The Life of an Actor

Recently, a friend of mine had a bad experience with Geeky Clean, which you can read about in her blog post HERE.

It got me thinking about the dichotomy between business and creativity, and how often I hear people go “but I can’t do X, I’m an actor!” It’s funny, because while I am an actor, I am also a marketer, a copy-writer, an event planner, an accountant, a therapist, a secretary, a web designer, a manager, a peon, a makeup artist, a costumer, a director, a producer, a video editor, a photographer, a graphic designer, a researcher, a personal coach… and this is all just for myself and my business as an actor (and various other projects I take on that relate to my own ‘business’.) You can’t just wear one hat, and if you want to be at all respected and successful, you need to be prepared to work your ass off and be open to learning anything you can that will help you on your path.

As a creative person, it’s not like working at McDonalds or as a CEO or secretary or carpenter or whatever else you may do for a corporation, for an employer, for someone else. You often don’t get the 9 – 5 job (or whatever hours you may work) and the freedom to leave your work at work when you go home at the end of the day. There is a certain comfort in not having to spend time commuting and that you can sometimes even work in your jammies if you like, and that you can work at 3 am if it suits your fancy, but a lot of creative people get so caught up in this – and let’s face it, some of us get lazy – that they miss out on that fact.

When you work for yourself, you are (often) a company of one (sometimes there may be a few of you working together and that’s good too). But that means that jobs that would fall to two or five or ten or twenty people at a company all fall to you. And for some reason, the self-employed – especially the creative, artsy types – often appear to lack the organizational skills to keep a business running. Getting money for doing something you love is great, but whomever the money is coming from is your customer, and there is a certain level of professionalism, protocols, future-thinking, and the like that needs to go into pleasing said customer so that they return and/or that many new customers keep coming along.

Directors, casting directors, producers, etc are all “customers” in a sense, as is anyone that you would produce a good or service for. Part of the key to satisfying most – and I am talking adult, reasonable people – is to always bring your best work and dedication to whatever you take on, and to be able to set reasonable goals and timelines for yourself. If you’ve never flown a plane before, you certainly couldn’t be expected to lead a squadron in a dogfight. Same as if you only have an hour of time free a week, you can’t run a full-time business on that. You have to know what you’re capable of. Yep, some idiots are always going to bitch at you because they are never satisfied, but you have to be able to take a good hard rational look at whether they are being unreasonable because they are expecting something unreasonable, or if they are upset because you promised something that you either could not deliver on and/or that you undervalued and burnt out on somehow. Always know how to value (if not upsell) your work, so that you are thriving and not just getting by. Especially in terms of incoming money, and in terms of not promising more than you have time and resources to be able to do.

Speaking of time, when you work for yourself, you are not likely to just have a part or even full time job. Because you are an army of one, you should expect to have 50, 60, 80 work weeks. You have to do the jobs of multiple people, it only makes sense that to get those jobs done right, you are going to have to find the time to get everything done. Just like working shifts that you may not want to, sometimes you have to turn down fun with friends in order to get a job done. I’ve missed parties and other events for acting gigs – it’s just part of the business. And too many creative people slack off. They fall out of work routines, or don’t even have one at all. They let one night of partying turn into a week, or stay up all night playing WoW, or do a million little self-sabotaging things that eat time away from their business.

I’m not saying “don’t have free time.” What I am saying is that you need to REALISTICALLY budget time each week for what you are capable of accomplishing, while leaving time to tackle things like cooking dinner and doing laundry and having a social life. You also have to be aware and able to either take on or pay others to do things like answering emails, do your accounting, make post office runs, and take on all of the other aspects of your business and personal lives that isn’t your main, enjoyable focus of the work you do. I am lucky in that my friends and partner understand, for the most part, my odd work schedule and my dedication to such; the time I actually spend on set or stage or screen is a small fraction of things I need to do, like inputting shopping receipts, going to the gym, tracking spending, learning lines, writing my own material, attending rehearsals, doing marketing, and a bunch of other non-acting tasks that are still needed to run my business. Like blogging, for example.

Don’t get me wrong, either – I am still working on achieving the balance in all this. This past week, I’ve been getting about two hours’ sleep a night because I have had so much work to get done, and then I crashed last night for about twelve hours because I was so darned exhausted. It’s nothing new. I also know how not-easy it is to run a business successfully, as the success or failure of it is ALL on your head. That, plus all the work that goes into things behind the scenes is pretty sobering and scary. Can you handle it? Only you really know for sure. I and anyone else out there can’t answer for you. Not everyone has the time or the skills or the drive to work full-time plus for themselves… and that’s okay. If you know that’s the case, scale back. Do your business as something part time for fun, and have a real, solid job that pays the bills instead and take a little bit of the worry off your shoulders. But if it’s something you need and bleed and are willing to sacrifice everything for – I do this with my acting, I get it – then do it so that people sing your praises, even if you are only getting a couple hours’ sleep a night and have to find time to schedule according naptimes and nervous breakdowns for yourself.

Oh, and while I’m at it, working on a day most people have off, happy “fat man invaded my home” day! Hope Santa and your families were good to y’all… and if they weren’t, I hope you have enough booze to make it all worth it anyway.