Excuses, Excuses

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” -anonymous

Back in my college days I would sit around with the other members of my class and we would chat about The Future. Sometimes the conversations would go like this:

How many monologues do you guys know?

“I talked to my friend Jessica in L.A. and she says she never has to do a monologue at auditions.”

Does anybody know anything about auditioning?

“I read about a guy in New York who was bad at auditions and eventually somebody he knew cast him in something and now he’s got his own TV show.”

I heard networking is important.

“I’m so bad with names and faces.” “Oh my God, me too!” “All you have to do is get an agent and they’ll take care of everything anyway.” “Oh my God, totally.”

And on and on and on.

Folks, it’s all a bunch of baloney. I think that as actors we sometimes search for reasons to continue doing what we’ve always done, rather than improve our approach to the business and our careers. We would rather exist in an industry of our imagining than the industry that truly is. We dismiss the (sometimes) good advice we get because it involves spending money or adding to our workload or interfering with our social time. We convince ourselves that by going out on whatever auditions we find in Actors Access a few times a month we will eventually be “discovered” and all our dreams will come true. And saddest of all, we try to spread this opinion amongst all the actors we know because hey—if we’re all doing the same exact thing, which is as little as possible, then none of us has to feel guilty about it!

Some major warning signs:

1.) You procrastinate preparing for your auditions for reasons that seem good at the time but in retrospect are frivolous.
2.) If you had to perform two contrasting monologues this instant or get shot, you would get shot.
3.) You do not change your social schedule when you get an audition so you will have sufficient time to prepare the material.
4.) You haven’t taken an acting class of any kind since college because you’ve convinced yourself you are already as good as you can possibly be, or that you are somehow magically “beyond” the need for class.
5.) You hire the services of the cheapest headshot photographer you can find and then brood over how your shots aren’t as good as other people’s.
6.) You dismiss as a waste of time networking opportunities with agents and casting directors, and then complain about how this industry is all about “who you know.”
7.) You spend time learning about people who are successful despite being bizarre exceptions to the usual paths to steady acting work, and then cite them as why you specifically refuse to utilize any of the usual paths to steady acting work.
8.) You have a cushy, financially lucrative survival job and you let it take priority over your acting career.
9.) When you really pause to consider what it would be like to be in a show you get scared because you realize you wouldn’t know what to do.
10.) You seek out others that think like this, and you deliberately avoid or ignore people who are being proactive.