July 20, 2021

 

[Gestures a few punches] Good. Okay, so all of the guideposts, what i’m saying to you is don't go: [robotic voice] “Yes, guidepost 5 is opposite. Yes. Check” All these things are tools, to get you to believe in these given circumstances, imaginatively. It’s not about being a good student. Our work, the actor’s work, the professional storyteller’s work, it’s not literal and it's not grammatical, it’s imaginative, it's emotional. It's emotional. You know one of the hardest things Mr. Shurtleff used to talk about, we used to talk about this for 4 hours, we were famous for 4 and 5 hour conversations and the hardest thing to teach anybody is competition. For whatever reason, people don't want to think they're competitive, but you're all competing for the best mortgage rate, the best life mate, the best agent, the nicest apartment, the best deal on a car. You want to be the smartest in your group or the prettiest or the strongest. We're competitive and if you're not competitive there’s no growth. If you're not competitive, then your interactions tend to be codependent where you're the powerful one and everybody else marvels at you. One of the greatest blessings Mr Shurtleff gave me late in his life and that's why he passed the book on to me, cuz he said that I'm the only guy that really challenged him. I knew this book granularly and I would just say stuff to him. Like he would say: “why jokes don't work” under humor and then in every conversation, I’d squeeze a joke in there and he'd laugh really big and i’d go: “See, that was a joke I told you and I just proved that it can work”. He’s like: “F&$k you, Todoroff, F&%k you”. We had these really fun, challenging [...] until he got older and then we had to dial it down, because he didn’t have the speed of speech, but I could talk to that guy for 4-5 hours like nothing. Guys, it’s competitive and you’re here as we enter 2021 cuz‘21 going to be FUN, right? We’re done with 2020. Put that in the rearview mirror. It is hindsight, isn’t that great? It was going to be the year of perfect vision, but now it’s hindsight. I’m here to challenge you to work more deeply than you ever have in your life. The ego doesn’t want to do that. When you really put yourself out like that, you're going to feel more alive. The ego plays this game that “If I don't feel really really alive and I don't breathe deeply and use everything I got, maybe I won’t die”. Well, no, you're going to die, probably sooner, ‘cause you'll have less vitality, that I can't promise you, but the likelihood is great.