Your Thoughts Can Change Your Life by Donald Curtis

Author:Donald Curtis [CURTIS, DONALD]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780446567107
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2009-09-25T16:00:00+00:00

Identify Yourself with Success

We become successful when we identify ourselves with success. You will never become a success if you identify yourself with failure. The inner image always reproduces itself in our experience.

Years ago, hopeful young actors like myself used to gather for coffee at a Times Square drugstore in New York. We would read the theatrical columns and discuss the current activities in the theatre; we would commiserate with each other about our inability to convince the casting offices that we were God’s gift to the American theatre. At eleven o’clock, fortified by this atmosphere of gloom and defeat, we would start “making the rounds,” trudging from office to office in search of employment. We would usually approach the receptionist with the timorous query: “You wouldn’t have anything for me, would you?” or “I don’t suppose there is any casting today, is there?”

The answer was invariably “no.” We were licked before we started when we followed such a procedure. You can’t get positive results from a negative attitude. You can’t achieve anything when you believe you can’t. The whining and begging actors never got the jobs. The ones who succeed in the highly competitive world of the theatre, or in anything else, are those who prepare themselves and develop their confidence in themselves and their ability. A persistent attitude that will not take “no” for an answer certainly gets more results than a talent that identifies itself with failure.

Hundreds of hopefuls, both young and old, used to come to me over the years asking: “How can I get into pictures—or the theatre, or TV?”

My answer was always, “You can’t—unless you believe you can. There is no set way. You can do it if you have something on the ball, believe in yourself, and are willing to endure scorn, insults, rebuff, hardship and discouragement. If you want it enough, and if you can continue to see yourself up there with the stars no matter how tough it gets, you will make it. Otherwise, your heart will be broken. Now, do you still want it?”

The ones who are sufficiently identified with their dream will— and do—go through almost anything to get there. The rest fall by the wayside in the natural eliminative process of the survival of the fittest. I can name any number of stars and successful writers, directors and producers who slept on park benches, who washed dishes or worked as janitors, salesgirls or carhops on their way up the ladder. They finally got there because they were so completely identified with success that failure was impossible.

In my own career as an actor, I never needed to go quite that far, but I never got to the top either. In my youth I used to say, “If I can always have enough to eat, a place to sleep, and a part to play, I will be happy the rest of my life.” It is obvious that I identified with an extremely limited goal. It took years to rise above it.

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