When Dreams Don't Work Out

“Never have a plan B. Go all in.” That was the actor, Joel Kinnaman’s advice to other aspiring actors. 

The problem with this advice is that it’s terrible, and yet it’s the great American lie we are fed over and over. 

If only you worked harder, your dreams could be had. 

This lie is not preparing people for the realities of life.

Let’s stick with acting for a second.

There are about 160,000 SAG-AFTRA members; 2% of which, a recent study noted, make a livable wage. 

Two. 

I read somewhere else that only seven hundred SAG actors in regular roles can claim to make a living acting.

That’s 0.4%.

Let’s say it’s somewhere in the middle. 1%. 1,600 people. And that’s not counting the actors just trying to get their SAG card. 

The dream says you can be one of the 1,600. The math says you won’t. 

Our emotions don’t like math, though. They like possibilities. (Hey, you can't win if you don’t play.)

Sure, you can’t succeed without hard work, but just because you worked hard, doesn’t mean you’ll get there. 

Adam Grant recently posted about this too. He said,

I’m seeing a growing number of students complain: “My grade doesn’t reflect the effort I put into the course.” Public service announcement: An A is for excellence, not for effort. 

You’re owed your labor, not the fruits of your labor.

What’s worse, excellence isn’t only up to you. The Actor Anthony Mackie (The new Captain America) touched on this. He said, “Success isn’t earned, it’s given.”

DiCaprio was famous for saying, “It didn’t matter how talented I was, someone somewhere had to give me a shot.”

On top of your own efforts, there is luck and privilege involved. 

So success is a combination of persistence (which you control), mastery (which you partly control), and getting picked (which you don’t).

And yet, through books, and quotes, and podcasts like Smartless, we are only being fed the stories of the 1,600.

We are only getting the message from the people who’ve “won.” It’s survivor’s bias. Someone has to make it. Someone has to give the acceptance speech of, “Let me be the proof that you should never give up on your dreams.”

And so we think that the 1% is achievable through our own oomph, belief, or manifestations.

The truth is: the majority of us will have to abandon our dreams not because of a lack of effort, but because it just didn’t work out, or we didn’t get picked.

I’ve done it numerous times. 

Shouldn’t the lion’s share of advice be about how to give up on your dreams? How to pivot? How to reinvent yourself?

Shouldn’t the acting book flying off the shelf be: Have a Plan B: How to Quit Acting with Grace?

What To Do?

So is the message to not try something? To lie down? To give up easily? Well, no. Try like hell, but when you have accumulated enough new data, update your destination.

Say you set out to reach Lisbon from Manhattan in your dinghy, but tides, storms and currents battered you towards the coast of Nova Scotia. Is it in your best interest to say “But I wanted to get to Lisbon once. I’m a failure!”

No. Why do we value dreams we had in adolescence greater than lessons we learned in adulthood? You know who has more info and life experience than the person who thought of that dream you had five years ago? You, today. 

You tried, you learned, and now you have a new reality in front of you. 

It’s the pivoting that’s so hard, because we have to redefine ourselves, and abandon adolescence, and tell a new story, and update our bios, and god, that’s just exhausting. 

Recalibrating our goals is the most important part of professional life and nobody tells us how to do it. 

Well, until now. 

The 1-Day Method

Some of you know that my good friend, Antonio Neves, lost his house in the Palisades fire. It certainly wasn’t in his plan.

It was a forced pivot. And since the time of immense loss, he put together a powder-keg-of-a-book called, The 1-Day Method to showcase how he has used intentionality on a daily basis to create momentum out of thin air. 

And now we all can learn from it as we navigate our hopefully not-so-brutal-but necessary pivots that we’ve been avoiding.

The first step to altering a dream is to realize that you are going to be ok. The next, and hardest, step is the first step you have to take towards that new “you.” 

The 1-Day Method won’t guarantee that you reach your long-term dreams, but it will keep you focused on what you need to do today.

Here’s to having dreams, here’s to abandoning them when they don’t serve us anymore, and here’s to the next chapter you will create.

As Antonio says in the book, “Your future isn't built in years. It's built in days."