Actors are some of the hardest working people in the world. There are so many demands on our time. From working out to stay fit and energetic to being on set working long hours, and then working a day job on top of everything else it’s no wonder why so many actors have “going fulltime” as their top priority.
Having to choose between going to work or going to an audition is one of the worst feelings in the world, isn’t it?
Granted, most of us are not in a position where missing a day of work would mean the lights get cut off. However, for almost every actor, working a job in addition to acting is necessary for mere survival.
But who really wants to do that?...
Let me be clear, there is nothing wrong with working a day job so to speak. In fact, it’s honorable to do what’s required to empower yourself to chase your dreams.
However, consider how much further along you might be in your career if you could devote 100% of your time and effort to it?
What if you could spend all of your time networking with industry decision makers, auditioning, or on set?
Personally, every minute that I spent doing something besides chasing my Hollywood dreams felt like an eternity and like my dreams were moving further and further away from my reality.
So, if your desire to become a fulltime actor, read of this special report carefully. Not only is this achievable, here’s why it’s without a doubt possible for you to do it in 2018…
We all learned about opportunity cost in 9th grade math class, it’s all about weighing the difference of doing one thing vs another.
We are faced with this everyday that our attention is away from our acting careers.
Elon Musk says that “if everyone is working 8 hours a day on something and you are working on something for 16 hours a day, you don’t even have to better than them and you will still accomplish twice as much.”
Though many actors trick themselves into thinking that other people got lucky or knew someone that helped them get into the industry, they seldom stop to think of what those other actors did.
I know an actor who is adequately talented (tactfully speaking). He spent many, many years playing bit parts and not making any traction whatsoever in his career.
From the mid 90s to the early 2000s he struggled to make any kind of headway. Frankly, he didn’t!
It wasn’t until he gave it one last ditch, effort. Just before he made the decision to quit the industry, he went all in.
He quit his day job and went after it one thousand percent. If he wasn’t at an audition, he was out shaking hands.
He refused to go home before he met 10 people that could help his career in some way.
Sometimes, he would meet producers and casting directors. Other days, he would stumble on their assistants.
If he didn’t hit his goal of meeting 10 people by the end of the day, he would add the deficit to the next days total.
Everyone thought he was lunatic for doing this and for spending every dime he had, and even a lot more that he didn’t have…
That was until he started to appear alongside Denzel Washington and John Travolta. They were small roles at first, but it wasn’t long until he graduated to bigger things.
By the time he starred alongside Matt Damon in a leading role, he was a full blown movie star!
I love his story and I’ve been able to witness much of it first hand.
He was seldom the most talented person in an audition, he’ll be the first to say it, but the difference between him and everyone else was his perseverance and the sheer amount of work he put into building a career.
Working a half day, meant that he spent 12 hours working on his career in some way.
That’s why it’s so important to make the leap and go fulltime in your own career.
As optimistic as I am, first and foremost, I am a realist.
I realize that most of us are unable to rely solely on the income we make from acting and need another source of income in order to survive.
However, if you focus on the solution and ask the right question, the way to go full time in acting is rather simple.
First you have to get clear on what is required for you to go full time. In other words, how much do you need to earn on a monthly basis in order to at least maintain your current lifestyle.
Write it down on a sheet of paper.
Don’t be too conservative and don’t inflate the number either. After you have written it down, look at it for a few seconds…
It’s probably a much smaller number than you previously thought.
See most of us have been secure in a job for so long that we often 2X, 3X or even 5X that number. We are so accustomed to going home with cash at the end of the day or getting paid every other week, that we would never feel secure going full time with acting unless we had several months worth of expenses saved up.
That’s a limiting mentality. See, if you start by defining what is required to accomplish the overall goal (going full time with acting) and then reverse engineer solution, things become much more manageable.
Let’s say that you need to earn $4,000 a month to maintain your lifestyle. That’s your goal, not $4,000 times 6 months of expenses ($24,000).
The question then becomes, how do I get to the $4,000 mark?
And that’s a much easier question to answer than the $24,000 one.
To hit that goal, consider what skills you have. You could start a YouTube channel and hit your goal easily. It doesn’t require millions of views; many, many small channels are very profitable.
Do you have photography skills? Just a couple of events could get you to your goal.
Are you a musician? Perhaps you could do film scoring. Not only this in high demand, you will make connections that are invaluable.
The goal is to spend the least amount of time humanly possible “working to survive” so that you have plenty of time and energy to work on your career.
While you are doing this, you also have to work on opening doors. Here’s a quick and easy way to do that.
Intent is a powerful thing!
By placing your attention on the goal of going full time in your acting career, and backing it up with actions and processes that propel you towards that goal will make things happen.
Beyond that, you want to make sure that fill the role of an actor worthy of casting. By that I mean that your industry reputation and platform should match your goals. Here’s how I can help with that.
So what do you plan to do now grasshopper? Did you complete the exercise above to quantify what it would mean for you to go fulltime?
Do you need help coming up with a game plan?
Let me know in the comments below or shoot me an email. I will always help in every way I can because my goal is to…
See you at the top,
Scott