Justin Prescribes

Some people are magnets

November 14, 2025

They make you smile, they make you feel heard and they make you want to shout “Heck yes!” when they share their vision for the world.

They aren’t magnetic because of any communication tricks or hacks- sure, they may have honed their craft, but theirs is an elementally magnetic core.

Where does it come from? Like most delicious meals, it’s a balance of all the good stuff.

Here are some of the raw materials:

A listener.

This person has the ability to deeply listen to people with both brain and heart.

A purpose.

This person has a burning purpose that will cut through anything. This might be a grand vision for change or something that leads them to hold down their corner of the world and enact the purpose daily.

Values

This person has a strong set of values. Values that make decisions for them.

We not me.

This person is not out for themselves. They understand that a win for you is a win for me. They know that there is no feeling greater than lifting up others.

Leverage.

This person makes big things happen with short conversations.

Abundance.

This person knows there is more than enough.

We need magnets in the world.

We need you to be one and we need you to create them.

Distorting time

November 9, 2025

We are all Marty McFLy. Yup, we’re masters of time distortion.

Recently I had a morning-long battle with myself to go for a walk. I was editing and writing and as each ‘pomodoro’ 25 minutes went by I said to myself:

“I’ll walk on the next break”

And of course I never did. I had distorted the time in my head. You can usually catch it in the language:

“That’ll take forever” I thought. Of course I don’t really mean that but the imprecision in my language is what helps me to distort it.

After a few hours my brain began bulging and fuzzing and I knew the walk was no longer a nice to have- it was needed.

So up I get and out I go- air pods in and happily strolling along the road to my favourite power pole. I check no one is looking, then turn around to head back (why do I always find it so embarrassing to do a 180 in public?)

I get back to my desk feeling refreshed and thinking why didn’t I do that hours ago?!

Here’s the crazy part- the from desktop, around pole, to desktop took me nine minutes.

NINE MINUTES!!

In that time it felt like I had visited another dimension, I saw my power pole for goodness sake! It felt like an eternity (there I go again) and the time away completely reset my brain’s ability to keep logging deep work hour.

But it only took me nine minutes.

Note to self, stop arguing with yourself- just go on the walk.

It’s always a good idea.

Failure into feedback

November 8, 2025

Sometimes things work and sometimes they don’t.

That is so great.

The trick is to be able to stay curious and cheerful for both. And this can be trained.

What is the feedback we give ourselves and others when things don’t work? When you misplace and finger and don’t get that new jazz chord right on the guitar do you grunt in frustration? Or do you smile to yourself and try again?

I’m willing to bet it’s the grunt. It seems natural to have a frustrated response when something doesn’t work the way we planned. But each time we do that, we condition ourselves like Pavlov’s dog to associate negative feelings with trying and failing.

The key to growth is the exact opposite. How can we associate feelings of excitement, fun, curiosity and a hunger for more to those moments of “failure”.

One step is to stop calling it failure. Call it feedback. We always get ‘an’ outcome, it may not be ‘the’ outcome but you will always get some feedback.

This isn’t just positive thinking, this is practical to your growth and crucially to the growth of those you lead.

I love Benjamin Zander’s exclamation when things don’t go as planned (he teaches all his music students to say this when things go wrong):

“How fascinating!”

Let’s train ourselves to celebrate the micro failures and lean in more, it’s win win really

Email batching- thanks Tim!

November 4, 2025

Some say 6, 7; I say 12 and 4!

This idea is from Tim Ferriss. I read this over 10 years ago and I keep coming back to it over and over again.

Tim’s advice is simple- we get more time by eliminating things. Now that doesn’t necessarily mean we miss out on things, it just means we are smarter about what we get rid of and when. So it becomes possible to have your cake and eat it.

Like most, I sometimes feel like I’m a professional email responder. My email inbox is a GREAT place to go if I want to feel ‘productive’.

The problem with that is we are being reactive to the needs and the to do lists of other people. I open my inbox and suddenly an hour and a half would disappear.

My day becomes a continuous stream of processing the request that leak in from people whenever they feel like sending me an email. Over time, this removes my energy and ability to do what’s important and non-urgent to me.

Tim suggests instead we batch our emails, let them accumulate and check them only twice a day.

So I check my email at 12pm and 4pm. That’s it.

The amazing thing is, when I go to my inbox with the singular focus of processing what’s there- it takes all of 15 minutes. Its because I’m a lot clearer on my own priorities and can cut through them quickly. I’m also not kidding myself thinking I will split focus between what I’m doing and the emails as they come in- I am focussed solely on the inbox during these chunks.

The unexpected thing was I found it hard to wait! I had become so used to the magical task-giving inbox that I almost needed it.

“Oh! I wonder what emails I have!”

It became a discipline of it’s own not to check it outside of my allocated times.

I had become addicted to having an instant task someone gives me with a finite end!

When I feel productivity waining, I can pretty much guarantee it’s because this habit has slipped.

When I want to reconnect again to powerful focus on what actually moves the needle on the work that really matters to me, I go back to 12 and 4.

When in doubt, 12pm and 4pm.

Rehearsals build certainty

November 2, 2025

An actor in rehearsal is building the future.

You’ve heard of vision boards, right? Don’t lie I know you have one!

They seem kind of embarrassing when others see yours, but they are powerful visualisation tools. When I first heard of them I thought it was all a bit mystical, but the older I get the more I understand how important it is to see something before it exists.

To build a house you draw up the plans for it.

To take a road trip, you use a map to see and plan the journey.

I knew all this in theory, but I recently realised that the actor’s rehearsal process is also a visualisation exercise.

To get a desired outcome, we have to have a sense of certainty of what it will be like when you do it.

The first day of school is daunting because we can’t picture in our heads what it will actually be like- who will I sit next to? What do the classes look like? What will happen? (Sometimes we imagine it worse than it will be). We don’t have a store of images and experiences ahead of the first day of school, we can’t visualise it, therefore it’s a difficult experience before and possibly during.

The 513th day of school on the other hand, is a lot less daunting- or at the very least we know exactly what to expect.

An actor in rehearsal is laying the foundations and ruts of certainty.

“I will go here, I will do this and then this and then this. The audience will be there, the lights will be there and then I go backstage and have 7 minutes to get changed, have a drink and get the rubber chicken.”

Without this methodical and gradual process, actors don’t have the certainty they can perform at their peak come curtain.

When I think forward to 3 months from now when we’re remounting a show I tour in the US, I get zero nerves because I have laid hundreds of ruts of certainty. I can visualise exactly what it will be like.

So a fun game I’m playing is to create that level of internal certainty for things I don’t yet have in my life.

I think this is what the vision boards are all about. If we can make our desired realities as clear, as vivid and as real as our actual realities, we’re a heck of a lot more likely to get them.

The Gene Wilder one

October 31, 2025

Abundance is magnetic.

My favourite people ooze a sense that there is more than enough of everything:

More than enough time, more than enough resources, more than enough opportunities, more than enough love- everything!

Abundance is the best.

And if the sentiment of “if you believe something is true, then so it is”- abundance is at our finger tips at any moment.

We always have a choice to orient ourselves to abundance. To communicate effectively with those we lead and love that there is more than enough. That the world is bountiful and it’s opportunities are awaiting you.

We don’t have to go out and change things to make this so. To quote Gene Wilder as the chocolate maker, “if you want to view paradise simply look around and view it.”

Go on, be one of my favourite people.

View the paradise around you.

Playing for keeps

October 30, 2025

It’s not what you achieve, it’s who you become in the process.

This is one of the most valuable lessons I’ve ever learned. It seems like a cute concept, but in practice it’s powerful.

For me it’s the idea of playing for keeps.

That means when you go after a big audacious goal, face your fears or push yourself beyond what you thought was possible, the real treasure at the end is who you are.

The person who tries and fails 1000 times is a cool person.

So is the person who has hundreds of difficult conversations.

Who you are on the other side of the big scary impossible is the thing you want, not the big scary impossible itself.

Playing for keeps makes you undeniable to yourself.

Playing for keeps is stepping up to a new challenge, looking back to all you’ve gone through to get here and thinking to yourself “this challenge ain’t seen nothing yet- it hasn’t met me”

This is all just for you, by the way.

Playing for keeps isn’t for others, so don’t bother trying to tell them. It’s about what you think about you.

And you get to keep it forever.

The audition

October 22, 2025

“Here, this is what I make”

As actors, we can fall in the trap of trying to morph into what we ‘think’ the casting director or director want.

We reach for something and in the process lose our authorship. This is a destabilising place to work from and makes the whole process feel empty.

“Here! Do you like this? Is this what you want?”

The alternative of course is radical authorship. It aligns with this idea of doing in the audition exactly what you would do on the shoot day.

Seems obvious, right?

Of course understanding what the project needs, the tone of the piece and the directors past work can and should feed into your process.

But it’s an interface, not a foundation.

Instead, it’s saying “Here, this is what I made. Here’s what I uniquely bring to this, you likey?”

This is a much more satiating orientation to the audition process. We remove the desperation and we get back to our art.

Every audition really is an opportunity to work, as Bryan Cranston encouraged us. The minute we reach for what we think they want is when we stop actually doing our job. We’re just entering a weird lottery at that point.

Ignite the artist and unleash the full force of your creative craft on that audition.

When you do that, whether or not you book the job becomes irrelevant.

Don’t try and be good.

October 19, 2025

Looking back on my experience of drama school, it seems a lot of the initial training was about getting us to focus on the right things.

There’s this thing people say about actor training where they “break you down and build you back up”.

I’ve never really liked this saying- it seems kind of negative or unnecessarily fear inducing. From my years of training it’s more about discovering patterns and building new ones.

And that’s just the learning process. But I guess people like making things sound dramatic and scary when it comes to acting.

It’s confronting, sure, but so is meeting your edge in any arena.

One of the main focuses I needed to undo in my training was this thing of trying to be liked. Of monitoring in an audience or in a director- am I doing the right thing? Do you like this?!

It makes sense, of course; my only frame of reference for learning was the school system that was all about being ‘right’. But of course acting isn’t about being ‘right’ it’s about being true.

Even that is a tricky metric- true according to who? Looking elsewhere for how truthful your work is is just another way of outsourcing your certainty.

Instead, as actors we must become experts of placing our focus. One way of doing this is to give your character an objective:

To make this person stay

To make them leave

To make them understand me

You get the idea. This is how we pursue truth; to what extent did you fight for your objective?

I love this way of thinking because if I’m feeling nervous I can ask myself, what is my objective?

And more often then not in those nerve wracking situations my objective has accidentally become “to make these people think I’m clever or funny.”

You lose when this becomes the objective, you really do. And this is what can happen if you’re not clear on your objective as an actor.

Trying to be clever or funny or attractive will always set you up for failure. Those things MIGHT come as a result of what you do in pursuit of an objective (emphasis on might, haha).

So in life, I think we should practice the same thing; give ourselves objectives that get us out of our own way. Objectives we can fight for, use our full selves to pursue them.

That’s playing big and that’s where the real magic is.

Self Esteem

October 18, 2025

Where does self esteem come from?

It’s esteem for one’s self. A deep feeling of self security and worthiness. I think in the past I’ve tricked myself into thinking that we get this from others.

Yes, we’re told that what others say and think about us doesn’t matter- but it’s a mighty loud signal.

When we’re kids it’s the authority figures in our lives that shape our beliefs about the world and ourselves.

As we get older I suppose we continue giving authority to others.

Do other people think we’re good or strong or clever? Whether people see us doing things that signal our virtues becomes important.

Because of course if a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?

It does make a sound- but only the tree knows it.

Esteem for one’s self is about who you are when no one is looking.

Because when we do things that show we’re strong, kind, creative, clever and the only ones to see it is us, that’s when we build real self esteem.

You’ll fight every urge to talk about it or signal to others what you’ve done. But that erodes the real treasure.

Do the right thing and do it for you only. And do that over and over (and over).

JUSTIN ROGERS

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