The comedian, actor, writer and director, whose movie “Don’t Think Twice” is in theaters, offers some unsolicited advice for people thinking about showbiz.
Source: Mike Birbiglia’s 6 Tips for Making It Small in Hollywood. Or Anywhere.
Finding his recent movie to be much better than Sleepwalk with Me, I wondered what sage advice Mike Birbiglia had for us aspiring creatives—music for me, not movies. And he did have some good advice: e.g., #2: fail; #3: learn from the failure. (A speaker I heard early after arriving at Lewis & Clark defined college as ideally a safe place to fail…and to learn from it.)
But the best part was a YouTube video he mentioned, with This American Life’s Ira Glass talking about the huge gap aspiring creatives initially feel between their superb taste and the actual quality of their work in the chosen artistic medium. Ira played a tape of one of his early radio broadcasts to suggest how bad he once was. The key? Keep at it…you’d suspect he would say that.
Here’s Ira’s YouTube, just for us all to remember that people who are really good at their work didn’t get there by clicking their heels. There’s hope for the rest of us in making it small yet!
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