107 Discipline is Devotion

What do you say you want—and does the way you live support that claim? We admire excellence, but often resist what it takes to achieve it. In this episode Charlie explores wasted talent, failure, comparison, distraction, curiosity, and the private work behind a serious artistic life. Who are you when no one is watching? What owns your attention? And if someone watched how you spent the last 30 days, what would they conclude you were devoted to? Maybe discipline isn’t something we impose on ourselves. Maybe it’s what love looks like when we take our life's work seriously.  Hosted by Charlie Sandlan, the Artistic Director and Master Teacher of the Maggie Flanigan Studio in New York City https://www.maggieflaniganstudio.com Follow Charlie on Instagram @creatingbehavior and @maggieflaniganstudio. Theme music by Lawrence Trailer. 

Transcript

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Charlie Sandlan (00:03):

So I think that anything that we do, anything that compels us into action in any meaningful way has to start with desire, doesn't it? I mean, unless you're punching the clock, putting in your eight hours a day, working towards retirement, phoning in your life, you've got a desire to do something. And it leads me to a couple of questions that I'm going to pose to you right now, and then we're going to talk about all of this today. What do you say you want? And does the way you live support that claim? Do you want to be an actor? Does it appeal to you? Or do you really want to do what being an actor requires, what being an artist will demand of you? Why is it that we admire excellence while resisting what produces it? So what are you willing to give up for the thing you say matters most to you? That's what we're going to talk about today, my friends. Discipline is devotion. So put the phone back in your pocket. Creating Behavior starts now.

MUSIC (01:26):

Ooh, ooh.

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Oh, ooh.

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It's not enough.

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Ooh, ooh.

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It's not enough.

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It's not enough.

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Keep on chasing the dream.

Charlie Sandlan (01:48):

Well, hello, my fellow daydreamers. Greetings from the Maggie Flanigan Studio, Studio A in New York City. I'm sitting here at my teaching desk. I love this place. And so over the course of this podcast, I've recorded from so many different places, my apartment, hotel room, down in Guatemala in a cement cinder block closet. But from here on out, I'm always going to do it from here. I love my desk. I love my chair, my Herman Miller chair, which keeps me from being completely thrown out of whack, my knees, my back when you're sitting nine hours a day. It's challenging. But I also do have some things that I have found from going down the rabbit hole on occasion here that I think would be really interesting and fascinating for you also to read and to watch.

(02:53):

Listen, if you are an artist, an actor who's trained, who has been at it for a while, maybe you got out of school a couple of years ago, 20 years ago, I don't know, but you've been at it, maybe even working, not working. If you're feeling a little distanced from your craft, from your artistry, from all of the things that were kind of coursing through your instrument when you got out of school, I invite you to check out my new artistic endeavor, Return to Craft. You can go to https://www.returntocraft.com Really, it's everything that I teach, 20 years of information that has been condensed down into 14 videos and about 12 hours of content. It gives you everything that you need to be reminded again of how to work, how to craft, how to think, how to approach a script, how to understand character. Has a lot of things for you. So check that out.

(03:55):

I'm also trying to put together a listener-driven episode. I have never done this before. And that requires questions from you, things that you're curious about. And so if you have something that you'd like me to talk about, something to discuss, something you'd like me to watch and comment on, listen, I'm open to anything. I want you to go to https://www.creatingbehaviorpodcast.com Go to the contact page and you'll see a red button. It's a little plugin called SpeakPipe. And if you press that red button, it allows you to leave a voice message. And then that voice message gets emailed to me and I'll have your question and I will answer it. So it will be really helpful if all of you guys, my daydreamers out there, please, take a few seconds to come up with a question or two that you are curious about. Go to https://www.creatingbehaviorpodcast.com hit that red button, and send me a voice message.

(05:00):

So since Season 5 ended, a lot has transpired and I just kept collecting articles and things that just stuck out to me that really kind of inspired me that I thought I would share with you. The first thing I want to do though is I do want to give a shout-out to the late great Robert Duvall, who passed away, I believe, back in February. He is, in my opinion, one of the greatest actors that this country has ever produced. If there is a Mount Rushmore of actors, he's on it. An incredible career. And he was Meisner trained, so I have a particular affinity for his acting style, his ability to transform. He is the epitome of what a character actor is and what we strive to be as actors. Completely and utterly transformational. Every single thing he did beared no resemblance to what came before it.

(06:01):

Everything was this just unique, incredible, human, deeply-felt performance. And I'm sure that you have your list of Duvall films that you've seen or that you maybe have heard about. The obvious ones, The Godfather, Godfather Part Two, Tender Mercies, which he won an Oscar for. But I'm going to give you some other movies that you should check out. These are my favorite Robert Duvall films. I'll go all the way back to 1962, To Kill a Mockingbird. He played Boo Radley. Doesn't say much, but man, what a deeply felt, interesting human being. He brought that character to life in such an interesting, compassionate, empathetic way. Apocalypse Now, I think it's one of the best, if not the best war movies ever made.

(07:00):

An incredible film. And the story behind how that film was made and all the shit that the cast, the crew, everybody had to deal with from Coppola all the way through Brando. The guy's only on camera, I believe, for 11 minutes. And his dialogue in that film is one of the most quoted and all of cinema. "I love the smell of napalm in the morning." I mean, my God, incredible film. Tender Mercies, I mentioned. The Great Santini. My God. The scary, the authoritarian, the demanding disciplinarian, Bull Meechum. Incredible performance. He plays a tough cop in this movie, Colors. This is the late '80s. It's not a film that you'll see at the top of Duvall Films, I don't think, but I loved it. So watch Colors from 1988. I loved MASH. If you've never seen MASH, and I'm not talking about the show, right? You guys do know, I hope that the show was a spinoff of the film.

(08:08):

Robert Altman, great director. Robert Altman had this kind of documentarian, observable kind of eye when he shot his films. It was like you're really eavesdropping into something. He's an incredible filmmaker. MASH, this is early '70s. It might be 1970, actually. He played Frank Burns, fucked up guy. A lot of issues. He ends up going crazy in the film and gets driven off in a straightjacket. But funny, funny film. Elliott Gould, Donald Sutherland. Check out MASH. The Apostle in 1997. He played this preacher, Sonny. He wrote, directed, I believe, this film, starred in it. It was like his baby. But the performance I ultimately think is, for me, it's my favorites. It's the most endearing. It left the biggest mark on me. It's not a film. It is a television miniseries from the late '80s. Lonesome Dove based off the book by Larry McMurtry. It's like a 6-part epic 12-hour movie about these two former Texas marshals who end up taking a herd of cattle up north into the Montana territory, Wyoming, where all the land is available, and it's up for grabs, and you just got to get there.

(09:33):

So the journey from Texas up into the Montanas, that is what this book is about, is what the movie is about. And he plays Gus McCrae, one of the great, great characters. And he said many times, this is his favorite character. It's the performance he's most proud of. He brought the character to life with such humor, with such an interesting outlook on the world. He took those words up off that page and breathed life into them. It is an incredible performance. And the cast, and this is a television movie. Anjelica Huston, Danny Glover, Robert Urich, Tommy Lee Jones, a very young Diane Lane, an incredible collection. A young Ricky Schroder, kid's probably 19, 20 years old when that was made. Rest in peace, Robert Duvall. He talked a lot about behavior, the importance of behavior, the importance of listening. Go back into the archives, just go down a YouTube wormhole and just listen to him talk about acting, about the craft.

(10:42):

There's this really interesting article. If you want just a quick education and an introduction to some people that you might not have ever heard of or know anything about. The Wall Street Journal. We got to go all the way back to January. Okay. It's called Seven People Who Changed the Course of American Entertainment by Kerri Anne Renzulli. It's part of this USA 250 series where they're kind of encapsulating over the history of the country, important topics, important parts of our history. And so this article is about seven people who changed the course of American entertainment. How many of you know who P.T. Barnum is? Kind of the definitive showman of the Victorian era. P.T. Barnum. Now, he's most famous for the circus, Barnum and Bailey Circus. I'm sure you've heard of that. Harriet Beecher Stowe. Guys know what she did? Wrote one of the important books of the 19th century, Uncle Tom's Cabin.

(11:46):

It was one of the first serious pieces of literature to really challenge Americans, challenge us as a country to stand up against slavery for fuck's sake. This is a woman with zero status, zero power personally, professionally, politically, but she was an activist. It's a bestseller. I think it trailed the Bible in sales in the 19th century. Check out that. Buffalo Bill Cody. I'll just go through all of these. Lois Weber. I have no idea. Never heard of this woman before. Lois Weber. She was born in 1879, died in 1939. She was a filmmaker. What's crazy, so we're talking about a filmmaker in the early part of the 20th century.

(12:42):

She was tackling controversial, interesting, deep social issues. And at the time, and we're talking about 1916, 1917, okay? Lois Weber, the highest paid director for a period of time. And she even launched her own production company. And she was the very first American female director to do this, 1917. That's amazing. Now see, when I hear this, I read this, I want to know everything there is to know about this woman. And I feel ignorant that at 56, I had never heard of this woman before. Now we're talking, she's working at a time that Cecil B. DeMille was working. DW Griffith was working. If you want to find out a little bit more about Lois Weber, there's a book by an author named Shelley Stamp, and it's called Lois Weber, W-E-B-E-R, in Early Hollywood. And she also wasn't just a director. She didn't just make films.

(13:43):

She directed, she wrote, she acted, she edited. I mean, she did everything. There were some interesting early techniques in the early part of the 20th century when film was really starting to grab hold as an art form. She did split screens. She worked with double exposure, overhead shots. She filmed on location. Martha Graham, of course, you've heard of her, the mother of modern dance. Louis Armstrong, a jazz legend, and of course Walt Disney. Interesting article. Check it out. And I've been listening to David Duchovny's podcast. It's called Fail Better. Now, I don't think he's the greatest actor in the world. Definitely an example of an actor that kind of brings everything down to his personality, but he's got a certain way about him. Listen, I love Californication. I watched every episode of that series. And it's a podcast called Fail Better. The whole concept of the podcast is, he talks about failure because failure is more important than success because everything's built on that.

(14:53):

And I believe that to be true. He had an episode with Emily DesChanel. Emily Deschanel, if you don't know her, she played Dr. Temperance Brennan on the show, the television show Bones, which ran for like 12 seasons. And she has an anecdote, which I just thought was important to share. She talked about when she first booked this job, series regular showing up on set. She talked about the fact that she had been diagnosed with ADHD. She had dyslexia as a child. And in the first season, now you're a series regular on a big show, and she wasn't prepared for how grueling it was. And she played a doctor, so there's a lot of medical jargon you got to memorize. You can't fuck that shit up.

(15:41):

I'm just going to quote something she said here. "We were working insane hours, longer than just a normal series. You're working 14 to 16 hour days, and then I had to memorize the lines. So I'd be staying up late night memorizing lines. I would joke that I would go home and just cry in a bathtub every night because I was just so overwhelmed. I'd come to set and I would be trying to remember the lines. I got no sleep and trying to remember the lines that I had memorized the night before, and then I had them in my head and couldn't remember them. Hart Hanson, who was the series creator, knocked on my trailer door, which was not a usual thing. He wasn't knocking on my door often. He took me aside and says, 'The studio has concerns about your work.' They said that I was late and unprepared."

(16:34):

"That to me, I get emotional just thinking about it now because it was probably shame. I mean, I was a wreck. I took it so hard. I was such a fragile person at the time. I got hardened up doing that show for so long. I was not sleeping. I was so stressed out. I'm an emotional person, so I was just beside myself." And she goes on to say, "Hart helped me find ways to be better, get my job done in terms of learning my lines and remembering them." So things definitely got better for her as time went on. I mean, the show went for 12 seasons. That's a real punch in the gut. You're pursuing your career. You want it, right? You want that opportunity. You get cast as a series regular, and then you're presented with how much fucking work it's going to take for you to be one, two, three, four, five on the call sheet. And what's actually going to be expected of you and demanded of you.

(17:36):

And if you don't have a sense of discipline kind of built into your character already, you're going to have to find it pretty quickly. And I would venture to say if she didn't turn it around, the studio, the network, they were going to fire her, replace her, kill her off, and I would figure something out because you can't sustain a show if your top of the call sheet is late. Especially if you're really kind of just starting out, so to speak. You're not a superstar coming onto a show. You get a lot of leeway. A lot of people are more patient with you if you are already successful.

(18:27):

I love these Hollywood Reporter Roundtables. I'm sure you guys all have seen them, clips of them on social media. If you don't read the Hollywood Reporter, you should. The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, The New Yorker. This is a particularly good one. The title of the roundtable is Who Gives a Fuck What Other People Think? And the participants, Walton Goggins, Diego Luna, Eddie Redmayne, Adam Scott, Jeffrey Wright, and the great young actor, Cooper Koch, who you know if you listen to the show, I did a deep dive on in his performance as a Menendez brother in the miniseries, Monsters, which you can stream on Netflix. An incredible performance from him. There are a couple of quotes that stood out to me that I though I would share with you. Walton Goggins, who really kind of just came right back on the scene with the White Lotus last season, the White Lotus. "I don't think people truly knew what to do with me. I'm not Brad Pitt. I'm never going to be Brad Pitt, but I am Walton Goggins and very few people fit in my lane."

(19:44):

And he said, "So much of it starting out has to do with comparing ourselves to other people and looking in other lanes. That just brings so much pain. And after doing that for the first couple of years, I want to be like him or I want to be that person. I realized I was never going to be any of those people. The first acting teacher that I had here in Los Angeles said to me, 'You don't have the looks, so you'd better work harder than everyone in the room. You'd better love this.' Maybe I'm weird, but it inspired me. That's what it is. To be your authentic self and to contribute whatever it is that you have to express or say in this medium. It's the only lane that you have. It's really the only thing you can control."

(20:34):

Great little nugget, great insight. I mean, how many of you get caught up in comparison? Are you kidding me? It's such a human thing. We look at the people in our life. We look at the other actors, friends that we have, classmates, you name it, and you track their career, you track their progress. Somebody starts booking, somebody gets a really great opportunity. You're still waiting tables, you're still bartending, nothing seems to happen for you, but it happens for him, happens for her, it happens for them. You can really fuck your entire mental health if you get caught up in comparison. So what I took from that is first being real with yourself and understanding who you really are and what you have to contribute.

(21:24):

And he's right. Not everybody's Brad Pitt. Nobody's Brad Pitt. Brad Pitt is it. Tom Cruise is it. Right? I mean, these actors, actresses who just have the matinee idol looks, the personality to the charm. What do you have to offer? What is authentic, unique, interesting to you? You've got to lean into that. You got to lead with that in everything that you do. And that's why I love stumbling upon articles like this or interviews because it reminds me of things. It helps put some things in perspective. It challenges me to kind of rethink and reorient the way I'm considering a particular issue. So check out The Hollywood Reporter in these round tables if you aren't doing that already. It's a great source of material, especially when you can listen to other actors, working successful actors who were at one point in the position that most of us have been in, are in, struggling, waiting for that opportunity, grinding it out.

(22:41):

Something else I'd like to point you to, this was an article I stumbled upon in the New York Times. Okay, this is back in July of '26 by Margaret Fuhrer, F-U-H-R-E-R. The title of the article was this, Is This Man the Picasso of Pointe Shoes? So I'm scrolling through the times. I see that and I'm like, "What the fuck does that mean?" It is a piece. It's a feature about a guy named Tim Foster. Tim Foster was a professional dancer for decades. He's now in his early 70s. He is the shoe colorist for the New York City Ballet. He colors the ballet shoes of the dancers that perform at the Met. And the art, the artistry that's required to get the color just right so it matches the costume. It matches the line of what that dancer is wearing so it doesn't stand out. It blends in.

(23:43):

It's an art unto itself. It is a skill. And it's just a fascinating thing. It was inspiring to me because it just made me just kind of revisit artistry again and attention to detail. But what was interesting is that, so I talk about going down a rabbit hole. As I'm reading this article, there's a paragraph where Margaret mentions this documentary on Tim Foster called Shoes for Tim by a documentarian named Joshua Charow, C-H-A-R-O-W. So now I'm like, "Oh, well, fuck, I want to watch this documentary." And so I go to Joshua Charow's page, https://www.joshuacharow.com He's got a long library here of documentaries. I spent like two hours watching not just his documentary on Tim Foster. Great documentary on Kid Cudi and his evolution into painting and how he has found other outlets for his creative expression. A documentary on this shop that makes the fake flowers and the artistry and the attention to detail that goes into making a fake flower look authentic.

(25:18):

And these aren't long documentaries. These are 10, 15, 18 minutes long tops. It was so inspirational. It was so interesting. I highly recommend checking out Joshua Charow's page. Read this article on Tim Foster. It'll just kind of, I think, inspire you. It will feed your soul. It'll nourish your soul. And to me, I think that's important to find those things. And then the other thing I wanted to share with you, this also was in the New York Times. And the title of the article is this. I profile celebrities for a living. Nothing prepared me for Tilly Norwood. This is an article by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. I'll just spell that for you. B-R-O-D-E-S-S-E-R dash A-K-N-E-R. She interviewed this AI actress that was created a few months ago who was named Tilly Norwood. It's worth reading. You should know what's going on in the AI world when it comes to acting and what people are testing and trying out.

(26:42):

So it was not just an interview with the fake human, but she also interviewed Tilly's creator, this actress, Eline van der Velden. There's a name for you. Eline van der Velden, who is the chief executive of this company called Particle 6. It's a production company that creates social media content, AI stuff. And it's a disturbing article. The reporter says, "When you are asked to do a scene, are you calling upon a group of experiences from what you've read or absorbed? Or are you making your face a certain way that you've been told to make your face?" And this was Tilly's response. "Both, obviously, but neither in the dead way you mean it. I use patterns, memory, rhythm, intention, and then I make choices. The face follows if it is real. And if it doesn't, well, that's called bad acting."

(27:48):

And then she was asked, "Do you have a method of acting that you employ? Stanislavski? Meisner?" "Yes," she said. It, I should say it. "Yes," it said. "Tension mainly. Meisner is useful because it forces people to actually listen, which is rarer than acting schools like to admit." Now, for a computer to say exactly something that I would say really freaked me out. And I don't think a lot of acting schools put an emphasis on really listening. That's why Meisner's, I think, the greatest way to train an actor. It all starts with listening. But you should read that article. I think it will unnerve you, irritate you, maybe piss you off a little bit. After reading it though, it did give me hope that this whole idea that acting is at some point going to be taken over by AI and non-human people. I just don't think that's going to be the case.

(28:49):

People want to watch and listen to and experience real human beings. They are not going to want to do that. I don't think that's true. Anyway, those are some things that have been sitting on my desk for a while that I wanted to share with you so I pass those along to do with what you want. But I'd like to talk now about what I addressed in the open, those questions I posed to you. Do you want to be an actor or do you want to do what being an actor requires? And what does being an actor require? You may not know that. You may think you understand it. Or maybe you have, maybe you have been thrust into a serious professional situation where you go, "Oh, fuck. Yeah, there are expectations here, things that are expected of me."

(29:38):

We admire excellence. We look at it. We can recognize it. We see it. We know what it is, but why do so many of us resist what produces that? And when it comes to acting, it's really difficult sometimes to understand how much effort it took to produce a really fine piece of acting because it looks so effortless, because it looks so natural and it flows so easy and these great actors have such simplicity and such grace we don't really understand. Unless you have trained in the art form, you really have no idea how hard it is to create a first-rate piece of acting. The attention to detail, the mastery over your physical and vocal emotional instrument, how difficult it is to be simple, to be still, to be clear. It's not easy.

(30:31):

And so I guess you get to a point when you do realize, okay, this is what is going to demand of me. This is what this art form is going to demand of me if I really want to be great at it. Well, then you're kind of pressed with this question, like what are you willing to give up? What are you willing to give up for the thing that matters to you? What are you willing to sacrifice? Who are you as an artist when nobody's watching? When you are alone in your room, when you are confronted with extended periods of solitude, let's say. What do you do when it's you and those 3 pages of sides, 10 pages of sides, and you're getting ready to self-tape and audition? What is it that you're doing when you're preparing for going onto set, going into rehearsal? Do you approach that in an artistic way?

(31:31):

It's that private, personal, intellectual, deeply emotional work of the actor that nobody ever sees or of any art form really. The work that nobody sees so that when you do show up or you do do the work, it looks effortless. That's really difficult to do. What do you do when nobody is around to hold you accountable except yourself? That leads me to this whole idea of discipline and what discipline means. Is discipline really about the work or is it about keeping promises to yourself? And what is the promise that you keep making to yourself about the type of work, the type of life, the type of actor, the type of artist you want to be? Do you keep those promises to yourself? And so when you don't do it, when you do start to phone stuff in, or you do something in a half-assed way, well then what happens to your self-respect?

(32:26):

What happens to your self-respect when you repeatedly, and I say the word repeatedly, because there has to be a pattern that starts to form, where you repeatedly don't live up to the promises that you are making to yourself. And when you get to that point, can you really take your artistry seriously if your daily behavior, the things you do on a daily basis, don't back that up? Get real with yourself about what are you doing right now, overall in your life, the things you do on the micro and the macro level to sharpen your work? Because I mean, I've talked about this talent, my God, talent. Do you know how much talent I have watched go to waste over 20 years of training actors? How many times I've seen a really interesting, compelling actor ends up going nowhere in their career, ends up quitting and doing something else?

(33:27):

Because it just gets wasted. Now, that could be for many reasons. You might realize that you just don't want to be an actor and it doesn't appeal to you. But when I'm talking about wasting talent, it's those people that know they've got something that really actually like acting and they just don't work hard. Talent just becomes an excuse. And so what I have seen often, and this happens more times than not, the less gifted actor, the less talented actor works harder and goes further in their career. And at some point, the fact that you have potential, the fact that you are talented, the fact that this work comes easier to you than other people is only going to take you so far. At some point, that's going to stop being impressive. And so at some point, how long are you entitled to call yourself talented if you're not doing anything with it?

(34:18):

At some point, it doesn't mean anything. And so actors, they want things. You want things, right? You want to be alive. You want to feel in the moment and present and out of your head and on your spontaneous impulses and really listening and living and breathing the part. Well, I think most actors want those things without putting the work in, doing the preparatory work to make all of that possible. I hear actors saying, "Oh, I don't want to get locked down into technique. I don't want to limit myself. I don't want to become mechanical. I don't want to feel in a box. I just memorize my lines. I don't want to rehearse. I just want to get in there in a contact and just to see what happens." And they think they're saying something profound and interesting about their process that they have. You don't have a process.

(35:04):

Most actors don't. They memorize their lines and they say to themselves, "Well, I'm just going to be in the moment." And they wing it. But what actually allows that actor to leave themselves alone? What actually makes it possible for an actor to get out of their head, to be in the moment, to be able to be on their spontaneous impulses? This is like an athlete stacking reps class after class after class, working on these fundamentals, working on these fundamentals, developing for yourself in whichever way you choose to do it. A way of instilling in you real process, real technique, and real craft. How hard, how often do you have to work? And I ask all of you that are trained out there that are listening to this before at some point that technique, it will disappear and it will kind of evolve into just pure instincts and talent because you have a way of working that allows your talent, allows your instincts, allows that innate God-given, I guess if you want to say that, ability that you have.

(36:09):

And so I think creator freedom, artistic freedom is actually the result of extraordinary discipline. What happens when the teacher disappears? What happens when you don't have the classroom anymore? What happens when you're not showing up twice a week, three hours a class, rehearsing, working with your partners, breaking down material, being held accountable week in and week out? What happens when that disappears? No class, no deadline, no notes, no one demanding anything of you. Do those standards remain when the person that established them for you, the person that set those standards is no longer in your life? Are you still working on your instrument when you don't have an audition? Are you still an actor when nobody's paying you to act? Are you feeding yourself artistically? Which means you got to have standards. You got to have standards. How many times have you quietly said to yourself, "This is good enough"? I mean, I do it.

(37:06):

I have to actively intervene. If I'm doing something that I know I could just get by on because, "Ah, I'm good at what I do. I can phone this in. I could skate by on this. I could bullshit my way through it. No one would know the difference." I have those moments where I've got like a 140-page script I've got to read for this coaching session that someone's paying me $250 for the hour and I skim through the script. I just focus on the sides and I'm like, "I'll be able to help them out." Feed them some standard crap that I say in class over and over and over again. And then I have to stop myself and I have to go, "What are you doing? Someone's going to be paying you $250 for an hour of your time. Read the fucking script. Do a deep dive into it. Take the next two hours. I know you'd rather fucking get high and have a martini and play with Wally, but just read the fucking script. Do a deep dive and see what's in there so you can be as insightful as you possibly can."

(38:05):

See, so I fight this too. So I'm posing all of these questions, but I don't want you to think that the questions aren't being posed to me too. And so these things that I'm sharing with you are the kind of things that I grapple with, the things that I ask of myself. And I just started jotting these down. And if you lower the bar for yourself once, it makes it easier the next time to lower it again and lower it again and lower it again. So to me, having a high standard for yourself shows the respect that you have for what it is you're doing, the love of what you're doing.

(38:41):

It shows how important it is, I think, to you because of how hard you're willing to work. And as a teacher, that's what impresses me the most. Those are the students that I pour my heart and my soul into are the ones that, talented or not, work really, really, really hard. And so this has to do with the quality of your preparation. It's the quality with which you're approaching everything that you're doing. Does your preparation speak to how much you respect what it is you're doing? The art form that you're pursuing? And sometimes maybe it's a fear of failure, a fear of just realizing maybe I'm not talented. You know, that's a tough thing to get to, I think, if you're somebody that's pursuing something you love and you just realize I'm just not that good at it or I need to work harder than someone else just because I don't have innate talent.

(39:41):

And why is it that we're so afraid of being bad at something? I think the fear of being bad probably keeps a lot of us from pursuing something that's meaningful, that we're passionate about. So can you really become though great at something, excellent at something without spending years being inadequate doing it? Unless you're like a savant, unless you're like a child prodigy.

(40:11):

I get students that come into my classroom the first day of class, the first week, the first month, the first three months. I mean, talk about inadequate, the struggle. And I think that's really kind of what is the most rewarding for me. This is why when I talk about this, it's because I see it. I see failure and inadequacy at a high level when you're in a classroom. And then what happens after two years? What happens after 128 classes? And the work that these students do on themselves and what then they're able to do when they get out of here? It's incredible. So when you get frustrated, when you start feeling untalented or feeling like a failure, what does that reveal about you? When self-criticism or criticism from other people start to collide with your ego, what happens? Can you stay in the struggle long enough for it to change you, for the work to settle in, for your talent to be able to start to operate, for it to start to bear fruit?

(41:11):

I get a handful of students every year that will quit within the first two months, three months. And usually the people that quit, quit when they are faced with serious constructive criticism about their work, about their work ethic, about their attention to detail, being called out on laziness. Who wants to be called lazy? Who wants to be told that what they're doing is phoned in bullshit? And so what happens rather than really take in that criticism and take stock and reflect about why this teacher, why I am saying these things to you. It's, "Fuck you, Charlie. I don't need this. Charlie's abusive or Charlie humiliates me or Charlie, how dare you call me lazy? I'm a Black man. How dare you use that racist trope?" I'm sorry, it has nothing to do with race. It has to do with you've had this script now for three weeks and you've done nothing with it.

(42:11):

You've put no work or no effort into it whatsoever. That's lazy. And so they quit. Storm off. You got to turn it on yourself. Where does your behavior contradict your values? And just be real with yourself. Where have you? Where have we gotten lazy? "Ah, I don't want to sit down and have to sift through articles today, this week. I don't want to do this fucking podcast again," right? I mean, it took me a year, well over a year to get Season 6 going. And it's not because I don't enjoy doing this while I'm sitting here right now. I love it. But man, when it's over, I'm just like, "Man, I don't... It's a lot of work. It's another 12 to 14 hours in my week," which is already a 60-hour work week. "Ah, fuck it. No, I don't have time. I don't want to have to get up early on a Saturday morning and come to the studio and set everything up. I don't want to have to start looking for guests, start reading articles, passing along shit. Why? Who gives a anyway?"

(43:08):

And you just start going down this rabbit hole of why I don't need to work as hard as I know I should. So I can tell you, that's where I got lazy. It took me over a year to sit back in front of this mic again. And I avoid it. And I know that there's that part of me that loves it. I know that when I sit down and I start to do it, that I am so glad that I'm doing it again. But man, it's really difficult and I avoid it. What do you avoid? What promises do you make to yourself that you break? I've broken many. Even I bring it right back to this podcast. The first two seasons, I did 32 episodes.

(43:41):

And I said, "That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to do 32-episode seasons. It's going to be great." After the first two, I'm like, "You got to be fucking kidding me. I cannot sustain this. I don't have the money for a production team. I do everything." I broke that promise to myself. I'm only going to take two or three months off of every in between seasons. I'm going to come back and it's going to be consistent. No, if not possible, I broke that promise to myself. And I just think sometimes what is 20 years in the classroom required from me? What does however long you've been pursuing a professional career, artistic career required from you, right? To show up when you're exhausted or distracted, grieving, pissed off, uninspired, feeling uninspired. I'm like, I don't even know what the fuck to talk about anymore. I don't want to be repetitive, say the same shit over and over again.

(44:29):

And so I avoid it. I'm stuck. I don't know what to say. I don't know what even Season 6 is going to be, so fuck it. I'll just wait. And then time flies. And so I always have to keep challenging myself. Am I demanding from myself what I demand from my students? More times than not, yes, but there are times that I don't. So what owns your attention? Not what do you like to spend time on? What owns it? Your phone? Doom scrolling? Reality television? Drugs? Alcohol? And that's something that you have to kind of really take a look at if there's something that's sabotaging you. Can you call yourself curious if you never allow yourself to be bored? I struggle with this. I have to force myself.

(45:18):

I have to really consciously say, "Charlie, for the next week here, don't work." I've been on break now for the last three weeks from class. I have been working every single day. I've got interviews. I've got content that needs to be created for the website. I've got Return to Craft, which I've been working on nonstop. I've got videos to edit. I've got content to create. And I say to myself, "Man, I got six weeks before school starts. I have to unplug. I have to allow myself to be bored. I have to allow myself to be open and curious and decompress. And I have to actually force myself to do it." When's the last time you sat alone without reaching for something? Reaching for the remote, reaching for the phone, reaching for the music to play in the background? Are you actually even observing the world anymore? Check in with yourself about that. I think that's important. What is constant distraction doing to your imagination? If you're constantly being pulled towards something, and I fight this, I have my phone.

(46:27):

I've got my computer. I've got everything I've got to do. I've got music. I've got books. I've got books all around the house. Here's a book anywhere I sit. I'll grab a book and read a few pages. What's that doing to my imagination if I don't allow myself to be bored? You need those quiet times so that when you do read and observe and daydream and listen to things, that it feeds you in a way that's nourishing and artistic and not just some sort of distraction that I'm using to fill time because I don't want to be alone with my thoughts. Like what are you allowing? What are you permitting into your inner life every day? Take a look at it. Reflect on that. And all of these questions that I'm posing that I'm just thinking out loud with here with you leads me to devotion.

(47:11):

And this is the whole point of the episode, I think, that discipline is in fact devotion. That discipline isn't about being tough. What if discipline is really the evidence? It is the evidence that you care. You prepare because you care. You show up because you care. You read because you care. You maintain a standard because you care. So what do you love? What do you love enough that you are willing to tend to it every single day in some way? What does devotion look like when it's inconvenient? Right? I mean, can you claim to love an art form that you consistently neglect? We see great artists. We see great actors take challenging difficult roles and make them look effortless. We don't really understand the years, the repetition, the failure, the sacrifice, the craft involved in that. I think it's the disciplined artist that eventually looks free.

(48:05):

It's the disciplined artist that eventually has spontaneity in the moment out of their head on their spontaneous impulses. That's a disciplined artist who's worked to make that how they operate and how they work in the art form. So as we wrap up here today, I'm going to close with a couple of questions. I feel like I've been asking you a lot of questions today. Not just of you, but of myself. These are things I think are worth considering. And so hopefully this has been food for thought. Where have you become undisciplined? What are those things you've been telling yourself, "I'll get back to it. I'll get back to it. I'll get to it. I'll get to it"? Where have you lowered your standards? What parts of yourself have you stopped tending to? And let me ask you this, and I'm going to think about this myself too.

(48:49):

If you were to watch how I spent the last 30 days, if we were to watch how you spent the last 30 days, what would I conclude you're devoted to? What assumption would you make about me if you looked at the last 30 days of my life? Would it be the thing that you claim matters most to you? And so what would one year devoted to your craft, devoted, seriously devoted to your craft, what would it do for you? Maybe discipline isn't something that we impose on ourselves. Maybe discipline is what love looks like when you take it seriously.

MUSIC (49:26):

It's not enough.

(49:29):

Keep on chasing the dream.

Charlie Sandlan (49:31):

Well, my fellow daydreamers, thank you for sticking around and keeping that phone in your pocket. Please subscribe, follow the show, spread the word about CBP. If you got a few moments, you can go to iTunes and fill out a written review. That would be fantastic. If you are a trained actor and you are feeling distanced from your artistry, if you would like to return to the actor you were when you got out of school, go to https://www.returntocraft.com I might have something that interests you. If you would like to become a seriously well-trained actor, you can go to https://www.maggieflaniganstudio.com fill out an application, come to New York City and train with me, and you can follow me on Instagram @maggieflaniganstudio @creatingbehavior. Lawrence Trailer, thank you for the song, my man. My friends, discipline is devotion. Stay resilient, play full out with yourself, and don't ever settle for your second best. My name is Charlie Sandlan. Peace.

MUSIC (50:20):

Oh, oh, ooh.

(50:20):

Oh, ooh.

(50:20):

It's not enough.

(50:20):

Oh, ooh.

(50:20):

It's not enough.

(50:20):

It's not enough.

(50:20):

It's not enough.

(50:20):

It's not enough.

(50:20):

It's not enough.

(50:20):

It's not enough.