As actors – even as models and musicians – a lot of your perceived success hinges on whether you booked the job, nailed your audition, or if you’re gaining enough traction in your respective field. It always feels like a ladder climb, an endurance test, and a relay race all at once. Sometimes it’s hard to take a step back and reassess what you’re doing, but you always hear the same thing: those who make it are the ones who last. We personally believe that those words hold a lot of truth. So the question is: how do you figure out your groove so you last? It’s all in how we perceive, handle, and process both success and failure. It’s about keeping our headspace in alignment with our goals and our expectations for ourselves, while still remaining openminded and grateful for the good things that are happening. If you’re able to take a step back and realize that the greatest success lies in personal growth, you may be able to recalibrate and let go of the breath you’ve been holding while trying to ‘make it’ in the business.

Our friends at Backstage published a fantastic advice piece titled Re-Examining Success and Failure that delves deeper into this. Here’s our favorite excerpt:

The way most actors define success and failure is clear and absolute. Success seems to come only with the booking of a job, the finding of an agent, or a career-making opportunity. While, conversely, failure seems to come in so many different shapes and sizes: failure to get an agent, to get an audition, to book a job, and sometimes from booking a show (success) and then having your scene cut, or show cancelled, or character killed, etc. (failure).

This seems to create a feeling of constant failure. Either failure might happen, failure is happening, or failure has happened. Add an extremely narrow definition of success in our lives and careers, and that ends up erasing any sense of joy that acting might bring. It crushes hope, and actors easily begin to lose faith and confidence in themselves and can, eventually, quit.