One of my FAVORITE MOVIES is the sleeper-comedy, Leap of Faith, starring STEVE MARTIN and a then-unknown PHILLIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN.
Just after winning the 2006 Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Motion Picture Drama (Capote), Philip Seymour Hoffman explained the approach that helped him reach the top of his profession.
In reply to a question about what advice he’d give to aspiring actors, Hoffman said,
“This is something a teacher told me years ago, and he’s right: even if you’re auditioning for something that you know you’re never going to get or for something you read and didn’t like—if you get a chance to act in a room that somebody else has paid rent for, then you’re given a free chance to PRACTICE YOUR CRAFT. And in that moment, you should act as well as you can.”
“Because when you act as well as you can,” Hoffman says, “there’s NO WAY the people who have watched you will forget it.”
So it leads to opportunities, but more importantly, “at the end of the day, all that matters is the work. Everybody knows that. If I show up one day and the work I’m doing isn’t any good, then I’m just a guy who’s not acting well…
So I would say it to anybody starting out: if you’re given a chance to act, take those words and bring them alive. If you do that, something good will transpire ultimately.”
Takeaway 1:
Philip Seymour Hoffman saying that good things inevitably transpire when you just focus on doing whatever you're doing as well you can reminded me of a piece of advice from Steve Martin.
“Despite a lack of natural ability,” Martin writes in his memoir, Martin would go on to put together one of the most decorated careers in the history of entertainment (five Grammy Awards, an Emmy Award, a couple of Lifetime Achievement Awards, an Honorary Oscar, and on and on).
Someone stood up in an audience once and asked Martin, how do you become successful?
“You have to become undeniably good at something,” he said. “Nobody ever takes my advice, because it’s not the answer they wanted to hear…but I always say, ‘Be so good they can’t ignore you.’ If you are just always thinking, ‘How can I be really good?’—people will come to you.”
Takeaway 2:
I've written before about a trait often possessed by those who reach the heights of their profession:
They do what they do, not as a means to some end (money, fame, awards, etc.), but for the sake of doing it. To them, as Hoffman said, the work is all that matters. To them, as Ryan Holiday once told me, “the work is the win.”
You control the effort, he says, not the results. You control how well you act, not whether or not you get the part. “So ultimately,” Ryan told me, “you have to love doing it. You have to get to a place where doing the work is the win and everything else is extra.”
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“She brought so much love, energy, and cheerfulness to the work that she could not but succeed.” — Louisa May Alcott