What would happen if you treated your carer in the same way as an actor, a musician or an artist? What if you considered yourself a freelancer no matter where you worked or for whom? What if you saw every job as a stepping stone to a CAREER and not just another step in an endless string of “just to get by on ” jobs?
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Now, of course, I don’t mean that you should start acting like some of our most at risk stars involved in drugs, alcohol or a highly publicized 27 day marriages. Your goal is a long and productive career, not a a bright shining moment that ends in a crash. In fact, these bad examples can often be more useful than good examples. They warn us of the dangers and pitfalls to avoid. The good examples then serve to give us a guideline as to how to handle our career paths.
You are on your own
Anyone who works in the various entertainment fields learns a hard lesson immediately. While you may have a manager, an agent, a record label or a publisher, you are truly on your own. No one can ever care as much about your career as you do. We shouldn’t even expect them to care that much. They are most interested in their own career, just as you should be. This means that you are directly responsible for the health, growth and protection of your career. No one else. When Leonardo DiCaprio selects his next movie, he will take advice from his agent and such, but in the end, it is his face on the screen saying the lines. It is his reputation at risk when the movie does well…or poorly. He can’t blame his staff for his failure. All the blame will be laid at his feet.
The same applies to your job no matter what it might be. You might try to blame your staff, your peers, your management, your company, but it is you who will suffer when you make bad choices. If you make bad choices, you have no one to blame but yourself — or more properly stated, no one else will except the blame for you. Forget this lesson at your peril.
Don’t let others make decisions for you. Take their advice. Discuss the possibilities, but when you make a decision, make sure it is truly your own. I see people allowing others to make their decisions every day. The fact is, there are many people who would love to make your decision, if you abdicate that power to them. Once you have made your own, personal decision, accept it wholeheartedly. If you don’t, it will fail. It may fail otherwise, but your waffling will only increase the chances of that failure. An actor may find that a given movie is not what they imagined, but they can’t give up. They need to make sure that their performance is at the same level that their audience expects. At least then they will have the comfort of knowing they did their best.
Your Audience
Actors have an audience. So do musicians and comedians. So do you. You may never have thought about it in this way, but you have an audience — an audience that may be smaller than Leo’s audience, but is probably much more important. Every person you touch in your work — every client, peer, manager, customer — is your audience and should be treated as such. Your work is your “performance” as much as any actor. Ignoring this fact can be quite destructive to your overall career. If you are constantly disappointing your audience, it is likely that they will walk out of your career theater sooner or later.
Your audience is what will sustain your career over the long term. These are the people that go to the theater to see a movie with a particular actor no matter the subject matter, role or reviews. These are what author Ken Blanchard described as “Raving Fans.” People who will support you in whatever you do. Developing a few raving fans of your own can help you rise to incredible heights in your career. They will be the people recommending you for a new, more prominent position. They will mentor you from their own experience. They may even hire you themselves to present your ideas to their company or organization. Cultivate your audience — your raving fans — at every turn.
How would your favorite actor, musician or comedian face your career choices? Knowing what you know npw, how can you take the reins of your career and build your reputation and audience. The entertainment industry may have some bad lessons to teach us, but it also shows us how careers will be defined in the future. “All the world’s a stage…”, as Shakespeare said, but we need to work carefully and diligently to insure that it doesn’t turn into “…a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” We have many parts to play and being the lead actor in our own career is but one.
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An excellent way to present the current reality of our career/job world. It is a shame this is not how we were ‘sold’ career as children, but it is a much better framing of the reality of today. Of course, the bigger tools needed today are how to deal with public reviews, reputation from being out on stage and in social media, and the challenge of developing and the world having easy access to our past learning experiences of our 1st productions. Many an actor has had to learn how to get past these challenges, and the names we know today were most successful. I see you have addressed these issues in your various ebooks, I look forward to seeing your reviews of them and how they link career with reputation, and social media.