Learning

Do I need more patience, or more action?

August 20, 2026

We know good things take time. But in practice, time feels a lot longer than that maxim lets on.

Exercise feels long because it’s hard on the body. Before you start, “good things take time” sounds true and useful. Halfway through the strain of actually doing it, that maxim doesn’t help you much at all.

So it can be genuinely hard to know: is the reason I’m not hitting my goal that I need to push harder, or wait longer, or change what I’m doing altogether?

One answer is just to do it a little longer. But you don’t want to run the same action with no results for too long either, because you’ll run out of playing time.

The real trick is the balance between more action, different action, and more time. Like a good cake, if you get the ratio right, it comes out delicious.

Don’t compartmentalise

July 25, 2026

I just interviewed high performance acting coach Jon Hunter on my podcast. We were talking about the idea of living the lifestyle of an actor, as opposed to treating it like a career.

What he meant was, instead of compartmentalising the soft skills necessary to be an actor, things like empathy, creativity, listening, playfulness, and so on, instead of saving those for when we have a job to do, we just practice them in our everyday life.

I really love this idea. One, it’s a time saver, but also, the things we need to learn in order to be an actor make us better humans.

I think for many endeavors, creative or otherwise, that we pursue in our lives, there are things that, if we allow them to just exist in our everyday life, they can start to improve our experience of it.

So, what are the things you’re currently compartmentalising that you could actually just live in your daily life?

A place for the project

July 17, 2026

Special things require special places.

A beautiful gift is seen as beautiful because it’s in a lovely and thoughtful box.

We remember to use our tooth brush because it has a little home in the bathroom.

I’m about to begin rehearsing a show and I wondered why my relationship to the actual script wasn’t feeling as strong as other projects.

I realised it was because the script was floating around the house in random places; it didn’t have a home.

So yesterday I hole punched each section and put it neatly in ring binder. Everything I need to do that work is in one place.

When I look at the folder I get a little gleeful flutter. That project has a little home now and I’m much more likely to do do productive work with it.

Books are insane value

June 24, 2026

Think of all of the time an author puts into writing a book.

And think about the years of practice, research and revisions they’ve gone through to know what they know.

And think about how specific book topics often are.

A book holds the detailed instructions of how to get a specific result. You get to adopt the beliefs, experiences and recipes of the greatest minds in any field you want.

By opening a book you open a potential world where you too can do what the writer has a done.

All of this for 20 bucks.

But of course every action has an equal and opposite reaction. So yes the book is cheap, but it doesn’t give you the result on a silver platter.

It gives you everything you need, but it’s up to you to implement that.

A shelf of books could be collectively worth a few hundred dollars.

But the potential that lies in those same pages is in the millions or perhaps it’s even priceless.

Books are a bargain, but only if you take action on them.

If you don’t, well you’re ripping yourself off.

Learning and emotion

June 8, 2026

As an actor, I’ve often been challenged by learning lines. Yesterday in acting class I had a breakthrough.

The theory was simple: We absorb, learn, retain and are better able to recall things we learn in a highly emotional state.

Makes sense, right? We all remember minute details of where we were when we got the news of major life or world events.

It soaks in.

So in practice, our teacher Jon had a person feeding us a line auditorily. They held the script and read each line to the actor who was learning the text.

Importantly, when you’re the one learning the lines you have no visual reference of the text. So you’re not reaching internally to create an image of the text to recall it. You are hearing it, but that’s not what this technique encourages you to do either- you aren’t supposed to hear the word in your minds ‘ear’.

Instead, as we’re being fed the line, we are working extremely physically inside one of five actions that relate to emotions; essentially variations of pushing and pulling.

While we are working physically in this way, the line is fed to us, and we repeat the line over and over, using the words we’re saying to help us play our action of pushing or pulling. We are generating physicalised emotion with the body.

We continued this for 15 minutes per actor. And the lines went in, yes… but not in a way I’m used to.

When it came time to recall the text, I wasn’t grabbing at it the same way I usually do, it was more… seeping up from underneath. Coming up from underneath to support me. Much more like how ideas form into sentences for me in real life. It didn’t feel like I knew them, but as I said the first line, the next one came out and then the next and the next.

The best part was they came out differently every time (which is gold for an actor)

It changed a fundamental building block of my whole craft as an actor- how I learn lines. If this fundamental thing changes, I wonder what the trickle down effects are?

You decide the frame

May 10, 2026

There were some classes at drama school I didn’t enjoy.

I guess I was just a punk kid.

Looking back now, I bet there was something to be learned in all the classes I had mentally checked out of.

The thing I now know is that no matter the experience, it’s up to me whether I take something useful away from it.

The trick isn’t just to learn anything though, it’s about bringing your own frame along to an experience.

What are you interested in right now? What are you working on? What are you wanting to grow or get better at?

These are your frames.

Take these along with you to any experience and by virtue of you being there with them as your point of reference you will have a learning experience.

It may not be THE one you had in mind but it will be AN experience.

You decide the frame and don’t forget to take it along with you too.

The good stuff sticks

May 5, 2026

Learning new things is one of my favourite things on this planet.

Because it’s so important to me, the weight of retention weighs heavily on me. “How on earth can I remember all this, and how can I use it?”

Time Ferriss gave great advice on this, he said “the good sh*t sticks”

We can try different systems of note taking and revisiting, but at the end of the day we cannot remember it all…

…and we shouldn’t really try to.

Just trust that the things that strike a chord, that prove to be useful, that make a change, that shift our world view- these are the things that stick.

It’s the good stuff. And when it makes that kind of impact on us, we don’t have to worry about retention.

The three ingredients

April 25, 2026

I have a question for you: As a teacher, what do you find most difficult about making te ao Māori part of your day?

Many schools genuinely want to make te ao Māori an authentic, living part of daily school life…

…but often the challenge is not intention, it’s knowing how to turn that intention into something practical, consistent, and sustainable for busy staff.

That’s why I recorded this short video for you.

In it, I share 3 core ingredients I keep seeing in schools that are making real progress with embedding te ao Māori school-wide.

If this is something your school is working toward, I think you’ll get a lot from this video.

Target practice

April 23, 2026

When I was 23 I was tasked with teaching 30 adults how to act- I felt completely out of my depth.

It was a weekly class; two hours each Thursday night. I was only a couple of years out of drama school but the thing that really got me was that the oldest of my ‘students’ was 45.

I felt completely unqualified to teach this class. Despite my three years of actor training, I didn’t think I had any wisdom to share with these people- I was hardly an expert! And besides that, I felt like a kid compared to the people I’d be teaching who had full on careers and families.

My mentor from drama school was the one that changed my whole perspective. He told me I didn’t need to be some zen master of acting to run this class. He said “You know a lot of acting exercises, right?”

I said “yeah”.

He said “And you know the learning embedded in the exercises, right?”

I said “Of course”

“Then that’s all you need. You don’t need to be the best at archery, you just need to bring a bow, some arrows and a target. Then you can all do target practice together”

This changed everything. I realised I didn’t need to be an expert. I just had to bring what I did know and we could all explore the learning together.

The weight lifted off my shoulders and I walked into that class with confidence. And the confidence didn’t come from knowing everything, it came from knowing enough and having a willingness to learn more.

That’s all we ever need. I take this same mentality into every environment where I teach or learn.

Appreciation on tap

April 21, 2026

I just did the architecture boat tour in downtown Chicago.

Before the tour I looked around at the buildings and thought they were neat, impressive even.

But after the tour my relationship to the buildings was transformed.

This is the magic of education I think. Our tour guide had injected life and information to the buildings. We learned about the people who designed and built them, the context of the creations. We felt the tour guide’s personal connection to the buildings.

Without the tour we could walk right past the building that was designed to look like a giant wine bottle and never know it was designed as an architectural middle finger to the prohibition laws at the time of construction.

What a tragedy to simply not know because of a lack of being educated…

Teaching is not just about dispensing facts, it’s bringing them to life so we have a relationship to them.

How good.

JUSTIN ROGERS

Post Category: