The Scarcity Mentality
One great reason why actors should create their own content
(By Javier Guerra)
(Photo: Karolina Grabowska | Pexels)
One reason you should create your own content as an actor is to keep yourself busy during the slower periods, when you aren’t booking acting jobs. Having too much idle time can make you an anxious actor, and it’s hard for an anxious actor to relax and enjoy the process.
For instance, the anxious actor can’t focus on having fun in an audition because they’re too worried about booking the job and earning a paycheck.
RELATED: Create Your Own Opportunities!
The anxious actor cannot live their lives peacefully after an audition because they’re anxious to see if they got the role.
The anxious actor can’t allow themselves to enjoy the company of other actors because they view them as hostile competition for scarce resources.
(Photo: Ahmad Gunnaivi/Unsplash)
It’s what WebMD calls the scarcity mentality. Thanks to the abundance of competition and the limited number of available acting jobs, the scarcity mentality is endemic in the entertainment business.
This kind of mentality leads actors to put up with unnecessary verbal abuse from agents or casting directors. It’s lead countless women, and some men, to join powerful people on the “casting couch”. They’ve been conditioned to take whatever scrap someone throws at them, even if that scrap is thrown at them rudely, or offered to them in exchange for sexual favors.
If you’re always working on your own content, you always feel productive.
It also leads actors to take jobs that they would rather not take. When you don’t know when your next job is going to come, you’ll compromise your dignity, values and self-respect to take whatever job is being offered that day.
But if you’re always working on your own content, you always feel productive. You always feel like you’re accomplishing something. Work seems less scarce when you control the work.
(Photo by Kal Visuals on Unsplash)
If you’re always working on your next web-series, play, short film, etc., you are always existing in a world of plenty, not a perceived world of few. You’re always busy and never idle. You’re always an actor, never a person who does acting from time to time.
Plus, bonus, working on your own content makes you better at your craft, so that you’re ready when a larger role comes along. As the expression goes: “If you stay ready, you don’t have to get ready.”
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