You Have To Be Every Day
If you do something every day, it gets easier and harder. Easier because you get better at the thing. And harder because repetition is intrinsically boring and tedious. “The best thing we do is every day,” the college basketball coach Buzz Williams likes to say, “and the hardest thing we do is every day. [Practice] proves who’s an Every Day Guy. And if you’re not an Every Day Guy, it doesn’t mean we love you less, it just means you’re going to have to sit over there on the side. You have to be Every Day … There’s no, ‘We’ll do it tomorrow.’ No. We’re doing it today…You gotta do it every day. And if you can’t do it every day, then you’re going to struggle because it is every day.” Being Every Day—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6.
Every Day, I Sit Down And Go, ‘I Got Nothing’
The Oscar winning writer and director Peter Farrelly was asked, Do you get writer’s block? “No,” he said. He doesn’t get it: “Writer’s block is my natural state. Every day, I sit down and go, ‘I got nothing.’” Then every day—it’s hard, but he forces himself to do what he’s best at. “Because I always say, ‘I’d rather write shit than nothing.’ Because with shit, you got something to work with. You can make it less shitty and then not horrible and then decent and then pretty good and then good and then very good and then excellent. But you gotta start with shit.” Every day.
Launched Into A World From Which I Never Looked Back
Harry Belafonte dropped out of high school at 17, enlisted in the Navy, served during World War II, and was honorably discharged in 1945. With help from the GI Bill and the little bit of money he was making as a janitor, Belafonte took acting classes at a drama school in New York City. Aside from a few school productions, for years Belafonte struggled to land roles.
“When I went on auditions,” he writes in My Song, “I struck out again and again. ‘Nothing we’re doing has any Negro roles,’ each casting director would tell me.’” In 1948, Belafonte auditioned for a stage production of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice And Men, another predominantly white cast. For unknown reasons, after meeting Belafonte, the director made up an unnamed character although character is not even the right word. This made up entity would simply sing songs to give the stagehands more time during set changes. Anyway, the director made up this role and offered it to Belafonte, who accepted.
If he ever thought, like, ‘This is so ridiculous, I want to be an actor not a singer,’ ‘It’s so unfair that there’s no actual roles for black actors,’ or, ‘Geez, singing these songs to a crowd that’s not really paying attention to me is getting boring’—he didn’t let those thoughts infect his performance on stage. On stage, he was Every Day. He pretended, “I was an actor, singing in character.” He told himself, “these songs are key to the play, to understanding the story’s time and place.”
One night, in the crowd, there were a few jazz musicians from The Royal Roost, a jazz club not far from the theater. The jazzmen didn’t think much of the play itself, but they were blown away by Belafonte’s singing. After, they suggested that he start singing at the Roost. “I’m not a singer,” Belafonte told them. “What you saw me do was acting. It just happened to involve singing.” Still, they introduced Belafonte to the Roost’s manager who agreed to let Belafonte come back another night to sing during the intervals between one act packing up their instruments and the next setting up theirs.
On that night, after the first act finished, Belafonte stepped to the microphone and got the nervous shakes, dry mouth, and sweaty palms. “I almost bolted,” he writes. “And then something very odd happened, something I remember as vividly today as when it happened more than sixty years ago.” Behind Belafonte, four musicians—saxophonist Charlie Parker, bassist Tommy Potter, drummer Max Roach, and pianist Al Haig—had picked up their instruments and began playing. Belafonte turned around, “and Al gave me a little nod and a smile…I couldn’t believe it. Four of the world’s greatest jazz musicians had just volunteered to be the backup band for a twenty-one-year-old singer no one had ever heard of, making his debut in a nightclub intermission.”
This legendary quartet, Belafonte would later say, “launched me into a world from which I never looked back.” He received an ovation after that first intermission set and became an Every Day Guy at the Roost—after a twenty-one week run there, Belafonte signed with a record label and went on to become one of the most successful and influential recording artists of the 20th century, releasing hit albums like Calypso (the first album by a single artist to sell over 1 million copies), winning three Grammys, and using his platform to publicly contribute to the civil rights movement and his financial resources to do so in a more quiet, behind-the-scenes way (check out the “Share Your Load” chapter in Discipline Is Destiny).
You Should Act As Well As You Can
Just after winning the 2006 Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Motion Picture Drama (Capote), Philip Seymour Hoffman explained the approach that helped him reach the top of his profession. In reply to a question about what advice he’d give to aspiring actors, Hoffman said, “This is something a teacher told me years ago, and he’s right: even if you’re auditioning for something that you know you’re never going to get or for something you read and didn’t like—if you get a chance to act in a room that somebody else has paid rent for, then you’re given a free chance to practice your craft. And in that moment, you should act as well as you can.” You should be an Every Day Guy, Hoffman says, “because when you act as well as you can, there’s no way the people who have watched you will forget it.” So it leads to opportunities, as it did for Belafonte, but more importantly, “at the end of the day, all that matters is the work. Everybody knows that. If I show up one day and the work I’m doing isn’t any good, then I’m just a guy who’s not acting well…So I would say it to anybody starting out: if you’re given a chance to act, take those words and bring them alive. If you do that, something good will transpire, ultimately.”
The Nature of Love
A couple weeks ago, I mentioned that the skateboarder Rodney Mullen is in his 50s and still skateboards every day. When reading about people like Rodney—people who seem to love what they do, etc.—a common mistake is to think that it’s easy for them to be Every Day. “There are days,” Rodney said, “where you don’t want to go out. Or it hurts. Or you’re sore. Or you just suck—you’re not making progress, and you feel defeated…But that’s the nature of love—it’s got hate in there, it’s got pain in there. And that’s what draws you in, that’s the magnetism.”
Like It’s The First Time
Lin-Manuel Miranda tells the same story dozens of times to the same people because he forgets who he already told. Once, Miranda told a story (about something that supposedly happened to him) to his collaborator Tommy Kail. After, Kail said, “That happened to me. I told you that story.” They laughed then Kail said, “That’s why you’re cut out for theater, because you’ll tell it like it’s the first time.” Performance after performance, audition after audition, song after song, practice after practice, night after night, day after day, bored, blocked, or defeated—you have to be able to show up like it’s the first time. You have to be Every Day.