Remember that scene when Neo unplugged from the Matrix and saw that the world was made up of a bunch of ones and zeros? He saw the agents standing before him, taking shots and bent reality to his will, stopping the bullets in midair.
With every release, I aim to give you a little taste of that. Every week, I offer you the choice of the red pill or the blue pill. If you are reading this, it’s pretty clear which one you have chosen.
Now it’s time that you start bending reality to your will, grasshopper.
Just like Neo, it’s not enough to simply take the red pill and download the information. You too have to act upon it.
That’s where I come in. Over the years, I’ve come to know the players and more importantly, I’ve learned how to play their game.
What I’m sharing with you today is straight from their playbook. This is the strategy that has launched or relaunched the careers of actors that we all look up to. I’m not one to call anyone out by name, but let’s just say that The Avengers franchise would be much different if it weren’t for this strategy.
I’ve taken what I’ve swiped from my industry insiders, cut out the fluff, and refined it so that’s even simpler for you to use.
It’s called the Actor’s Efficiency Matrix.
To use the strategy effectively you have to understand the method behind the madness. Simply stated, everything you do falls into one of four categories, as you can see on the chart below.
Those categories are: Low Efficiency, Low Effectiveness, High Efficiency, and High Effectiveness. Not having any knowledge of this strategy, most actors just fill their days with activity that is haphazardly planned at best.
This is kind of like hopping in the driver’s seat of your car and randomly pushing buttons, pulling knobs, and stomping pedals, hoping that you make progress towards your destination.
Because we all have limited time and limited resources, it’s important to focus on the activities that will be the most effective and that are also highly efficient. I’ve given you some general examples of things you’re probably doing every week (I hope!).
What you want to aim for is creating a plan for launching your career, through activities that overlap in the highly efficient and highly effective categories. From the chart above you can see how some activities are double edged swords.
For example, posting to social media falls into the High Efficiency category, however without a plan and purpose it also fits into the low effectiveness category. The circle part of the graph shows you the activity to replace it with, in order to make it overlap into the correct categories. In this case that’s “creating a dominant social media presence.” We’ll come back to that in a bit.
So many of us think that we’re doing everything we can, because we’re going on 3 auditions a day…except they’re all cattle call auditions. Of course, these overlap in the low efficiency and low effectiveness category.
Let me be clear, you don’t have to stop doing this. In fact, you might go insane if you quit cold turkey, but you do have to employ the 80/20 rule.
Most actors are spending 80% of their time focused on stuff that yields 20% of their results (like open auditions). The fix for this is easy, simply flip the equation and allocate more time to activities that are more efficient and more effective.
It’s ok for activities to fit into opposing categories. This will still allow you to make massive strides. For example, instead of going on tons of cattle call auditions, network with decision makers that can hire you. This activity normally requires face time in small groups or even one on one, so it falls into the low efficiency category.
However, because you would be in direct communication with people that can hire you and move your career forward, it is highly effective and counteracts the “efficiency drag.”
The way to do this is out of the scope of this release, but I encourage you to spend time checking out one of the many releases I’ve put out about this topic.
There are also activities that are highly efficient but not very effective. Because you can send out 100 headshots in about 90 minutes, this is highly efficient. Because they would only be looked at while being sorted into the trash bin (sad but true) it falls into the Low effectiveness category.
The opposite of that would be to send out your demonstration of power pack. That falls into the low efficiency category but it is one of the most effective things you can do to push your career forward.
So that’s it grasshopper. You just took a crash course in a strategy that Hollywood power brokers have been working on for over 50 years. There’s a reason why some things haven’t changed. New movie release=late night show circuit. It’s both highly efficient and highly effective (along with a few other closely related activities like the press junket) so they focus heavily on it.
Here’s what you should do next. Make a list of all of the career related activities you do on a weekly basis. Then, label which categories each of those activities falls into.
Anything that doesn’t at least have a counterbalance (such as low efficiency countered with high effectiveness) should be slashed from your list of things to do.
A couple of things will happen when you start doing this.
- You will inevitably have more time to focus on the things that move the needle and push your career forward
- You will have the building blocks of a plan to launch your career
Throughout this process you will be tempted to cheat and justify the reason for keeping some items on your list when you know they don’t belong. Resist the temptation grasshopper. If in doubt, throw it out.
Success doesn’t require doing 1000 things a few times. It requires doing a few things 1000 times.
On that note, the number one thing you can do to thrust your career to the next level is build a dominate social media presence and polish your industry credibility. Not only does this make everything else easier (literally every-thing!), but it is also one of the few things you can do that falls into the highly efficient and highly effective categories.
There’s no downside to it, so that’s why I created this for you.
It’s the only thing that puts this crucial activity, arguably the most important part of your career development, on autopilot.
Do the exercise above. If you decide that you want to achieve your goals faster and easier by building a platform that you can leverage, then go here and get the details on that.
I love hearing your tales of triumph so remember, I’m always only a comment or an email away.
See you at the top,
Scott
P.S. the world needs more great actors, so why not you? It’s no secret that building a platform and having a stellar industry reputation is the fastest road to success. It’s waiting for you here on a silver platter.