You Only Give Your Best Performance Once
There can only be one “best.”
Whether it’s your best audition, the best-paying gig, or the best scene partner, these occurrences only happen once in your career. This means that every other opportunity–which make up the vast majority of an actor’s career–will not live up to being the proverbial best. Brutal to hear, right?
Have you ever booked something and were surprised because the audition wasn’t your best work? This happens all the time. A lot of energy is wasted seeking perfection during the audition process and obsessing over career expectations when an actor books a job.
I’m going to challenge you to modify your thought process when it comes to auditions. The next time you prepare for an audition, don’t worry about getting your tape to 100% satisfaction. Attempting to achieve perfection can cause you to spiral, and record too many takes. A well-prepared actor can lay down a solid audition in just two or three tries. Improving an audition tape by just a few percentage points by attempting ten or fifteen takes is, generally speaking, not worth the effort and only increases anxiety.
Actors can give a very good audition and book the job without achieving perfection.
Even if you do book the job for which you recorded ten to fifteen takes, once you arrive on set, you are no longer the person who gets to decide how many chances you get. If it takes you copious attempts to “nail” a scene, you will not have the time to get there and be disappointed when you feel you weren’t able to give your best work by receiving fifteen attempts.
But that’s okay. Perfection is overrated.
We represent an actor who was about to begin the rehearsal process for their Broadway debut. They were excited about the show, the role, the salary and the cast. What could possibly go wrong? Well, this particular actor had a proclivity for putting opportunities on a pedestal only to be disappointed if they didn’t live up to their inflated expectations. Before they left for New York, I told them, “just know that this is not a perfect job. There is no such thing.”
“But Zach, it seems pretty perfect.”
“It’s a great job. But if you go into this process thinking everything will be perfect, you will inevitably find small imperfections that will add up and begin to sour your perception of the opportunity which is great, but not perfect.”
It’s better to be pleasantly surprised rather than disappointed on the path to perfection.
The best job happens once. If you book 30 episodes of television in your career, by definition, 29 of them will not be the best experience. That doesn’t mean that a career with 30 episodes of television isn’t a successful, meaningful or rewarding career; it’s just a helpful, practical realization.
As an agent, I will end up having one deal that is the best deal I’ve closed in my career. It may have already happened, but I hope (and trust) it is in my future. I don’t know where it lies and I won’t know for quite some time. Neither will an actor. But it’s important to not lose sight of how good something can be even if it is not the best. Searching for 100% satisfaction is a waste of energy. You will avoid burnout as an actor if you begin to get comfortable doing solid, good work and forget about the meaningless “best.”
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