Saturday, February 27, 2010

The Key to Success

I hate failure. It hurts. It happens more often than I would like.

In the early days of my acting career each audition was not just a referendum on the quality of my talent, but an evaluation of my soul. I dreaded auditions almost as much as I was thrilled by them. What I really feared was a job interview. Landing the gig that would pay my bills while I waited to become a star was more terrifying. I felt like I had no marketable skills -- and in truth I had almost none.

Less than a year out of college I found myself with a nice sparkling prospective career -- and no income. In those days, the job source was the Chicago Reader and if you needed a job, you also needed to figure out where the reader was being delivered first and snap one up as soon as possible. It came out on Thursday, and Friday was locked in pounding the pavement. Then late on Friday the Sunday Tribune came out and Saturday was mapped out planning the Monday assault. I interviewed for anything and everything for about six gruelling weeks. At the same time I had to find a new apartment and had very, very limited funds with which to achieve that feat.

Somewhere around week four, I became numb to the fear of interviewing. I recognized that it was still there, but it didn't slow me down. In week five I started getting a lot of calls for follow-up interviews, and in week six I was offered three part-time jobs. I took two of them, and in turn each one of those turned into full-time jobs, one of which sustained me and my acting career for almost ten years.

When I went into the serious job market and began climbing the corporate ladder, I again took the approach that I would interview for everything. Then I landed a job interviewing job applicants. I started out being terrified of the interview, and I ended up being the interviewer -- and a damn good one, if I do say so myself.

Not all of those interviews were successful. As an applicant, I've probably interviewed for nearly a hundred jobs. I've probably done as many interviews as I've done auditions. And not all of those were successful either. I have absolute horror stories about auditions. Auditions that crippled me in some way. But I carried on. I only stopped auditioning when the entire theatrical experience bored me. And I kept auditioning long after I should have stopped because I wanted to make sure I was stopping for the right reason, and that I wasn't just giving up.

In that evaluation process, I decided that failure is a relative term and that I did not accept failure. There are set backs. There are disappointments. But there is only failure if I allow there to be failure. Even now, as a photographer, with all the best intentions and preparations, I experience set backs that could be termed failures -- if I let them.

I know this sounds all Rah! Rah! But the truth is it ain't over til it's over. I've watched artists with mediocre talents at best rise to unimaginable heights simply because they refused to define a set back or disappointment as failure. They refused to set a drop-dead date that will define the success of their achievements. That doesn't mean they didn't have goals. It means that if the results fell short of expectations within the time frame prescribed the goal was re-evaluated, progress was analyzed, and a new goal calibrated.

Calibration is the key to success. Stamina is the key to success. Flexibility is the key to success.

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