Don’t Wait For Anyone To Knock On Your Door

After graduating from high school, Mike Myers left his hometown in Canada and moved to the United Kingdom to pursue a comedy career. He got gigs here and there, but for the most part, it was hard to get jobs. “So I went, ‘nobody’s hiring me. I’ll hire myself.’” He formed a comedy troupe, and while performing with them at a club in London, he was discovered by Saturday Night Live producer Pam Thomas, who happened to pop into the club while on vacation. Back in New York City, Thomas recommended Myers to SNL creator Lorne Michaels. Reflecting on his career trajectory—from Canada to London to SNL cast member to writing and starring in his own Hollywood movies—Myers noticed a pattern: “Things always happened,” he said, “when I completely gave up the concept of being discovered.” In 2014, when Myers delivered the commencement address at a performing arts school in Canada, that was the advice he passed along: “Don’t wait for Hollywood to knock on your door—make your own movies. Don’t wait to be hired by a theater company—make your own stage. If it’s been said that ‘theater is two planks and a passion,’ then go to Canadian Tire and buy two planks. Don’t wait for anyone to discover you—discover yourself.”

Not waiting to be hired, to be discovered, to have your door knocked on—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…

Find The Doors And Knock On Them

Many years ago, Bill Whiteside—a.k.a my Uncle Bill, who I mention on my about page—became interested in a little-written-about World War II operation in which Winston Churchill made the controversial decision to turn the British Navy against its French allies. A great reader and a great admirer of Churchill, Uncle Bill was puzzled by the operation: “it jumped out at me as totally incongruous with everything else Churchill had ever done.” Wanting to learn more of the details leading up to the incident, he read Churchill biography after Churchill biography, and was surprised to find that each one gave it little more than a passing mention. So eventually, he started thinking about writing a book himself. A software salesman at the time, he began weaving research trips into his business travels—visiting archives and libraries to track down the letters, diaries, and documents of the key players involved, even teaching himself to read French so he could get both sides of the story. After years of researching and writing, Uncle Bill’s book, Operation Catapult: Winston Churchill and the British Attack on the French Navy at Mers-el-Kébir, was just published! In every interview I’ve listened to, Uncle Bill inevitably gets asked how he—an untrained historian with no publishing experience—did it. How did you get access to all these archives? How did you get a publishing deal? How did you write such a “page-turner”? How did you get so many “glowing endorsements”? (Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts, for instance, called it a “truly fascinating book…Bill Whiteside has put [Churchill’s] dilemma into starker and better informed perspective than any other historian writing today.”) “I just found the doors,” he said, “and knocked on them.”

Make Your Own Turn. Will It Into Existence

Since she was a kid, Greta Gerwig wanted to be a director. At one point, she met with executives at Sony Pictures and tried to persuade the studio to let her direct an adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women. “Who are you?” one of the execs said. “I don’t know who you are.” Accepting that if she were to get what she wanted, she’d have to “will it into existence,” Gerwig wrote an original screenplay, Lady Bird. With it, she made her directorial debut and earned three Oscar nominations, including Best Director, becoming just the fifth woman ever nominated in that category. After Lady Bird’s success, Gerwig said, Sony Pictures “came back around and said, ‘do you want to direct Little Woman?’” Reflecting on her path, Gerwig said, “When you’re coming up, you kind of have this sense that somebody at some point will be like, ‘Now it’s your turn. And it doesn’t ever happen like that…There’s no man behind the curtain who goes, ‘Ok, your turn now.’ You have to make your own turn. You have to will it into existence.”

Stop Waiting For Permission

Before Lin-Manuel Miranda created award-winning musicals, he was a substitute teacher in NYC. From an early age, Miranda’s dream was to star in Broadway musicals. In college, he studied the musical theater canon looking for potential acting roles. “We have ‘West Side Story,’ ‘Zoot Suit,’ and we have a couple of parts in ‘A Chorus Line’—that’s it. For Latinos, in the canon, it’s just slim pickings.” Instead of seeing that as an obstacle, Lin-Manuel saw it as an opportunity. “I decided to write what I saw was missing,” he said. “So I started writing a musical full of scenes where people are rapping outside of bodegas [and] doing the stuff that me and my friends used to do.” He set his musical in a neighborhood (Washington Heights) near where he grew up, and he titled it, “In The Heights.” He wrote it over the course of 5 years—mostly on nights and weekends—while “I was a ‘whichever teacher is sick’ substitute teacher.” And on March 9, 2008, “In The Heights” premiered on Broadway at the Richard Rodgers Theatre. That same year, “In The Heights” won a Grammy (Best Musical Show Album) and four Tony Awards, including Best Musical. “I went from broke substitute teacher to [award-winning] Broadway composer,” Lin-Manuel said. When asked what gave him the belief that he could create a Broadway musical, Lin-Manuel said. “I think I chose really good heroes,” he said. “One of my heroes is Robert Rodriguez, who wrote his own ticket to Hollywood.” Robert Rodriguez famously wrote and directed his first movie, El Mariachi, for $7,000. It went on to win the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival before it became the lowest-budget movie ever picked up by a major Hollywood studio. Rodriguez later wrote about how he did it in a book, Rebel without a Crew: Or How a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker With $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player. “I devoured that book in high school,” Lin-Manuel said. “If I had to sum the book up in one sentence, it’s basically: Stop waiting for permission.”

“The System Is Not Built For You To Succeed. You Have To Break Through It.”

A few years into trying to land acting jobs, in 1988, Matt Damon auditioned for Dead Poets Society. Again, he didn’t get it. Soon after, he got a summer job at The Janus, a single-screen movie theater in his hometown. “It played 1 fucking movie the entire summer,” Damon said: Dead Poets Society. “So, you go from the possibility of being in the movie to the guy wearing a maroon vest and black bow tie, tearing the ticket, and watching people come out crying because they’re so moved by the movie.” Damon persisted on the auditioning circuit, and over the next few years landed a handful of small roles. In 1995, he auditioned for the part of Aaron Stampler in Primal Fear. From years of experiencing the cycle of reading a script, auditioning, getting rejected, watching the movie release, and observing its impact on the actors’ careers—over time, Damon developed an instinct for recognizing when something had real potential to be a break-out role. After reading the Primal Fear script, Damon said, “I spent money I didn’t have on a dialect coach because it was clear that whoever got that role was going to blow up.” Edward Norton got the role. Selected over 2,000 other prospects, Norton made his acting debut, a break-out performance for which he won a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor and an Academy Award nomination in the same category. After watching Norton’s rise, Damon decided to change his approach to trying to break into Hollywood. “I knew there wasn’t going to be many more of those roles to come around,” he said. “It was like, ‘The system is not built for you to succeed. You have to break through it.’” “That was really the impetus behind Ben [Affleck] and I writing Good Will Hunting…We wrote that movie specifically because we wanted the parts as actors.” Nobody was hiring them. So they hired themselves.

It’s Little We Get Done For Us

In a 1928 letter to his friend Edmund Wilson, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “It’s little we get done for us in this world.” It mostly falls on us to go knocking on doors and willing things into existence.