How do you quantify success in any industry then?

I had yet another long comment from a reader further to my last post about the acting industry and I won't go into the details as you can click here to read it for yourself, but the point is that he was quite insistent on imposing his criteria about what constitutes as success in the acting industry. And given the way he talked about Hollywood celebrities, well, it was clear that he was an industry outsider - probably someone who watches TV and movies once in a while but has never ever tried to work in the industry. I find it frustrating when people try to impose their own standards on an industry they are not a part of and know little about - instead of asking questions about the industry, they form an opinion based on what little they know and go out of their way to justify it. Success means something different in every industry, but there are some similar themes of course like how much money you've managed to earn (ooh but some may consider it to be crass to measure success by one's earnings). But let's delve a little deeper into what success and failure means.

Why is success so hard to quantify?

So let me show you why this is silly: have you ever heard about Orhan Pamuk? Probably not. He is the most famous and successful Turkish writer - he won the Nobel prize for literature in 2006. However, as he writes in the Turkish language and not English, his work is pretty much only read by a Turkish-speaking audience. Some of his more famous books have been translated into other languages like French and English, but Pamuk's fame doesn't extend beyond the Turkish literary circles in spite of his Nobel prize. Is Pamuk a successful writer? Well, I think most of us would agree that he is based on the factual evidence: the statistics speak for themselves. He has sold over 13 million books in his career, has won numerous awards over the years and is an extremely rich man as a result of his success. But there will be people who will claim, "who is Pamuk? I've never heard of him, so he couldn't have been that successful." Someone who can come up with a statement like that clearly thinks that the world revolves around them: the fact that they have not heard of Pamuk doesn't negate Pamuk's fame and success - it just means that they don't know anything about Turkish literature.

Whilst we're on the same theme, have you ever heard of Asli Tandogan? Probably not, but she's the most famous, richest and successful actor from Turkey. She has not bothered going to Los Angeles to try to get into American films as she is already a megastar in her native Turkey and the vast majority of her acting work is in her native Turkish language. So unless you are a fan of Turkish TV programmes or films, you'll probably have no idea who she is. Does the fact that she is relatively unknown outside Turkey somehow make her a failure? Of course not. The statistics speak for themselves, she has done many Turkish TV and film and is the highest paid actor in Turkey today. You can see where I am going with this: just because you haven't personally heard about Asli Tandogan doesn't mean that she is a nobody who has achieved nothing - you just haven't seen one of her films yet and are unlikely to unless you decide to go on a Turkish movie binge this weekend. Why not try something different for a change if you've never seen a Turkish film?

This is why I always caution people against using their own knowledge as any basis to pass judgement: particularly in this day and age when you can look anything up on the internet instantly. That is why I think it is ridiculous to use the concept of 'recognition' as a basis to judge if someone is successful in what they do. If you were to ask people in Singapore or New York who Pamuk or Tandogan are - you are likely to get blank stares, but if you were to walk around Taksim Square in Istanbul and ask the locals who Pamuk and Tandogan are, everyone would know exactly who these two very famous Turkish celebrities are. Hence that's why I would always default to the statistics as a measure of a person's success in their industry because you can't argue with the numbers - it effectively removes any kind of judgement that can be influenced by one's opinion. Would you have the nerve to condemn either of them to be 'failures' just because they are not known internationally, outside their native Turkey? Let me show you why cold statistics trump personal judgement: allow me to use one of the favourite places I go to for lunch as an example.

There is a cute little Vietnamese cafe near my office - they do a great set lunch menu where you get a starter, a main course and a drink for £8 and that's fantastic value for money given the quality of the food. They've been around for a while and I hope they'll be there for a long time to come as I love going there for lunch. How do you judge if the guy running the cafe is a success or not? I would say that it would be a simple matter of statistics: is he breaking even, making a loss or a profit? If so, how much? What simpler way could there be to evaluate his "success"? Now I imagine this guy is making a profit because business is good and he won't be able to stay open otherwise, given how high the rents must be in that prime location. But let me show you how easy it is to deem that Vietnamese cafe a "failure"- if for example, you were to set a criteria as 'recognition' - has this cafe been featured in London newspapers or by food critics? Probably not. Is it a famous restaurant frequented by celebrities? Again, no. Do they have a good social media presence (Yelp, Tripadvisor, Instagram etc)? Once again, no. Are they a high class restaurant famous for their exquisite service? No. But do they serve delicious Vietnamese food and are always packed most days? Well yes and by that token, they are probably making good money. You can see how by setting some ridiculous criteria, one can give the impression that this Vietnamese cafe is somehow failing as a business because they've failed to live up to some arbitrary yardstick.

I love Vietnamese food! 

I think the only thing we can agree on is that there is no easy way to quantify success because everyone will have their own criteria as to what success means to them. But let's not go too far in the other direction and claim that by that token, nobody is a failure - I think we have to draw the line somewhere. So if someone claims they are a singer, my first instinct would be to question whether or not they are being paid for their singing - have they been able to make any money from their singing or are they merely doing videos for Youtube and singing at the Karaoke bar with their friends? You see, someone like Lady Gaga and Rihanna have clearly made a lot of money from their singing - but would you then classify someone who does it as a hobby (thus not making any money from it) as a singer as well? But what's wrong with enjoying a hobby in a non-professional capacity, without trying to make any money from it? I write this blog because I enjoy writing and I have an audience who wants to read my writing, I am not making much money from it unlike famous writers like JK Rowling, Stephen King or Tom Clancy: would you classify me as a 'failed writer' or just someone who blogs for fun? Going out of your way to classify someone as a 'failure' does sound unnecessarily mean, let me use my own sister as a case study and you can see why this rush to condemn someone as a "failure" is just uncalled for.

My sister is a jogger, a runner. She runs regularly, almost daily and it is a part of her daily keep-fit regime - sometimes she wakes up early and does it before work, or after work. Yes she has her personal goals in terms of the amount of time she takes to run distances like 5 km or 10 km but she is not competitive in that she is not actively seeking to take part in any kind of running competition. For her, it is a means to keep fit, stay healthy, burn up excess calories and forget the stress at work when she is running. Most of us, she really enjoys running which is a good enough reason to do it. Now would you look at her timing for 5 km or 10 km and then decide if she is a failure because she is slower than other women in her age group who compete? I say, if you were to be that judgmental about and rush to condemn her as a 'failure', then it says more about the person passing the judgement than my sister as a runner. You see, the crucial part of the equation is whether my sister is trying to compete against other women when it comes to her running and she clearly isn't - so I think that in this case, it is up to her to set her own targets and decide for herself if she is a failure or not and where she chooses to place the yardstick is entirely up to her. The rest of us have just got to back right off and MYOB.

However, I know of this Thai gymnast who is in quite a different position. Let's call him Kiet (not his real name) - he is from an extremely wealthy family and was educated in the UK. About 3 years ago, Kiet decided that he wanted to represent Thailand in the Olympics as a gymnast and went to train in America. You see, in the UK, whilst British gymnasts have enjoyed great success in the last ten years or so, the best coaches are reserved for the national team and the only way to benefit from the best British coaches is to get on the national team but in America, the gymnastics programme is dominated by a number of private gymnastics clubs who regularly produce gymnasts good enough to make the national team and represent the US in international competitions. Virtually American national team members start off at one of these private gymnastics club before 'graduating' onto the national team - now if you want to train at one of these prestigious American gymnastics and be taught by a famous coach who has produced a few national champions, you have to pay a lot of money and in Kiet's case, that's no problem at all, his family is fabulously wealthy so he is currently training in one of America's most prestigious gymnastics clubs. So is Kiet a success or a failure in this sport? In this case, there is a clear benchmark he has to reach. I have told him that you rarely get to represent your country in your first competition - get on the Thai national team first and maybe do something like the SEA Games or the Asian Games as a first step, representing Thailand. The 2017 SEA Games will be held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Kiet's not going to be ready for that - let's see if he can make the 2019 SEA Games in Davao, in the Philippines. 

This is quite different from when Vanessa-Mae represented Thailand at the 2014 Sochi winter Olympics - all she had to do was qualify for the 2014 Olympics as Thailand didn't have a winter sports programme, so at least she didn't have to compete with other Thai skiers to represent Thailand. You see, Thailand has their own gymnastics programme and I remember competing against Thai gymnasts back in the 1980s and 1990s when they used to come to Singapore to take part in the competitions we hosted back in the day. So for Kiet's investment to pay off (remember, he is paying a lot of money to receive top quality coaching in America), he has to be good enough to make the Thai national team. There are five members in the team and two reserves, that means Kiet has to be at least top 7 in Thailand before he can dream about representing Thailand in an international competition (let's not even talk about the Olympics yet). So there you go, that's the benchmark - he has to be at least top 7, preferably top 5 in Thailand. How good are the Thai men's gymnastics team today? Sport Singapore's Youtube channel had put many of the gymnastics routines from the 2015 SEA Games up on their Youtube channel, so I was able to see just how magnificent the current batch of Thai male gymnasts are. So if Kiet sets himself a goal to make the Thai national team and then fails to achieve that goal after having spent a lot of time and money training in America, then I daresay you can deem him having failed in his quest - but that's only because he has failed to achieve his own targets. I reserve judgement on Kiet's case for now, I've seen his latest training videos - he's made some progress this year but I'm afraid he still has a very long way to go if he wants to be top 7 in Thailand.

So you see, even in Kiet's case, the only reason why I feel justified to judge whether or not his expensive training in America has paid off or not is because of the goals that he has set himself. So you remember the cute little Vietnamese cafe near where I work? If the owner has set out to create London's most prestigious Vietnamese restaurant and this was the result, then he would have missed the mark by a long way - but if all he wanted to do was create a small cafe that provided value-for-money meals for the lunchtime crowd, then he has definitely a roaring success on his hands. So when people have set goals for themselves (as in Kiet's case), they have made it easy for us to evaluate the situation because we know how long the yardstick is. Is Kiet a good gymnast? Oh yes, reasonably so - but unless he reaches his own target, then one could say that he has failed, not so much as a gymnast per se (remember he is quite good), but he had failed to accomplish what he had set out to achieve. And even if he does somehow make it to the Olympics like Vanessa-Mae, what if he finishes last there - the same way Vanessa-Mae did. She was in the slalom event and amongst the skiers who completed the course, she was the slowest - by a long way. Many in the skiing community are quite scornful of Vanessa-Mae's Olympic episode, dismissing it as a super rich celebrity making a mockery of the Olympic event when most teenagers who have skied for a few years could have probably performed as well if not better than she did.

Often, there are yardsticks there for us to use conveniently to judge if a person is successful: in school, we are given grades to judge if a student has done well. But in the absence of a teaching grading our work in real life, how do we know when someone is a failure or a success? And what about the shades of grey between the two extremes of black and white? I'd like to use the UK electoral system as an example where at least we make a distinction between a credible lose and a total loser. To encourage only serious candidates to stand as MPs, anyone wishing to stand has to pay a £500 deposit which is refundable if the candidate receives at least 5% of the votes. Nonetheless, this has not deterred people like (and I am not making this up) Lord Buckethead to run in the last election - and this isn't Lord Buckethead's first election, it is his third! Clearly he is someone with money out to have a laugh and all he wanted was a bit of attention (and he definitely got it this time - see the clip below where he is featured in Last Week Tonight with comedian John Oliver), but this rule does at least give the losers in the election a bit of credibility if they manage to recoup their deposit having earned at least 5% of the vote and if they lose their deposit, then clearly, they had no business participating in the election in the first place. Lord Buckethead received 249 votes (0.4% of the total votes) and lost his deposit when he stood against PM Theresa May in Maidenhead - but the real loser was Victor Edmonds of the Christian People's Alliance who got only 69 votes (just 0.1% of the total votes) and that guy was taking himself very seriously during the election!

So surely, it would be ridiculous to lump the Labour candidate (Patrick McDonald) who earned 19.3% of the vote and the Lib Dem candidate (Tony Hill) who earned 11.2% of the vote into the same category as Lord Buckethead and Victor Edmonds. The McDonald and Hill were credible politicians who at least received several thousand votes each, whilst Buckethead and Edmonds lost their deposit - at least Buckethead was doing it as a comedian mocking the whole political process, whatever made Edmonds think that his results were going to be anything less than a complete disaster. In fact, I wouldn't even put Lord Buckethead and Victor Edmonds into the same category as Buckethead is definitely a comedian whilst Edmonds was totally delusional about his chances as a politician. You can see why the Christian People's Alliance is not a political party taken seriously in the UK when this is the kind of results they have in the general elections.  So whilst both McDonald and Edmonds lost to PM May in Maidenhead, one could say that McDonald did incredibly well earning nearly 20% of the vote when running against the current PM (who knows, maybe if he stood elsewhere, he could have won) whilst you know Edmonds will never get his deposit back in this kind of election. They both lost, but are they both 'failures'? I think not. Oh for crying out aloud, he got even less votes than Lord Buckethead (see his video below).

So turning our attention back to the acting industry: few actors can reach the dizzying heights of fame achieved by megastars like Matt Damon, Robert de Niro, Kevin Spacey and George Clooney but amongst the actors out there who are not as famous as de Niro or Clooney, may I point out that there is a huge difference between those who have achieved quite a lot in their careers and those who have achieved nothing - the difference would be like comparing a politician like Patrick McDonald of Labour to Victor Edmonds of the Christian People's Alliance. So in an election, we can count exactly how many votes each candidate received (and what that represents as a percentage of the overall votes cast), I imagine the checklist for an election candidate would be to have a credible campaign in order to win of course, get as many votes as possible even if you can't win and make sure you don't lose your deposit, otherwise you'll end up being labeled a failure by the public. Likewise, in the world of acting, I will provide a checklist that most actors who are starting out would look at to achieve: any actor looking to succeed in this business would be looking to cross out as many items on the list below as quickly as possible once you have decided to embark on an acting career.

1. You want an agent - a great agent who is very well connected in the business, who can get you the best auditions out there, who knows the casting directors well and can propel your career to great heights.

2. You need a good relationship with your agent. There's no point in being on the books of a good agent but not get their attention at all - this relationship is vital to the development of your acting career. After all, agents only earn when you work - they get a cut of your earnings, that is why it is so important to have that good working relationship with them.

3. You want to get a lot of paid work - that's a way to prove that you're a credible actor, after all, there are loads of opportunity to act for free (community theatre, student projects, Youtube channels etc). When casting directors look at your CV, they want to see evidence of well paid work - that gives you credibility because other directors have used you in well paid, high profile projects. This is the same as a restaurant having good reviews from a prominent food critic - so imagine if you've done a high profile project like the BBC's Dr Who, if the casting director there thought you're good enough for Dr Who, then that's a shining endorsement of your talent, that you're good enough to be in a show like that.

4. You want to demonstrate that you have a wide range of talents and get paid work in a variety of genres, to avoid being pigeonholed like, "oh he just does stunt work", "he's just a voice-over guy"or"he's just a commercial dancer". The wider your range of skills, the more diverse your talents, the wider your chance of getting well paid work.

5. You want international exposure: once again, this is about casting your net as wide as possible. If you can double your chances of getting work if you are considered for work in two countries - getting work internationally also looks good on your CV, it gives casting directors the impression that you are an international superstar.

6. You don't want to have any gaps in your CV - like a period of a year when you have done absolutely nothing. That can happen for example, when a woman gets pregnant and has a baby or if an actor has an extended period of illness, but again, this never looks good on a CV if you don't have a good reason for it.

7. Even if you go through dry patches when you're not getting much success with the auditions, you need to still attend at least a few auditions a month - you need to know that you're still in the system, that you've not fallen off the radar.

8. You want to be able to compare yourself to your peers who are not actors and be able to hold your head up high: there's nothing romantic about the struggling actor who can't make ends meet. You want to be able to earn as much as your peers, get on the property ladder, occasionally treat yourself to nice clothes and shoes, support your family, go on nice holidays regularly, plan to save enough for your retirement, be able to afford to do do all the things your peers do as adults. So if your classmate has become say an estate agent or a teacher whilst you have become an actor, you don't want to be any poorer than your former classmates especially when they have taken fairly mundane, ordinary jobs.

There's nothing romantic about being a poor actor.

9. You want to have worked with some famous directors and actors - after all, they are already famous and it is an easy way to raise your profile by being associated with them, working on the same project.

10. And finally, I hate it when people try to measure success through the number of awards an actor wins (Golden Globes, Academy Awards, BAFTAs, Cannes Film Festival etc) and that's the kind of award that only a very small number of actors ever get considered for - are you going to condemn everyone else who isn't part of that elite group? That's extremely harsh, because you would be effectively 'failing' 99% of actors and that's a ridiculous high benchmark you have set, almost to deliberately, spitefully, arbitrarily fail 99% of actors. Well, please let me show you why setting the bar so ridiculously high is just allow me to invite you to watch this heartwarming clip below about American teacher Jahana Hayes from Waterbury, Connecticut who won the teacher of the year award in 2016 and got to meet President Obama:

Here's how it works: each state (along with the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, and U.S. Virgin Islands and the Department of Defense Education Activity) selects a winner at their local state/district/department and thus that creates a shortlist of 56 finalists, from which there can only be one overall national winner. Jahana Hayes triumphed last year and her enthusiastic, joyful reaction at the award ceremony with President Obama went viral. Oh course, we love stories like that on social media and loads people couldn't wait to praise Ms Hayes for her amazing achievement - but there are a total of over 3.1 million teachers in America who are eligible for this award, only 56 of them made that shortlist for the teacher of the year award. So if we were to set the bar so high and say that unless you won this award at state level and made that shortlist of 56, you've failed as a teacher - well let me tell you that you're dismissing over 99.998% of teachers in America as failures. Are the teachers in America that terrible that we should condemn 99.998% of them as failures or is using the nomination of this award a ridiculous high benchmark to set when measuring how good a teacher is? You can see why this obsession with winning awards is quite frankly, ridiculous. Just because a teacher doesn't win an award doesn't mean that they are bad teachers.

Look, we've all been through the education system - we all know that even in a good school, some teachers are better than others. I would say that if a teacher is better than half of all the teachers out there, if they are in the 50% of teachers, then I would say that they're good teachers by virtue of the fact that they have managed to outperform at least half of their peers. If they are in the top 25% or 20% then I daresay they are excellent teachers. Now how you wish to evaluate a teacher's performance is another long piece I could write (and that's another story for another day), but what about condemning 'bad' teachers then who are failing their students? Where do you draw the line? Do you condemn the bottom 50% of teachers? The bottom 30%? Where do you draw the line in the sand where you can then claim, "this teacher is so awful that the school needs to replace that teacher as soon as possible." There'll be some teachers who certainly need some help and further training to do their job better whilst there are others who should have been sacked yesterday already - but I certainly wouldn't condemn 99.998% of teachers in America as 'failures' just because they didn't make the shortlist for some prestigious award. And that's why we simply don't rely on 'awards' or 'recognition' to judge teachers.

In any case, it seems ridiculous that I have remind you that we have a far more straight forward way to reward people who have performed well in their jobs and no, that's not awards: it is money. Oh yeah, cold hard cash. People who do extremely well in their jobs are paid more than their peers who are not performing as well. Did you forget that? Whilst winning an award may be a nice token gesture, those of us who do perform far better than our peers expert to be financially rewarded for it. Having worked a long time in sales, I don't expect to get any awards or prizes from my employers when I have a good month, I simply expect them to pay me the commission I am due promptly: show me the money (I wonder how many of you remember that reference from the 1996 movie Jerry Maguire). Don't get me wrong, I love awards as much as the next person but awards are nice only if they can somehow help you in the long run: so when I won numerous awards as a gymnast back when I was a student, I was thinking that it could strengthen my resume when I applied for jobs and scholarships in the future and give me an edge over my competitors. Let's get practical here: awards are nice but apart from adding a little sparkle to our CVs, they serve very little practical purpose in a world where most of us simply get rewarded for the good work we do with money and that is especially true in showbiz.

So instead of trying to win an award for your work, here's a far more reasonable benchmark - how about top 30% of your cohort, whatever your profession is? Whether you're a banker, actor, teacher, engineer, coach, fashion designer, sushi chef, computer programmer or a marine biologist, you can be sure that that top 30% of the cohort of those professionals are all excellent at their jobs. It seems like a reasonable cut-off point, but I know some of you may think even that's a bit harsh - maybe even the top 40% would be okay because I'm sure you're not going to include some really incompetent idiots who are terrible at their jobs if you aim to be amongst the top 40%. Where you wish to draw that line is up to you, but I certainly would never use the "you must have won the most prestigious award in your profession (or at least have been nominated for it)" benchmark to deliberately fail 99.99% of the people in a particular profession. I'm all about being reasonable when it comes to judging people in their professions and if you are amongst the top 30% of the cohort of actors in your country, you'd have certainly achieved the first nine items on this list, even if you have never been nominated for a prestigious award - that is why it makes a lot more sense to look at earnings to measure performance.

How bad do you need to be before you are deemed a failure?

Finally, I'd like to conclude by asking a simple question: who are we to judge whether someone is a failure or not? I say one important factor is whether or not you know what you're talking about - where is your credibility? Thus when someone who has never ever attended an audition before, never mind appeared on TV before tries to pass judgement on whether or not my acting career is a success - I can only raise one of my eyebrows and question if he even has the slightest clue what the hell he is talking about, because he clearly is an industry outsider. I'd like to see some of these haters try to get into showbiz - I'd like to see them try to get even just one day of paid work in the industry as a proper actor before they even open their big mouths. But such is the nature haters - they are not interested in learning about your industry, oh no, they just want to bring you down by saying, "I don't like you and I think you're crap. There I hope I've upset you." You can't avoid people like that in life - all you can do is to recognize firstly that these people don't know what they are talking about and that there's probably something hurting them in their lives to make them act like that.

So that's it from me: what does success mean to you and by the same token, what about failure? Do we get to set our own targets in life as to where we draw the line to define those two entities? Leave a comment below, thanks for reading.