A Career of Consequence Needs…Consequences

Plenty of young actors tell me confidently that the only thing standing between them and eventual success is their unmatched passion and drive. I shake my head at their optimism not because they don’t have the passion and drive they claim to own—they almost certainly have it in spades. It’s just that everyone else has it, too.

The thing is, passion and drive are prerequisites, not advantages, in this profession. Having them is a condition for entry and hardly a differentiator. And yet, despite the abundance of passion in our industry, actors still seem confused when their careers don’t explode in the way they expected.

Perhaps it’s all that misguided follow-your-heart messaging. Or our half-hearted assurances of “where there’s a will, there’s a way”—a cliché that places the burden on force of will to catapult up-and-coming actors into stardom.

But this advice is often misguided and scientifically bunk. It rests on the assumption that willpower is an inexhaustible virtue that, for people with moral strength and ironclad self-discipline, can be tapped into reliably at any time. More recent studies, however, suggest that willpower alone is a fairly unreliable source of fuel, a psychological state that can ebb and flow depending on any number of life circumstances. Basically, it's not a state of mind to invest all of your eggs in.

One reason so many creative entrepreneurs fail to break through is not a lack of passion, but a lack of well-defined consequences and accountability measures. Instead of sheer will, which is bound to prove unsatisfactory as a consistent resource, artists need to develop a steady work habit built on routine, incentives, goals, and consequences.

It might sound mom-ish or pedantic, but we set parameters in our lives for a reason. Sleep through your day job? Fired. Unwilling to communicate or compromise? Forever single. Spend blindly? Financial ruin. We understand these very basic consequences as direct results of making or neglecting a certain decision. And for most of those decisions, we are willing to put in the work or establish the boundaries—even if it means short-term discomfort—in favor of long-term gain. The consequences of not doing so are even more painful.

But unlike certain decisions we make about lifestyle, health, or even our annoying day jobs, the decisions we make about our day-to-day creative work don’t have the same built-in consequences to keep us motivated. After all, what will happen if you don’t work on your outreach emails today? Probably nothing…at least in the short-term. So how do we establish the same behavioral incentives in our own creative work, where consequences are harder to naturally find and effectively enforce? 

Identify your potential consequences

Because career-breaking consequences are not often immediately apparent in our line of work, we have to identify them ourselves. Below is a list of consequences you might weave into your own system as a means of keeping yourself accountable to the work at hand.

• Missing out. Actors are usually people-loving creatures, and holding them back from a happy hour, party, or premiere is akin to a type of social torture. With this in mind, one of your consequences could be an automatic RSVP decline for slacking off, or a social media lock that releases only when the task at hand is finished off. You know your flavor of FOMO best, so weaponize it against yourself when establishing a list of consequences for neglecting your creative work.

• Paying up. Perhaps you have triggering memories of the classroom curse jar, filled with the dimes and quarters of students who couldn’t wrest control over their dirty mouths. Everybody has a price, and even the filthiest minds in the fifth grade could adopt a Leave It To Beaver, H-E-Double Hockey Sticks persona after enough trips to the jar. Can you take the same technique and apply it as a self-imposed consequence in your own work? A number of start-ups have cropped up recently that siphon money directly from your bank as a consequence of failing to complete a task or meeting a goal. Perhaps you weren’t going to make any money sending out those outreach emails. But maybe the risk of losing some might be what motivates you to finally fire them off.

• Embracing the shame. For millennia, it has acted as society’s greatest deterrent, a potent tool to prevent people from engaging in the most unsavory of behaviors. Bingo, it’s good old-fashioned shame. While as a society we have—for important and largely positive reasons—moved away from letting shame drive our behavior, we should still remain acquainted with its power. One researcher equates it with pain, the function of which is “to prevent us from damaging our own tissue.” Shame, when employed strategically, can serve as an effective consequence. So stew in your feelings of failure and defeat the next time you miss a self-imposed deadline! Just don’t be too hard on yourself and fall into the productivity shame trap. 

If you made the commitment to yourself to build a creative empire, help yourself do it. Create the necessary consequences for not getting your work done in order to make this real for yourself. While treating yourself with grace and compassion is surely important to preserving your sanity and mental health, good old-fashioned consequences may be the only way to harness the drive and passion we know you—and countless others—possess in a way that engenders real, lasting, and consistent growth.