I mean, come on… Goethe knew it
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it;
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
What’s true vs. what’s helpful
Whether something is true or not is often argued upon, but it’s rarely important.
There’s only two things: what will help you and what will not help you?
What’s good for the greater good and what’s not good?
What empowers you and what impedes you?
Don’t worry about if it’s true or not, just make sure it’s good.
Things I learned from weight lifting: Pt 3
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.
Things I learned from weight lifting: Pt 2
You need little rewards.
There’s a spreadsheet I follow at each gym session that tells me what I lifted last time and I what I want to lift this time.
It worked fine and then I discovered you can change the colours of the boxes…
So now every time I lift slightly more than last week or increase my reps, I get to change the colour of the box GREEN!
Now when I go into the spreadsheet at the gym, I see green boxes dotted all over the place.
This little visual reward seems to give me the boost I need in those moments.
You need little rewards.
A place for the project
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.
You choose what you are by what you do
Our acting teacher, Jon, sends us a daily task. Something small we do as an actor, no more than five to fifteen minutes. Behind it is a simple idea: we are what we repeatedly do. You’re always an actor, and you can signal that to your brain just by doing the task.
What I love about these tasks is that they’re not product-based. We’re not trying to make anything. We’re just edging closer to our craft, building up reference material to draw on later.
That matters because as actors, we’re usually only ever working toward an end product: the audition, the rehearsal, the thing that needs to get done. We rarely get to just play, or sketch. Jon’s tasks are the opposite of that. They broaden our capabilities slightly, sure, but more importantly, they broaden our reference base.
Today’s task was to observe a person in the world through an actor’s lens, and try to figure out what drives them. How are they moving physically? What lens are they seeing the world through? How do they move in relation to the people around them? Then feel into what it would be like to begin playing them: how would you move your body to become this person?
I’m never actually going to play this person. But that’s not really the point. It feeds a longer body of work, a longer collection of references, that might inform something down the line… or might just broaden my reference base as an actor.
See it
There’s this story I love about the creation of Disneyland.
On the opening day, a reporter asked Walt’s brother a question:
“Are you sad that your brother never got to see Disneyland completed before he died?”
Walt’s brother turned to the reporter and said:
“You’re only seeing it today because he saw it all those years ago”
That’s vision.
Things I learned from weight lifting: Pt 1
Nothing teaches you the truth of ‘one step at a time’ like a really heavy weight.
You hear that all the time, don’t you? Just take one step at a time. The way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time, the journey of a thousand steps begins with the first one.
Yeah, we GET it. One step at a time.
But I had a great experience where I actually felt how important “one step at a time” is.
Have you ever done a front squat? It’s where the bar is laid across your upper chest- it’s really hard and easy to curve into a human question mark shape.
ANYWAY…
I was doing one of those and had increased the weight from what I had done last week. I knew that I had to get to 12 reps.
Not 11
CERTAINLY not 7.
12!
So I began- and I started thinking about the 12th rep right there at the beginning when I was only doing the first one.
Sure, they say picture your goal, shoot for the moon and all that…
But thinking about the last rep felt like an AGE away while I was just on the first, holding something very heavy and trying not to fold in half like an envelope.
So I forced myself to just think about the first one. Then the second… then the third and on and on and on.
This was the embodiment of one step at a time. And it worked. Hooray!
It’s easy for these adages to remain as sayings: one step at a time.
But when we find little ways of making them real for ourselves, we get to take away the learning and benefit from that wisdom in a very real way.
Sometimes a decision is necessary
And sometimes you just need to change your orientation.
Action can be tempting, because we feel a sense of certainty that there is movement.
But in some cases movement is unnecessary.
If you want to be a better father, you don’t need to buy all your kids kites or suddenly take them out for ice cream.
That action might be a flash in the pan.
But a new orientation could be long lasting.
How does a great father see the world? What situations and occurrences call you in a different way from that new orientation?
How does this new way of seeing the world naturally filter and affect your choices?
0 to 1
You don’t need ‘perfect’ or even ‘complete’.
You just need zero to one.
Zero to one is opening the gate.
It’s getting out of analysis paralysis and getting into the game.
Trying to be perfect, getting it finished or figure it all out before you start won’t get you nearly as far as zero to one.