Michael Laskin Studio

I recently spent a few hours with a young friend who was seeking my counsel.  He talked about the difficulty of juggling all the many variables at play in his life:  his acting work, his directing and producing efforts, his personal life, his finances, etc.  This is a very talented and substantial guy who, like so many of us, is trying to create a life based upon his passions.  Not just a career, a life. I’m more than a few years down the road from where he is, but I remember and understand the struggle vividly.  I’m still in the struggle!  I think if you’re not struggling, odds are that you’re dead.

I gave him two pieces of advice:

• First, separate all his efforts into distinct and different “silos.”  Each should exist alone, even though they invariably overlap and blend at times.  If they are not kept apart as much as possible, they can and will infect each other. When something bad or disappointing happens in one area,  everything takes on a negativity – unless you keep them separate.  Bad news is contagious, and it can overrun other parts of your life and work where it frankly doesn’t belong.  By maintaining distinct and separate “silos”, when one your efforts goes dormant, at least there are other areas to devote your talent to, and they have remained uninfected from the virus called disappointment.
• The second piece of advice I gave him really hit home, and I remember when it was given to me it had the same effect:  pay yourself first.  A bit of background: many years ago I engaged a financial advisor.  When I expressed to him that I wasn’t sure how I could save anything to invest because I had a mortgage, kids, and all the accompanying expenses that come with both.  He said very simply, “pay yourself first.”  In other words, if you have $5000, pay yourself $1000 first, put that away, forget about it, and find a way to live on the rest.  This was tried and true advice, hardly original, yet when I first heard it, it made such simple and ultimate sense.  Paying yourself first, creatively, helps to keep that well of inspiration full.  Only you can create the time and space in your life for that replenishment to happen – and it has to happen.

My young friend was struggling with finding the time to put into further developing his acting.  After all, he had directing and producing projects, he was writing a screenplay, his personal life was temporarily unsettled, he was waiting on some money that he knew was incoming…..and on and on. These issues were all beginning to infect each other with stress and negativity.  Separate these issues – put them in different “silos” , I advised him. Put your most precious resources into quarantine, which helps to create room for success in other areas – areas untouched by adjacent failures that can and do occur.

In his case, working on his development as an actor is crucially important to him, yet he makes precious little time for that.  He finds it difficult to justify and fulfill since it is not an immediate and present producer of money. Ironically, this is the very passion that is the foundation of all his other professional efforts and successes.  It’s this very passion that informs everything else he does as a writer and director.  So, that “bank account” has to be replenished. It gets drained from time to time, and it must be refilled so that it can help “pay” for his other creative efforts.  It is the headwaters of the river.

By the way, these are lessons I learned the hard way – by making ALL of these mistakes at some point in my own creative life.  Lessons learned the hard way are always the most resonant.

• Make time for the passions that are central to your efforts.
• Understand that if you don’t fund your creative self, no one else will.
• Place real tangible value on your creative life.
• Pay yourself first:  You never know when that bank account will be needed.