If you’re ever bored with your life I think the antidote is to put yourself at the edge of your ability in some way.
How far can you run?
Can you talk to a stranger for an hour?
How many press ups can you do?
If you find your limit and then actively work to extend beyond it, life gets way less boring.
The advice you give someone else is often the advice you need to follow yourself.
I mean, I find this is true with everything I write on here…
I remember at drama school, our teacher encouraged us to stop clapping, or wooting, or whooping, when our classmates did amazing work.
He was encouraging us to normalize the outstanding. Because if we’re amazed every time someone does incredible work, that work becomes something out of reach, something separate from us. It’s only when the outstanding becomes normal that we can actually build on it and create something even more extraordinary.
It’s important to celebrate our wins. But we mustn’t colour that celebration with astonishment.
Have you ever made a plan with a friend to go out, and in the lead-up you know that if you hadn’t made the plan, you probably wouldn’t leave the house?
It’s cozier inside. Less resistance, less energy spent getting ready. And the truth is, both options are genuinely good. Home is comfortable. Out might mean a great night, a deeper connection, being there for something your friend needs. When both are good, we take the path of least resistance.
You know the feeling when they text an hour before: “can we rain check, I can’t do it”? That rush of relief. Now you don’t have to go out.
That’s the tell. Given the option, most of us will flake, even though there’s so much to gain from doing the thing.
So I think it’s important to make commitments outside ourselves, to people or structures that hold us to things that aren’t easy or comfortable. Because left to our own devices, we’ll take the out every time.
“How do you learn all those lines?”
Actors get asked this all the time- and honestly I don’t know the answer!
But here’s what I’m trying…
I started learning the script from Act 2. Then I worked my way backwards through Act 1.
Why?
Act 1 Scene 1 is too loaded.
Even in the line learning phase, it’s hard not to imagine, dry mouthed, pupetting yourself out onstage for that first moment of the show.
I’d also end up going over that section over and over again if I started there.
So I just mixed it up. Actor’s are time travellers, anyway. We don’t relate to sequence, we relate to emotion; that’s our only timeline.
Is the order you’re doing something in helping or hindering you?
This is the only life we have and we if can engage with it charismatically we’ll get the best out of it and put the best into it.
Every week, I create a habit checklist of all the tasks I want to do across that week. I do it weekly rather than making one master list for the whole year, because life shifts a little each week, and refocusing regularly helps you stay honest about what actually matters right now. Things like a ten minute vocal warmup, a breathing exercise, or journaling.
For a while, I kept this checklist on a wall in my house, but I only did the habits when I happened to see it. I didn’t want it on the fridge either, since guests don’t need a tour of my personal habits. So this morning I found a better spot, the outside of my journal. Journaling is already one of the habits on my list, but it’s also something I reach for naturally anyway. Now, every time I pick up my journal, I see the checklist too, and I’m far more likely to actually do those small tasks, the kind that are easy to complete but just as easy to forget.
So here’s the question worth sitting with. What’s something you already do without thinking, and something you’d like to do consistently? And how could you link the two together, so one carries the other along with it?
My friend Conor Bowden made an entire film across the span of four years on his iPhone.
It’s finally finished and it’s about to be in the NZ International Film Festival.
I asked him what the secret to getting this kind of thing started.
He said step 1 is start before your ready.
Step 2 is ask for help from people you trust.
Both of these things are totally within our grasp- the thing in the way is probabaly fear.
What is the thing you most want to do in the world and how can you use Conor’s two steps to get there now?
But you almost always are glad you went on it.
There are lots of things that are good for us that don’t take long that we seem to avoid.
And the things we’d rather do takes longer (like watching an episode of a tv show)
So would you rather take a shorter amount of time, feel reset and feel energised…
…or take a longer amount of time, doing something slightly easier but that doesn’t really serve you?
Test things.
It felt like being hungry before the gym meant I wasn’t able to lift as much- like I needed carbs or something.
So I decided to eat two slices of bread before each session… and it seemed to work! I felt stronger.
After a couple of weeks doing that, I forgot the bread one day but I still lifted fine…
So I’m not sure if it was the bread after all that was improving my strength.
But I learned to test things like that. Make connections and causations but also test them.
It might be the bread, but it also might not be the bread.
