Grin and Bear It: How to Be Happy No Matter What Reality Throws Your Way (15 page)

Here are a few interesting failures for you to consider:

• Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, missed more than 9,000 shots in his career, lost almost 300 games, and missed the game-winning shot twenty six times.

• Thomas Edison invented the perpetual cigar and cement furniture before coming up with the lightbulb.

• Albert Einstein’s parents were told he might be mentally retarded.

• Elvis Presley didn’t make the glee club at his school.

• The Beatles were turned down by Decca Records.

• Steven Spielberg dropped out of high school so he could concentrate on shooting movies.

• Babe Ruth struck out a record breaking 1,330 times before he became the home-run king.

• John Grisham’s first book was rejected by sixteen agents and a dozen publishers. He actually sold his first book out of the trunk of his car.

• And finally, the average entrepreneur fails 3.8 times before succeeding.

Hey, David Letterman, did you know I applied in college to be an intern for your summer program and was rejected? Here is my Top Ten list:

My Top Ten Surefire Ways to Fail!

1. Don’t do the work.

From the outside, show business may appear to be all glitz and glam, but like any job, it’s still work. There were many times I’d try to “wing” a pitch for a new show or an audition and I wasn’t prepared. I thought I could skate on my “natural” talent. For years, I’d roll into an audition, expecting applause and an occasional “nice job”—any type of feedback to make me feel validated. The result was usually a “don’t call us, we
won’t
call you” response and me missing out on a perfectly good opportunity. Like most everything in life, you get out what you put in. If you’re truly interested in what you’re doing, it will show in the results. It doesn’t matter if you’re folding sweaters at the Gap or serving cocktails at your local pub, there’s a skill and a disciplined attitude required to make the most out of what you’re doing. Here’s what I know for sure: no one really sustains a career by being lucky. Robin Williams and Jim Carrey have often spoken about how they used to practice their material in the mirror for hours, days, weeks, and months—however long it took until it no longer felt rehearsed but natural. Succeeding requires dedication to your craft, continuing study, and learning to produce good work under difficult circumstances. That is when you have real value. The go-to person is the one who has done the work.

2. Don’t keep your promises.

Has there ever been a time in your life when you knew you needed to take action, to do something, but you simply didn’t follow through? We all fall victim to this—we make a promise with good intentions and somehow we allow it to fall into the abyss of our busy lives. A lot of times, a promise is made in a moment of goodwill. But what happens when that promise is broken?

In my case, I often over-promised and under-delivered, saying I’d read a script, researched an article, bought a book, or watched a film to learn more about a character I was preparing for, but I’d actually not done it. I’d come up with every excuse I could think of to avoid doing the work (see #1).

Guess what? You waste people’s precious time and you can wreck relationships.

Making a promise isn’t worth a thing if you aren’t willing to follow through. In your business or personal life this is an act of destruction. You can’t pledge to donate money to a charity and never write the check. Not keeping your promises is a surefire path to failure.

3. Keep lying because everyone is doing it.

When I was growing up, I often heard statements like, “Go ahead and try it, all of the cool kids are doing it.…” It didn’t really matter what “it” was. From cigarettes to drinking, if the cool kids were doing it, so did I, because I wanted to be cool, too. Here’s the thing—there’s nothing in life you should do just because everyone else is doing it, especially if it goes against your beliefs or values, or could potentially harm you in any way. We all have an inner voice that tells us “this is wrong.” Some people listen and others don’t. Take it from me. By now you know I was an expert when it came to finding ways to spin stories and situations so my life didn’t seem so … well, let’s just say pathetic.

There’s an old joke that goes something like this: What are the three biggest lies in the world?

• The check is in the mail.

• I will still respect you in the morning.

• Trust me.

Over the years there have been many whale tales, but the biggest one I’ve ever told has been, “I’m fine.” And to me, this two-word declaration outperforms the three listed above. I used that phrase to cover my real emotions from a very early age. Any child who survives an alcoholic household wears it like armor. They learn to do, say, and be whatever it takes to get through life—lies or no lies.

To do great work as an actor, it has to be based on truth. I didn’t hear the truth a lot as a kid, so I learned that not telling the truth was an acceptable way to move through life. It isn’t my proudest accomplishment, but it’s fair to say that I lied all through the pursuit of my career and in many ways, my personal life, too. When I was starting out in the business, there were plenty of people who told me I sucked, so whenever I was told that I was great, I actually believed it. I never thought about whether or not they were being real, truthful, or authentic. I’d grown up in a home where positive reinforcement was the devil—I was so starved for approval, acceptance, and appreciation for what I brought to the table that I readily accepted any kind words, supportive statements, or adulation, even if it was a crock. Worse, I lied to myself—a lot. And I didn’t realize that I might be hurting myself or others by my actions.

Though I didn’t know it at the time, my first marriage was clearly based on lies—especially the ones I was telling myself. I lied by saying that it was working, that we had a great marriage, that we were happy and having fun. I had no idea what a great marriage was. My parents’ marriage failed. I didn’t want to get a divorce. I wanted happily ever after, so I created a story, telling myself that everything was good—that “I’m fine.” I was having a relationship of my own creation versus a relationship with the person I was actually married to.

I lied about my career all of the time, too. I pretended that my career was really taking off when it was really a car stuck on the 405 Freeway because of an overturned banana truck. I told everyone I met that I was a great actress and a talented, funny comedienne when I had no idea what either of those two things really meant. Whenever someone was attentive or had the desire to show me how to be better, I had no interest. Their attempt to help me grow meant nothing to me because in my mind, I was already talented and well on my way to becoming a star.

And whenever the topic of my career did come up, I was the first to announce that I was working on something “fabulous,” when I wasn’t doing anything constructive. Kathleen had clients working as producers and lead actors on television series and in movies. They made time in their schedules to do the work and on screen I saw the results. Not me. I was so “busy” that I couldn’t, make that
wouldn’t
, make the time. What a joke, because I wasn’t busy working. I was wasting time running around doing my best to appear superbusy. I ran around telling everyone how great things were going. I had meeting after meeting, filling my days running from here to there with very little to show for my efforts. In fact, I took meetings with anyone and everyone remotely associated with acting just to appear busy and important. I had a lot of “lunches” to talk about “projects” as if I had a lot of things going on, but I never really developed any of those projects. I even took my clothes to a dry cleaner where I thought I might have a chance run-in with celebrities and called that “networking.”

That frenetic behavior was a choice I made because I was looking for guarantees. Life doesn’t come with guarantees and neither does work. It doesn’t matter how many lunches, dinners, and meetings you go to. If you’re not working at the work, you’re not working. Period. End of story.

4. Focus on the end result and ignore “the process.”

You have to be willing to work harder than you ever thought you had to. This is what is called “the process.” When you don’t think you have five more minutes in your day, find it. When you think you can’t do ten more sit-ups, do them. When you think you can’t find the time to focus on your family, figure it out. Emerson once said, “The difference between a hero and a regular man is that a hero was braver five minutes longer.”

Amen.

Be willing to be brave.

I used to have an acting teacher named Lesly Kahn who said, “Dare to suck.” What she meant was, be willing to take a chance without focusing on the outcome. It took me a long time to learn to take that first step without looking for a “guarantee” to hang onto. Recording
Old School Kids Beats
was my greatest lesson in experiencing “the process.” I worked extremely hard from the moment I set foot in the studio. I was willing to fail, but I wasn’t willing to quit. What I discovered was that every obstacle and every challenge I faced, I could meet, fix, and rerecord if I had to. And as I progressed and persevered, the right people came into the process, too. I’d gone through a lot of flaky “beat” artists, producers, and others who talked a big game but never showed up, and it became clear they didn’t care about my project.

For the first time in my life, I was on the other side of that equation.

Wait a minute. Did
I
just say that?

You might want to reverse engineer to get to step one in the process—breaking something down to understand the components in order to improve and rebuild.

If you want to get in shape, lose weight, build muscle, and strengthen your body, you have to work at it. You can’t will it. You can’t think yourself into shape. You have to hit the gym, eat right, and work the program hard to achieve those results. If you are always making up excuses, creating reasons why you can’t, you won’t.

Ever.

Never.

Instead of saying you “can’t” spend those extra five minutes a day doing something that pushes you toward your goal. Watch a scene in a movie that inspires and informs you, listen to a song that moves or motivates you, read the Bible, do something positive to create a path you want to walk on. Before you know it, five minutes turns into ten and ten into fifteen. Pretty soon you will be giving 110 percent of your effort toward doing things that will help you reach your goals. Being aware of this has brought me unexpected benefits: I am more joyous and excited about things. I missed out on so many opportunities in the past because I wasn’t looking at what I could learn from or give to the experience. I was only focused on what I couldn’t get and what someone wouldn’t give me. I didn’t understand how to look for the gain in loss.

Jeff always makes fun of me for using the phrase, “It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey.” He thinks it’s a hokey way of approaching life.
I
think it’s the
only
way to get through whatever life brings our way. If you can embrace that every situation—good, bad, funny, or sad—is an opportunity for growth, you’ll discover there’s nothing you can’t get through.

5. Present yourself in an inauthentic way and expect real results.

For the longest time, whenever I went to an audition unprepared, I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t getting cast in any of the roles. You might say I showed up, but I was never
really
present. I had a different goal in mind. I was extremely good at worrying about and
wanting
the job instead of walking in, looking appropriate, and
doing
the job. How you present yourself often dictates how people see you. Early in my acting career, I went on an audition for the kids’ television show
Beakman’s World.
I’d done so many characters over the years that I figured I could go in and wing it, be a freak and land the job. This was at a time when I was actually pretty disengaged in the process of auditioning. I did no research in advance to understand the show I was auditioning for or who would be doing the casting, and was so full of myself that I didn’t much care. I knew I wanted to stand out from all of the other actors so I bought a chicken limbo apparatus that cawed, “Chicken Boooooo” every time you made it under the stick. When I went to the audition, I set up the limbo stick and began running around the room like a crazy person while doing the limbo. I honestly think the casting director considered calling the police to come escort me away to the not-so-funny farm. Thankfully, they didn’t call the cops but they did ask someone to walk me out the door. At the time, I really thought the audition went well and that I had given them the best of me. Later that day, my manager called with their feedback. They told him they were worried that something was seriously wrong with me.

Showing up means different things to people, and it certainly has taken on a whole new meaning to me over the years. I spent four years on
Flipping Out
showing up, but not fully engaged. I thought it was enough to be “I’m-fun-and-I’m-here Jenni.” I never once cracked open a design magazine in our early years working together. That sent a message—loud and clear—that I wasn’t interested and I didn’t care. I really believed that my physical presence was enough.

Believe me—it doesn’t work that way.

Showing up in an
authentic
way means you are fully present, engaged, and if you’ve done the work, you’re exhausted by the end of the day. You can’t just phone it in and expect them to be impressed with your results. People began to get extremely frustrated with me because the only thing they saw me doing to move my career forward were lunches and dinners. I booked up my days, appearing to be someone who was headed down the path of success when I wasn’t. I was constantly dealing with people who were successful and earning a living in show business. I was pretending to be like them minus doing the work. It was preposterous and a one-way ticket to the fast lane of failure.