The Resilient Actor: Thriving In The Volatile Acting World With Reed Diamond

Welcome to the Conscious Pivot Podcast with international speaker, business mentor, best selling author.

Of Pivot, and your host, Adam Markell.

The Conscious Pivot shares the stories and wisdom of people who have successfully reinvented some area of their business and personal life. You'll gain powerful insights into how you can fully embrace new opportunities, increase your performance, and master the art and science.

Of innovation and resilience. So please join Adam as he guides.

You on your conscious pivotal. Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Conscious Pivot Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Markell, and I'm sitting here right now literally rubbing my hands together because I know that this morning I'm just going to have such a cool conversation with somebody that was just introduced to me. We have a mutual friend, somebody that I think we both deeply respect, just really love this guy and it's so cool. I think more than anything else, to be, to be able to still be able to meet and connect at a deep, deep level with people is important. I mean, I'm, I've, you know, like a lot of people. I think in the COVID time that we're living in, we've been in isolation in so many ways. And I think we forget, especially when a lot of our connection is just through social media or just through sort of means that they exist. 15, 20, 30 years ago, you actually had to meet people, had to speak to them, I had to connect with them. They could tell from the tone of your voice and from so many other things, you know, just a lot about you and what was important. And just all of that, I think, has just become something that is a little bit lost in the shuffle. So to be introduced to somebody through someone else that I have only been recently introduced to is just reminding me how important the connections are and to not take it for granted that we have this opportunity each and every day to still get deeply connected to people that we haven't yet met. I mean, we're living in divisive time, so maybe there's some wind in our face when it comes to that concept, but I truly believe that that's the most important thing we can do as human beings, is to connect and be able to see the presence, see what's really true in the eyes of another human being. And you can't do that through your device, I don't think. Well, that's controversial, but that's my. I'm sticking to it. So I feel great having this guest with me today. His name is Reed Diamond. I'm going to read a Little bit about his bio, a little about. A little bit about his history, and then we can just dig right in, as always. So Reed diamond has been working as an actor. He's been a working actor that. I don't know. Is that a contradiction in terms? Right. We might get into that a little bit, but he's been a working actor for over 35 years in television films and on Broadway. Career highlights include Homicide, Life on the Street, Moneyball, Good night, and good luck, 13 Reasons why, Designated Survivor, and many more. But for 35 years, he's been a part of a constantly shifting business where rejection and the word no are par for the course. He's definitely been forced to reinvent himself to be resilient, and that's in part why we were introduced and why he is the perfect guest to be on the show this morning. Reid, good morning and welcome. Thanks for being here, Adam.

Oh, man, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here. And it's so funny listening to your introduction, and when Adam, our mutual friend, you know, wrote me an email saying, hey, I think you guys would really hit it. Off I go resilience. This is all I've been thinking about. This is literally all I've been thinking about for the last three years. I've been. You know, I made a very conscious pivot to use the thesis of this show, you know, three years ago, and I've been my own little guinea pig. I mean, and in earnest. I mean, this has been just a concentrated period of time, but obviously throughout. But then something that also struck me, too. I mean, because I'm a fan of yours, and I've been listening to the podcast and thinking about gratitude and just the way you talked about meeting people and connecting to people. You know, it's. If you're. There's a. There's something miraculous. You said, being present of. If you're just. If you're in that flow state and you're going through life, it's amazing who will come into your world. And, I mean, Adam, our mutual friend, just happened to be dining in the same restaurant, and then we hit it off, and now I've met you, and it's nothing I could have constructed or, you know, strategized to make happen. And then here we are having a conversation about something that I'm passionate about, and I think about every single day. So I'm so happy to be here. Thanks, Adam.

More and more, there's just no coincidence. You know, we could go into a lot of. A lot of theory on that, yeah, of course there's. I just. The more I live, the more. The more days I'm blessed to have on this planet, I. The more I am. I am affirmed in believing that there is no randomness to it. There's just. There just isn't. So, yeah, I mean, not to get all woo. I mean, I'm from New York. You're from New York, of course, yeah. You know, you're in Toronto now, but you've spent a lot of time in the West Coast. So it's, you know, I like to get really practical sometimes. And for me, it's absolutely practical to think that things are on purpose. That's not like wishful thinking. Don't you agree?

Well, I think, and I think it's even. It's. As you work on yourself and as you're going to attract different. Someone much smarter than me said, it's more like as you reform yourself, you cut a different path through the world. So different things will come at you.

Right?

So if you and I are working on. If we're working on being more present and more open, we're going to be attracting different people. We're going to. I always think about it. There's a John Lennon quote, right? Like, life is what happens while you're making other plans, right? And you really just want to get into the life. And I always think about, you know, when you can't find your car keys and you get really focused and you're like, I gotta find these keys. And you're looking around, your brain just starts getting. It starts constricting into this just like a clenched fist. And the second you stop looking, you know where it is, or it's like, you know, remembering someone's name. And I think, you know, I mean, we're just jumping in. But I mean, there's something about that as going through life. Like, if you've got a plan, if you've got a strategy. I mean, certainly in my business, I've encountered so many people who. I mean, you said it so perfectly. I remember in the 90s, it was a big thing. Like, you need to network. You need to network. You need to, like, get your network going. And you gotta. And you could just feel your people were hustling you.

And it didn't.

It wasn't organic. But you do need a network of people. But the only way you're gonna have real relationships is if they happen organically. And if you have. Instead of. What can you do for me, Adam? It's like, what can I do for you, you know, we're in this together. It's a mutually beneficial relationship, and we find some point of contact and we find some point where we're on the same wavelength. And so, you know, those things are true. You do need a group of people in a network, and it enhances your life. But you can't do it. I mean, you can, I guess, but you can't really successfully and with longevity, do it out of some sort of stratagem.

Yeah, well, listen, to be in the industry that you're in for as long as you have been and to be working consistently, you might think that, you know, I think a lot of people would say, well, he's had a great. He's had a great plan for himself for his career. He's had a great strategy. He's been a great, you know, at executing it. I'd love to get a sense of, you know, how you define that resilience. But before we get there, I just want to kind of track to that thing that you said about, you know, kind of constricting, because I want to. I want to follow this little thread here because there's a part of us, I think, that says. And that we've been taught, you know, it's like the need to. The need to. You need to be a great. You need to have a great plan. You need to be, you know, plan for things. You know, it was George Harrison, so you brought up John Lennon, which I absolutely love that wonderful line in his song. And I think it was George that said something like, you know, if you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there. So there's this. This.

Oh, yeah.

Feels like there's tension for me between sort of having the plan and being really, really sort of rigid almost in the sticking to the plan. And the fact that in the creative arts, like, I do a bit of writing and I speak, and I wish, you know, an acting is such an art form, you know, play a little guitar and things like that. And in guitar in particular, like, for me, if I think too hard, if I just. If I'm. If I'm kind of trying to force it, I can't play. I can see my playing becomes really, really kind of just awful. And I would think in acting, is it similar to that? Is it similar.

You know, it's amazing that you brought that up because that's literally what I've been focusing on and talking about as far as art and craft recently with acting, because for a long time, there was always been this debate is acting a craft or is it an art? And I think you use the craft to get to the art. So this is just my personal philosophy of acting. But I think what I'm always looking for is to disengage thinking. You can't use the brain. So I need to create a situation, doing a scene. What I want to do is. Is. Is. Is. Is get to my instincts and get to whatever, because I know, okay, I can. I can go home. A lot of actors can do this. I can go home at night and plan what I'm going to do the next day. When I. When I get to this moment, I'm going to shout, I'm going to grab the glass on the table and that, you know, you can plan it, and that's going to be fine. And some people are quite successful doing that, and it makes sense. But what I'm looking for is I go, you know, if you and I come together and we're just feeding off of each other, one plus one equals a million. Because we're going to elicit out of the other actor something that we didn't plan. And that's. I'm always looking to create the mistake. I'm looking for things to go a little sideways. Because what you and I come up with together, not intellectually, not talking about it, but what you and I come up with by reacting off of each other is so much more interesting than anything we could have planned. So that's art. You know, when you talk about writing, you know, there's that book, that great book, the War of Art, and where he talks about your whole job as a writer. And I, you know, I translate this to the actor is to. Is to invite the muse and get the muse to come out. And, you know, you could say muse. Some people say, God, whatever you're saying, but I just think of it as the art. I know that you're going to bring something out of me that I could never have planned. And it's much more interesting than anything I consciously created. And so the craft is creating a situation where that can come out, which can be challenging. Because you know what I always say different. I think so many people are great actors. A lot of people can act, or musicians, same thing. I also play.

A lot of people can read a line. A lot of people could memorize script, right? But I don't think a lot of people can act really well. And I guess that's what we're kind of talking about. You know, is it planned improvisation or is it improvised planning?

Well, that's exactly because. Because. And that's because the thing that makes us professional from an amateur is that you have to do it under the most difficult. You have to do it under horrible circumstances.

And you have lights, 50 people watching you, seeing you make your mistakes.

I mean, you have to be. You have to be private and public. You also. There's so many things going against you.

Right.

If I could teach. You know, I'm really con. I really want to start teaching acting for working actors and just offer what of the benefits of what I've learned over the years. But the one thing I've always. I know, and this is my credo, is whatever you think it's going to be like on the day, it's not. They're going to be like, hey, we only got. We got five minutes to get this scene before the sun goes down. And you have to create. You have to find some sort of space where you can let that improvisation come out. And this is my personal philosophy. And that's, you know, that's where I know that my talent. And it's funny because, I mean, we'll talk about this because I had sort of a renaissance in my work and the way I was approaching it, because I think at a certain point I'd gotten to some sort of plateau and I was doing a lot of stuff that I wasn't. It was lucrative, but not necessarily creative fulfilling. But in the last few years, it's been getting back to that initial passion that made me want to be an actor when I was a teenager or even younger. So. And that all comes from, like, I just want to play, you know, someone much smarter than. I said that acting is a child's game played at a professional level. That's all.

Did you go to school, by the way?

I did, I did. I. I mean, I started. I did. I went to Juilliard in New York. Yeah, I mean, I. But I. I'd started younger because I. I was fortunate. You know, as we talked about growing up in New York City, my plays, the. The best. The best theater I've ever done in my entire life were the plays that I did at my high school. I had the most amazing teacher, the greatest teacher I'd ever had, and we were doing stuff well beyond our years.

Name? You cool to say his name?

Oh, yeah. Michael Gilbert. He was my good.

I. Is he still alive?

Oh, he is. And I love that. I mean, I literally, I still. When I get into a hole, often, I'll think about little things that he taught me in 10th grade or 11th grade. And. But those. You know, it's funny, you know, it's like that, you know, you're always trying to chase, like, you know, if you're a heroin addict, you're trying to chase that first high, like those musicals and those plays, like that feeling. But the benefit of it was because we were in New York City and I was doing plays there, the actual representatives would come see you. So I got my first manager when I was doing Diary of Anne Frank in my senior year in high school. So I was. So I started working right away. I started doing commercials, but I. And to pay. And then I ended up paying for Juilliard with a commercial, you know, because back then they used to make a lot of money and they'd run for years. So my first two years were paid from one Subaru commercial. But, yeah, so I studied. And then, of course, over the years, so I went to Juilliard for four years and left for a little bit to work, and they let me come back. And then I studied with some great teachers and some horrible teachers in Los Angeles. When I. Because I left right after I graduated Juilliard, I did my first play on Broadway, and then I went to la, because I'd never been there. Just been New York my whole life. And I got off the plane, it was all warm, and I could smell jasmine blooming. I thought, I'll stay here. That's pretty nice.

No kidding.

Exactly.

Right? I mean, first time you smell jasmine on the west coast, if you're an east coast person, you literally. It's like you're hooked. And I don't know, something about the size of your nose. I got a pretty good beak. It's in there. And then you're. You're. You never. You're never happy till at some point you go, we're moving there.

I'm going to smell that every minute.

Of my life from here.

I'm so glad you had that same reaction, because I remember I got off the plane, it was Jan. I remember it was January 16, 1992, and I'm walking in the neighborhood, it's dark, and the blooming night jasmine. I smell like, what is this wonderful smell?

It's out of control.

Yeah, but. Yeah, so I did. I did study, but. Yeah, but I really feel as far as, like, the craft part of the acting part, you know, because I feel my job as an actor, I have. I have two lanes that I have to do this work in. I have to be resilient and really think about how I'm being to do my work. And then I also have to, maybe even more difficult, how I'm going to be about my career and my life and how I am at home.

So the lessons that you were learning back then from this. This mentor that you had. Yeah, those are lessons that you've been applying throughout that. Your career. And in particular, even in the last couple of months when, I mean, when Covid hit, anybody who's sort of in the performing arts at all was shut down completely. I mean, people who perform in plays, the people that support those plays, public speaking, all of our gigs stopped for a period of time. You know, movie, movie shooting, television shooting, all that stuff just came to a screeching halt. Right. So, yeah, you've had to be. You've had to really practice the resilience.

Well, you know, it's like I feel. I remember when the financial crisis hit, and now obviously, with this one, you know, I spend a lot of my life unemployed and trying to get the next job. You know, I have that muscle. So I'm used to. I have a very. I've had to develop a very deep relationship with uncertainty. And that's, you know, a coach that I worked with for years, he said, you know, the patron myth of actors is Sisyphus. And, you know, the story of Sisyphus is Sisyphus was cursed or fated to have to push the rock up to the top of the hill every day and every night it would roll back down. And it's so true. And so even, you know, I've been stars of TV shows, I've gotten the rock up to the top of the mountain. And it may not always slide all the way back down, but it slides down. And he used to always say to me, the quicker you can get back on board with pushing that rock up the hill, you know, then you'll get your head out of your ass. Because what would happen is it's such a. You know, this is a very vulnerable. It's emotional. Yeah, it's a vulnerable job because you tend. And I counsel, you know, you tend to take things personally, especially when you're younger. And maybe some people always take it personally in my line of work. And you have to remember it's not personal. And, you know, I. Because. But you feel it's personal because your instrument or what you're offering is yourself. So you're going, oh, they're rejecting me, or maybe no one wants me or I'll never work again.

Irony in that, right? Because you've got to access your emotions that Emotional range is so important.

Yes.

And yet you. You have to also take the emotion out of it on some level when you are making meaning, when you're creating meaning for the rejection or for the, you know, the rock going down to the bottom of the hill and having to push it up at the top. There's so many ways that you can. You can give that meaning.

And that's. And you said, Stella Adler, famous acting teacher guru, said, you need to have the heart of a rose and the hide of a rhinoceros. And, and, but that's a delicate. That's a difficult balance. Right. Because sometimes the hide gets too strong or sometimes there's too much heart.

Right.

And you have to. But it's funny because if we talk about conscious pivots, you know, in the last three years, like three years ago, you know, we were talking before we went on about, you know, midlife crisis. And like, three years ago, really pretty much exactly to this date, everything fell apart. Like, I just. There was a massive breakdown all over. Now, breakdowns are fantastic because that's when you get into the meat and it gets all sticky and you got to figure out who you are. But it was maybe the scariest one of them all because I just. I turned 50, I had had. The business had really changed in the last few years, which we can talk about another point, but. And I'd just come off a show. We were living our nut was too high. And I really got to this point where I go. And I was breaking up with my representative, and I just. I'd had a period of doing, you know, five, six, seven years of doing work that I wasn't. I was paying the bills, but it wasn't satisfying as an actor because I say there's two typ of jobs that I do. There's the ones where, like, I hope I'm good enough, and then there's the ones where I hope I can make this good. But I love that.

Will you repeat that?

Yeah. So there's where you go, I hope I'm good enough, which is the job you want to do, or, I hope I can make this good. Or as Tyne Daly said to me once, she goes, we're in the business of polishing turds, and that's the ones where you hope you can make it good enough, but it's not satisfying. And that's not why I got into this. And I remember it's not. It's not really my personality, but I went to a very. It was bleak, and I really. I went to. I Got to that point where I go, I think I'm worth more to my family dead than alive. I was like, you know, maybe they can. So maybe something will happen. They can have a life insurance policy.

It's a Wonderful Life moment.

Exactly. That's exactly it. And then you realize, okay, that's not true. It's not true. And. And I go, I knew. And this is what goes back to the beginning. I started from nothing. I built this career. I've always had a strong work ethic. I was like, okay, you're 50 and you're. This is what you do. And I. Let me use your show. I had a conscious pivot, and I was like, you need to dig deep. And we got to figure this out. And it was twofold. So I found a new representative who I'd heard about, and we sat down, and she laid it out. She's like, you've been doing all this stuff that you don't want anyone to see. I don't think you should be doing this. This is what we should be doing. So we were on the career side. We were able to turn that around. But what was more important, and I think, you know, for this show, is I was like, I had to change my attitude. The way I looked at what, you know, I'm excited to push up the rock because I think where I'd gotten to. I'd gotten to a place of where I was searching for rest, and I was searching for, like. So when I. When I get a job, I would think about what that would provide for me and, oh, what dinners I could have, what I could do for my family. And I was looking. Somehow, at a certain point, I started to look for rest. And I was like, that's not who you are. That's not what you're all about. That's not what the world's about. And then. So I go, no, no, no. I want rigor. I want. I want to embrace the struggle. I want to embrace pushing the rock up the hill. And. And so I started to seek out. I mean, I certainly. I'd done a lot of good coaching. I had an amazing coach for years. So all of that stuff was cellular. It was in my bone. So I knew how to access that. And then just things started coming in. I go, you know, And I heard you talk about on one of those podcasts where it was just you talking and you talked about that, of course we can create new neural pathways and new ways of thinking about stuff, just because you can teach an old dog new tricks. And I Go. And there were a couple of things that I wanted to fortify. I go, I need my. I want my concentration to be better. So, you know, I would actively, actively work on how can I really expand my level of concentration. How can I also, you know, I was always a healthy guy, but I go, you know, like, let's take it up to the next level. Let's see, you know, how much more energy you can get out of life. And then also that. Then also the attitude thing, you know, because I tended to. Spent a lot of time pre Worrying. Worrying well before there was time to worry. Because as we were talking about, you know, how an actor is set up for.

I just want. I just want to pause for a second. Sorry. People are either chuckling right now, laughing, smiling.

What's that?

Did he just say pre worrying? To put words to that concept that so many of us do, that we spend time in the worry before the worry. The worrying about the worrying. The fear about the fear. The anxiety about the anxiety. Thank. Thank you for just articulating that, brother.

You know, in fact, you know what I started to do, you know, when I was coming out of. Because I really. I had hit the bottom. I was in the trough, and I knew I was gonna have to go up the hill. But I would do, because I would pre worry, because as an actor, as an unemployed actor, you go, okay, here's how much money I have. Here's how long I can go. Here's how long my family can eat before I work again.

And I would start Runway, like, in.

Startup, and I would pre worry. And I go, no, no.

Burn rate.

Yeah, totally. Right? So what I would do is I would literally get a calendar out, and I would. I go, here's when you're allowed to worry about this. I would put it in the calendar. You've got, like, two months from now. This is a problem. It's not a problem right now. And that was the other thing too, because that was a big adjustment of. There was some sort of catastrophizing that I was doing, which was just a habit, and it wasn't true. I go. And that's. And this speaks to resilience. I go, you've got this in you. You get it. You may have to dig a little deeper and work. It may be ugly for a little while, but, like, you've got this muscle. We just need to make it stronger. And so I really focused on making that muscle stronger and being disciplined about not catastrophizing, certainly in front of my family, because it doesn't make your relationships better. And I would never do it in front of my child. But, you know, with my wife, I go, I know it's unattractive. It's not true. And also, okay, things change, right? The world changes. And, you know, I'm not the type of person who's going to give up, so I really just need to build these muscles back up. And it's interesting, you know, I'm living. I was living in the country, and I've been living in the country for years. And you look at the animal kingdom, you look at nature, it's like, no one's resting. No one has time to rest. Like, every day, it's like. And then. And once I sort of made that internal shift, that conscious pivot, once I made that shift, I was like, again. It got exciting. Now, the challenges which we can talk about are daily because I think what the myth of Sisyphus actually teaches you, and which was an important lesson for me to learn. And I talked to some successful business people I knew here who said the same thing. You got to create it every day.

Yes.

Every day. You have to recreate it. Because what happens is because I think there's so much uncertainty in my business. What I end and what you end up wanting to do is your. Your thought is that you're going to get to some place where there's no more struggle and you can just. You can glide, you can coast, and that's death. And I got in there creatively, and I'd gotten there career wise. And now in the last three years, and the fruits have been born over the last couple of years is like, I've shifted that. And so I'm only. I've now gone from doing shows that I'm not embarrassed of. But I'm never gonna say, hey, Adam, check me out on this show. Now I'm doing. I'm working great shows on Netflix and Amazon and.

Sorry, no. The irony, I mean, of it is on some level that we resist uncertainty. We see uncertainty as a threatening thing, because that's kind of how we've been wired for. Yeah, I suppose. And. And yet, what's the only certainty is that everything is uncertain. I mean, there's a sense of that being. Of that being absolutely true. So how do you. How do you leverage uncertainty? How do you embrace uncertainty? And before you answer that question, I just wanted to bring it up because I was looking for the title to this book that this. When you mentioned catastrophizing, I grew up hearing about that word because My dad studied. He was. Is a writer. He to this day writes a lot of fiction, and he's written screenplays and plays and things like that. And at a certain point he was studying with Lee Strasberg, and, you know, there were some people which was. Yeah, really, you know, actor, studio, stuff like that. It was pretty cool. But there was another dude that he. That he encountered while he was going through his anxious times early in life. And the guy's name is Albert Ellis. So I want to just put a shout out to people out there who've never heard of Albert Ellis, but this guy is sort of the father of something called rational emotive therapy, which then later on, I'm not sure how it morphed into cognitive behavioral therapy, but that's something a lot of people have heard of. And there's a book that I read over the summer when we were spending some time up in Maine called Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable. Like, just check out this title, right? Stubbornly Refuse to make. Make Yourself Miserable by Albert. So anybody that feels like they pre. Worry. So any of the stuff that Reid was just sharing with us, I think if you were just sort of. Yes, into that, you know, going, yep, that's. That's me. I think this is a great book for you all because his. His whole thing was. Was sort of setting up the ways in which we make ourselves miserable. And often it can just be seen in the language that we use and we examine our thoughts. It's one thing. But our thoughts are pretty. You know, it's like it's a lunatic asylum inside most people's heads. But what comes out of their mouth is a little bit, you know, less. Less insane, usually. But even those words are super telling. And so the words that. That sort of connote a, you know, something has to happen. It should. These are the shoulds. These are the musts. In fact, he coined this thing called musturbation, which probably Jeffrey is Jeffrey Toobin. Everybody's. Everybody's using this poor guy's name right now. I guess I just did it too. But it's like, you know, it's masturbation. It's the idea of constantly musting and shoulding and creating these catastrophes out of things that just aren't, especially in the greater context, that things are impermanent and against the greater backdrop, that not everything that we worry about or every instance where we're worrying about is even useful for anything. You know, that's why the pre. Worrying thing is such a gag, right? Because it's like, how could pre worrying be useful?

You know, it's right. And you know that it's, you know, if you're really.

Does that help you be a better actor? Because. No. Are you sure about that?

Exactly.

No, of course.

Pre worrying. No, because it's not, it's an addiction. It's just a familiar emotional. Because it's not emotional. It's a familiar psychological state that you put yourself into. And it's a habit. And it's a habit that has to be broken, you know, because as I was, I remember like, as I was another great friend who's like an older brother to me and he's. Of course, things come in as we talk about, you know, he handed me a bunch of stoic philosophy right as all this was going on. And the thing you take away from that is, you know, all I have control over is what I do, my actions and my thoughts.

Right.

And, and that's a mental discipline, you know, so obviously you. This thing, this brain, and isn't that.

The rock at the bottom of the hill every day? Yeah, you're talking about, of course.

But if you, you know, and you, I mean, you know, you're obviously, you're so advanced at this, but it's like what you, you have to retrain yourself. You have to build new muscle. Like, you know, if you want to, you know, if you want to race in the, you know, in the Tour de France, you're gonna have to get different muscles going. So if you want to be, you know, mentally strong, you're gonna have to, you know, obviously went back to meditating religiously, exercising much, much more and not indulging the BS because it's not helpful. Not bringing anything that's not helpful and trying to stay as present and not catastrophizing or pre worrying and being able to dig deeper. And then people I'm staying with here, my friend Kate Warren, she's a big time corporate coach and we became friends because we'd be together at little dinners here and I'd be talking about stuff that I'm struggling with or bad days I, I had on set and what I learned about it. And she really introduced me to Tim Galloway and inner game of tennis.

Oh, man, are you kidding me?

And that has changed. It's changed my creative life, it's changed my on set life. Because, you know, his simple formula is performance is potential minus interference. And that interference thing is key because most there's external interference. But I find certainly with someone like myself that there's so much Personal interference, where I'm getting in my own way. And it's been such a powerful tool to be aware of that, to know that my performance is my potential. But any interference is going to subtract from that. And it's been. It's very interesting because now when I go to work, I've had a couple of. I'll give you a specific instance. So I was shooting 13 Reasons why last year, and it was like my first day on set. And we did. It was just a little scene. And I did the first take, and I thought, this is great. I did. This is going well. I feel like this is the right guy. But the director comes over and gives me a note. I'm like, okay. And then I do it again. I'm like, the same sort of note. And I'm going. I think I'm doing. This is going really well. I don't know what the hell is going on. And by the third take, when he gives me this note that I don't completely understand, I feel like, a little sticky.

When you say a note.

Well, no, he. I'm sorry. A director gives you a note, he goes, hey, you know, be more happy. Be faster.

Oh, this is feedback.

Yeah, he's feedback. So between each take, sometimes it's not a physical note.

It's like a whisper in your ear. Say it out loud.

Sorry, that's. I didn't mean to be too. Inside baseball. That's in. In my business, when a direction. A director has a direction, it's called a note.

Called a note.

A note. Sorry. Oh, great.

So it's a love note.

It can be. That's my favorite kind is, as Hugh Grant said, what does he look for in a director? And he said, sycophancy. But.

But.

So I started. I could feel. Because now the other thing, you know, you need to be aware of your system and how it reacts. And I could feel myself when I'm. When I'm feeling effed up, I start to resist. I implode. I start to go inside and I say. And I could feel myself starting to shut down a little bit. And I go, okay, all right. So something's going on over where the director and the writers are that you. Because, you know, you're doing well, but someone's not communicating something. So instead of imploding, why don't we just go clear this up? So I just walked right over and I said, hey, I'm confused, because I feel like this is going really well. But. And I can tell by the way he's Giving these. Reluctantly, giving me these notes that there's something else that you're looking for. And then the writers, because we open up the communication. Like, oh, yeah, you know, the head writer who's not there, he kind of wants something like that. And I go, well, that would have been nice to tell me, but thank you for telling me now. Now I completely understand. And we. Now we can get there together. And so by opening up that communication for years, I would have been too. I just would have been thinking about, okay, I can't wait to have a drink when this is done, you know, the end of the day. But now I'm going, no, no, no. I'm really here to, like, to get to the bottom of it. And I'm not gonna. Even if. Even if I'm. If the interference is just in my head, I want to clear it up so we know we're on the same page. And that's been really a really powerful tool at work. I mean, I had it the other day. I was just shooting on Bosch, and I had an idea about what the scene was. Not an idea. We were playing it a certain way. And then I kept getting a note that didn't make sense. And I could feel it. I could feel. Because you need to know your tells. You need to know when you're hooked, when your head's up your butt. You need to know what's doing that. And for me, you can make a little list of it. I know what mine are. I'll either start getting a little. I'll get a little rebellious, or I'll. Or I'll start thinking about leaving, going home. I'll think about just little things. Or I can feel like a little tightness in my chest. You know, whatever it is, you know, everyone's At a certain point, if you're studying yourself, you know your tells. And I go, well, this isn't gonna make for a good scene. This isn't gonna make me a good scene partner. This isn't gonna elevate whatever we're doing.

You have that level of self awareness as you're under the lights, in the pressure. Meaning in the pressure cooker, like film is. Film is rolling. I don't know film rolls anymore, but people are. People are being paid to listen. You do your thing, and in the midst of that high pressure, like, you're. You know, it's like you're got the ball on the field and the cameras are on, and in that moment, you're aware. You're present enough to be aware. Hey, you know I got a little tightness in my chest.

But that's the challenge. That's. That's my. That's. That's literally my job is to do that. And I don't always do it. You know, I've started taking. I took this from David Goggins book I do often days at the end of work, I'll do a debrief. I'll write an after action report about what I thought went well. And what I thought didn't go well because. Cut to last week. I was doing another scene where I did implode and I didn't implode, but I shut down a little bit. So every day is pushing the rock up the hill. And I go, okay, here's the things that you could have been paying more attention to and here's maybe how you could have resolved that issue or opened up the conversation a little bit more. So, you know what? We talked about creating it every day. That's the excitement and that's the challenge. Right? And that's been the most important.

That's the discipline.

That's the discipline.

This is the vigilance that we're talking about. It doesn't make life, you know, it doesn't make things easy. It makes things meaningful. But it's that old song, right? No one promised you a rose garden or whatever.

It's like, right?

You know, like it's not been promised. Nobody's been promised an easy life, right? But the opportunity for a meaningful life or a life where you're. A life of growth. I mean, isn't that one of the things that comes out of dealing with uncertainty? I mean, like, dealing with our BS is in many ways dealing with the way we create meaning out of the world around us. And we can see it as anything we want to see it. So how do you deal with uncertainty? I want to just come back and touch that because you mentioned it earlier. And this just fascinating to me, this concept that we're all.