Oct 2

I had a lovely dinner with friends last night and the topic of work ethic came up. Being the "old" guy at school I was telling them that from my experience, once you get out in the real world your work ethic decreases by about 80%, if not more. If you spend 10 hours a day perfecting your craft in college, you'll find yourself only working about an hour a day in the real world. If you spend 2 hours a day perfecting your craft in college, forget about it, you might as well be looking for a new career. The reason i came back to college was because I know that the only time you grow immensely as an artist or actor is in studio and college. The moment you get your degree you will find 1,444,876,392,085,476,213 reasons not to go to an audition, expand your repertoire, learn new things, read new plays, relearn stuff you learned in school, try new things, expose yourself to new ideas, force yourself to take a chance, and the countless other things we do on an everyday basis here. I love to hear young people say "no, not me. I won't do that". HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!! Yes you. I'm sorry. Even you.

I'm reading about Sondheim right now and am floored by the amount of projects, compositions, collaborative teams, collaborative projects, etc that he did while he was in school. I suppose he's done alright for himself. We live in a society now that we really want to just do enough to get by and we'll "hit it big" because deep down the Gods know how much we want it and will present us with the opportunity. HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAH! oh, that's funny.

I'm starting to get worried about my time left here. There is so much more I want to get accomplished and I know that when I leave here some of those opportunities will be gone forever. I will never force myself to sit down and learn the things I'm being forced to learn now and that scares the hell out of me. With less than a year left, I feel like I'm a 4/10 at where I should be as an actor to compete in this business. I know what's out there. It's not getting to the 5/10, but it's the 6-8 that scares the living fuck out of me. That is an area that excites me and will take me to a place as an artist that I'm only dreaming of now. But I know how hard it'll be and how much pain there might be involved in that and maybe why I have an arm length keeping me from it. I have friends in NY who are absolutely brilliant on stage. They have done things that leave my jaw dropped and would earn them their MFA's in one day. I possess that. Somewhere inside me I do. I see drops of it every once in awhile. But it's not enough. I only live once. I want to look back at my talent at the age of 35 and say, "Oh, I was such an amateur then". Every minute, every hour, every day, every class, my goal is to get closer to that goal. I guess that's why I'm destroying myself in school right now. Because two years from now, there is a possibility that I could never act on stage again. And I don't want to wish I worked harder in school. This is my time. This is my time to make it happen.