Take a vacation to help your acting career

You know I read a lot of motivational material from various ‘gurus’, both in the acting world and also the general business world.  It’s great information and it gets me really pumped but sometimes I find that what they are telling me still doesn’t give me a different result.  The same can be said for acting classes.  There were times when I was literally doing a class a day for over a year.  I was studying in Los Angeles and then I would also drive to San Diego twice a week to another teacher.  I’m sure that my acting came along pretty quickly, but at the same time sometimes nothing would happen and I would be disappointed and depressed.  All that work and I just didn’t make the progress I expected.  What could the problem be?

The solution to this problem is to be lazy and take a vacation.  You don’t have to leave the country and sit on the beach, but you do have to check out from whatever it is that you are trying to learn.  As an example, I grew up learning a variety of sports, and I did well in some and not well in others.  Who knew why?  But as I grew older, I was reintroduced to some of the sports I played in my youth, and I found that after a few games I was a much better player than I was when I was actively trying to improve.  The reason for this is that I was not playing from the conscious mind, but from the unconscious mind or the subconscious.  There’s a famous book called The Inner Game of Tennis. It talks about how you have to let go of trying to really do your best. You can’t be preoccupied with success while doing a task or you will distract yourself from your own abilities to complete that task.

What I’ve found is that if I step away from something for a while and maybe think about it rather than doing it, I have a lot of revolutionary epiphanies about that activity.  Sometimes I come up with them on my own and sometimes I suddenly understand what a teacher has been explaining to me for a long time.  Whatever the reason, with my new understanding I am playing or doing on a completely different level than when I was struggling with ‘trying’, rather than simply letting my mind get to things on its own time.  I’ve been a skier my whole life and raced and have skied all over the world, but after not skiing for ten years, the next time I skied I was much better technically than I’d ever been.  The same thing can be said for tennis and squash; both sports that I took long breaks from.  I also enjoyed them more.  Why?  Because I understood them more.  I knew what to focus on, and what to ignore.  I also found that even though I had much to learn, I could learn it faster than in the past.

The whole point of this post is to realize when it’s time to take a break and simply stop acting and even pursuing your career for extended periods.  That could mean a week or a year.  The choice is yours, but try taking breaks and see what the results are.  I think you will find that your understanding of your craft will be greatly heightened and you will also look back and laugh at where you were stuck before.  I know I used to think I was pretty hot stuff, and when I look back now at that stage, I think how naive I was being.  We never know where we are at in our learning and it doesn’t really matter.  Keep striving to be better but also keep putting it out there because we are all a work in progress, from the beginners to the masters.

See you on the other side…making big money acting!