it’s easy to say that after I’ve booked a bunch of jobs, but really it makes sense. Acting is like anything else in life. You have to prepare yourself for when the moment of opportunity arrives. When I suddenly had opportunities, I had worked so hard and smart that I knew what to do when given the opportunity. So had I continued to let my own guesses of what people thought of me, I probably would have given up. In fact, it was something I contemplated many times. The point here is not to give up before you have lost the desire to act. It is not for you to decide if you are right for a project, so you might as well assume you are right for all of them, prepare as such and let them decide if you are or aren’t. That way the decision to hire you will never boil down to your talent or effort but to something out of your control like who you father is, what color your hair is, or what the director had for breakfast. If YOU don’t believe you are right for the part, there’s no point in putting it up in front of the producers.