If At First You Don't Succeed Fail Fail Again

If you've taken a drawing course at some point in your life you've probably heard the phrase:

"As an artist you have 10,000 bad drawings given to you at birth. Now spend your lifetime getting them out"

The same applies to acting: you have to spend a lot of time working on your craft before you're going to be particularly good at it. It's not necessarily about how many years you've been doing it, but how many total hours you log.

If you listen to just about any successful stand up comedian describe how they got their start, it goes something like this.

"I was a funny guy, my friends laughed at my jokes, so I thought 'Maybe I can be a standup.' I wrote a five minute set and I did an open mike. I bombed. Not a laugh in the house. People actually booed me off the stage. I was totally and utterly traumatized. I didn't leave my room for a week.

But I must have been a glutton for punishment because I worked up the courage and came back the next month. I bombed again. I reworked my material and came back the week after that, and I bombed. The week after that, I bombed. I kept coming back every week, and I kept bombing. It wasn't until my 20th show that I got one good laugh, and it wasn't until my 100th that I could hold the audience for my full 5-minute set.

Finally, I got booked at a comedy club for a 10 minute set, and I said 'Oh shit, I've only got 5 good minutes of material.' So I did the comedy club, and I bombed there too. Eventually I found some success, but it was hard won"

I think the lesson here is that you have to work through the bad acting, and the feelings of failure, and not being good enough before you can find any success. There's no shortcut, you just have to keep banging your head against the wall until the wall starts to give way. So if you've been avoiding auditions because you feel you aren't good enough, find the acting-equivalent of an open mic and start bombing, feel the fear but do it anyway.