Keanu Reeves left Toronto as a teenager to pursue acting without a grand plan, just the willingness to work and fail. He and host Evan Carmichael argue that a calling isn't a predetermined destiny you discover, but something that emerges when you follow curiosity and ignore the pressure to have it all figured out.
Good morning, Believe Nation! Today's message is work on your calling. Over to you, Keanu Reeves. I wake up every morning, espresso keep me going.
I left home when I was 17, 18. I drove from Toronto, Canada to Los Angeles when I was 20. And moved out of my home when I was 18. So the beginning had, you know, I could take care of myself as a teenager. When I moved to the States, I had some family and I had a lot of rejection.
But who did you want to be? I mean, how How did you foresee your future as an actor?
I didn't. I just wanted to do it. I was very self-motivated. When I was in school, I was taking acting classes at night. I was going to Summer Stock Theatre. I was doing community theatre. You know, I was just—
You were simply enjoying it.
I was enjoying it, but it was a kind of— I don't want to use the word calling. You know, but—
It's like destiny?
I don't know if it was destiny. It's just what I wanted to do.
Right.
You know, but, and still, you know, hopefully.
Still enjoying it.
Yeah, still enjoying it and still working and working, I call it.
I think the interesting thing about callings are that you often don't know, it often doesn't have a lot of certainty. You can feel drawn to something, but you're always unsure of if that's the thing that you should be doing or not. And I think the lack of certainty prevents people from getting started. I think people have curiosities and interest in things, but they don't know how it's going to work out. They don't know how they're going to make money from it. They don't know how they're gonna be successful with it, and so it's just a lot safer and easier to do what you already know or what you went to school for, even though you don't really have an interest in it, you wanna go off and do something else. And I think what really helps, at least for me, is to not make it this huge important thing that I have to have it all figured out, to not make the stakes so high that this has to be the thing that works out, uh, because when you do that, it's such a big obstacle to overcome that you really get stuck. Where I like to chase curiosity, I like to explore, I like to try new things. If I get a new idea, I'll just try it and not attach all sorts of, you know, this must work to it that would prevent me from getting started. And I think having that mentality that it's okay to try things and to fail, it's okay to explore without knowing how it's gonna work out, eases the burden, eases the stress, and I think helps you find your calling. I think if you look at the people who have found their calling, At the start, they may not have had a clear plan, but they just kept following their intuition, they kept following their curiosity, and they led to something that was massively successful. You don't get there by playing it safe and by being afraid to try something new and doing something just because that's what you went to school for. So the question of the day today is, how did you find your calling, or what is your calling? Leave it in the comments below, I'm gonna join the discussion. Thank you so much for watching, have an amazing day, continue to believe, And I'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of espresso. I wake up next morning, with espresso, keep me go.
