By: John Henry Soto
Every morning my first order of business is to look at my schedule for the day.
My secretary is amazing! Everything has been perfectly scheduled so I get the most valuable work done each day. Auditions, lunch dates, social media, writing, meetings with actor friends, casting for my next film and of course my web series. All I do is wake up, get coffeed up and go!
By the way, my secretary's name is John Henry Soto! What a guy! I hired him a few years ago when I realized I was trying to succeed as an actor but had no direction to get things done on a daily basis. I was lost and now I'm found. By now, I'm sure you all know where I'm going with this. The only person that can help you get organized is you! After all, you have more to lose than anyone else when it comes to your career so why wouldn't you organize it to be successful.
I'm amazed when I run into an actor friend and I'm hearing all these great ideas and plans for the future… but no certainly as to how or when this will happen.
As if somehow by saying it out loud in a Starbucks to numerous other struggling thespians, a heavenly acting angel will come down from a majestic theater in the sky and take you in their arms where they will gently place you in the middle of Boardwalk Empire.
It will never happen without a daily plan. This may be harsh to read but I've failed without it… and succeeded with it.
Now, A plan doesn't have to be difficult but it must have a strong direction to an end goal. At the end of the day you should look at that schedule and say to yourself, "I kicked ass today!" "I got it all done!" "This is a good and fun business!"
Those that are complaining, are not working with enough ferocity to get ahead. It's easy to blame the industry or reality TV. With a good plan, you have a better chance and I can say that with certainty. If you plan, you WILL reap the rewards.
Not everything on your daily plan has to be an amazing acting activity. It may be as simple as… find and clean that shirt that would be perfect for my 2 pm audition. This might seem silly but what ends up happening is that you remember the shirt with only 10 minutes before you need to be out the door. Now you find the shirt and it's wrinkled. You don't have time to iron it so you wear another shirt and all the way to the audition you're thinking about the shirt that might have been.
Will you be 100% confident walking into the audition? Maybe you will and it's not that big a deal, but just think if you were wearing the perfect shirt and felt great because your schedule is packed with other productive activities, you might walk into that audition with so much confidence and looking great that they have no choice but to give you that role. And you would have earned it and deserved it.
A good executed plan towards an end goal can make the difference between booking once a month or booking so many gigs you have to turn down work cause you can't fit it in your schedule. At that point you will really need a secretary to handle your schedule. Then you can create another kind of schedule. Hmm….let me see…dinner with Pacino on Wednesday. Fallon asked me to do a sketch on his show so I need to call him back.
Let me put these into my schedule. :-)
JHS
John Henry Soto
//www.imdb.com/name/nm2874718/
//www.castingnetworks.com/johnhenrysoto
