I’ve had occasion recently to read a few students’ Career Concepts, and figured I’d offer some thoughts on the matter.
I think writing down, at any length, some specifics about what you’re looking to achieve in your career is a good thing. This is why Milton developed the idea and put it early on in Dreams Into Action. He alluded to the result of this exercise as certain kind of ”Declaration of Independence,” and some write-ups that I have read have DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE written on the first page rather than CAREER CONCEPT. Okay. I don’t give a shit what the title is, but I think it’s important to note that the actual Declaration of Independence marking the breaking off of the American colonies from the British was just over 1,300 words. A history-making, country-founding document was 1,300 words. While Milton encouraged writing down as many specifics as possible, he also used the words “lean, mean and concise,” and did so for a reason.
I’m getting a subtext when reading them that they have been created for someone else. Three of them had a very similar format, as if adhering to a template for how these things should look. There seems to be a significant effort to explain not only details about a possible acting career, but political and personal belief systems that are interwoven throughout, as if the actor is trying to communicate some innate truth about themselves, something that is probably clear to them when they look in a mirror, but harder to explain to an outside reader. Why all this effort? There is no need to explain your beliefs, politics, philosophy, or psychological inventory in a career concept.
You can guess where I’m going: These suckers are too damned long. I’m seeing Career Concept documents that are 3000-4000 word, 15-page or longer manifestos that have as separate sections the following: Mission, Purposes, Postulates, Policies, Principles, Affirmations, Personal Assets & Liability breakdowns, Projects, Goals, Plans (broken down into bulleted lists of items under each branch of BHP teaching), Lists, and on and on and on. Now on the one hand this work is often very impressively brought together, it takes time, and it takes a certain confront to look at it all, and I applaud that. But I also worry that the results are possibly too unwieldy, complicated, redundant, circuitous, and beg a giant question after the dozens of hours being spent to create them: Now what?
(One thought I had – what if the dozens of hours spent creating these manifestos had simply been spent getting in communication with industry professionals?)
Milton was very concerned with the Now What? question. In the 12 years that followed the publication of Dreams Into Action, which I edited and was fully guinea-pigged on, I was part of countless meetings between him and individual students, as well as witness to innumerable critiques where he might touch on Career Concept. And in each of those meetings and talks, he sought to break down what was usually a highly intellectual and ethereal morass of career ideas into a simple concept. (It would be a very Milton thing to do to have six people in front of him at a staff meeting at his house and go around dissecting the essence of each person in about two minutes – for all six. Many of these little gems could have been adopted as a career concept.)
He often wanted a single sentence. He wanted something you could put on a post-it and affix to your bathroom mirror so that in the morning you woke up, saw this simple declaration, and it moved you to do something that day about your career. I remember one was simply, “NOW.” A single word, used to address that particular actor’s habitual procrastination about everything. I met recently with a student who was frustrated by his inability to get a regular job-job because he didn’t have the proper education / accreditation that employers look for. He’s ridiculously talented. I offered this: “Since I’m not qualified to do anything else, how about I actually try to get acting work?” We laughed about that, then wrote down, “It’s time.” A counter-notion to this actor’s idea that he had to “pay his dues” for a few more years before regular work would come his way, which I thought was bullshit.
Ultimately, the Career Concept exists to move you to action, not to get an “A” in Career Concept writing. If it doesn’t fire you up, it’s not a good concept. If it is bulky and can be used as a paperweight, it’s not a good concept. Milton used the analogy of buying a car – quite rightly pointing out that (practically) no one says, “I need a car. Just any car.” And through this analogy he’s trying to get actors to be more specific than, “I just want to work. You know – any work.” And by getting specific with the concept, hopefully it fires you up to do something about it, and target specific people who might line up with your concept of what you want to do.
If you like BMWs, you go to a BMW dealership. If you like one-hour dramas, there are people who write, produce, direct and cast those shows. But no one I know who has ever wanted a car wrote a 15-page manifesto about it, beginning with, “I would like a car with four stunningly round wheels and stylish appearance that sails through traffic with the performance of a Porsche and the economy of a Prius, a car that inspires others to drive it, that inspires others to be as bad-ass and yet ecologically sensitive as my car, a car that resides both in the Hollywood Hills and is also driven to New York where it will have its own garage in a downtown pied-a-terre, where after it books one Broadway Show a year it will also have six TV guest-star appearances as well as being featured on Letterman…..”
So to sum-up and not go on and on about this – try to apply my own point to myself… If you want to free-associate across every facet of your life, psychology, self-analysis, behaviors, etc ad infinitum to create a 15-page draft of a Career Concept – I’m all for it. It may well be beneficial to do so. Every script has as its first iteration a pretty shitty, overlong, overwrought, overwritten first draft. NOW WHAT? Get it elemental. Get it lean. What’s it about? Unlike a script, a career concept need not be something that communicates to others. No one else has to get it. No one else has to read it. No one else has to be entertained by it or moved by it. It frankly isn’t anyone’s damned business but your own. There is no template, and no one should be offering one to you. The idea is that in the middle of an actual actor’s day – get up regretting something from last night, feel discouraged, avoid the breakdowns, cruise Facebook, go to lame job, rehearse scene, feel discouraged, go to commercial audition, feel discouraged, surf the web, flinch on exercising, eat too much sugar, go to class – that somewhere in that day-to-day reality, you find 15 minutes, or one hour, or two hours, where this concept fucking gets you to do something about the career instead of wallow, avoid, or theorize about it.
PS: I remember another student for whom the entire Career Concept concept was so infuriating, so frustrating, so crazy-making… she was just bonkers on the entire topic, coming to tears in front of Milton about how it simply did not compute for her. Milton’s answer: “Forget it. Don’t do one. Forget I wrote about it.” He took her copy of Dreams Into Action, drew a bunch of lines over the entire chapter (in pencil), and handed it back to her – and both of them cracked up. It was the last she dealt with the topic, and they got on happily to other areas of career administration. So, as with all aspects of technique – it has to work for you, and if you really try and it doesn’t – let it go. There are plenty of successful people who probably never wrote one of these out. It’s a tool. You should try it as it may help, but it’s not on a tablet handed down from Moses.