Is it fair to get Angela to do a lot more to prove herself?

Hi guys, I'd like to share with you a story about a conversation that I had recently with a woman that left me shaking my head. I actually did my first acting job this year (that's in early November) when I played the lead role in an ad for a Canadian optician chain. It was a comedy skit involving a woman who had misplaced her glasses in an airport and whilst I can't disclose anymore, I am proud to say that I am the only other character in this short comedy skit that interacts with this lady. It's only for a 30 second commercial so it's short and sweet (with one big punchline) - they are not trying to do too much in that very short commercial. But of course, since this is skit is set in a busy airport, there were a lot of extras who were brought in for the shoot. So when I was resting between takes, this woman whom I shall call 'Angela' (not her real name) asked me for my advice - she was an extra who was brought in to simply fill the scene, so the airport looks crowded but she really isn't going to be seen in the final product, at best you might just notice her passing through briefly in the background in one of the shots but otherwise, there was no acting on her part. Her instructions were simply, "when you hear action, you pick up your bag and you walk towards the shop." Angela noticed that the two leads were given a lot more attention and detailed instructions from the director, so she became quite intrigued as we were clearly the stars of the ad. Thus she asked me how she could get a big part in an ad like me and I told her that it simply wasn't possible for her - now this is not me being cruel, but I tried to explain to her the situation with the Spotlight casting system. Perhaps I shouldn't be that surprised but this was all completely new for Angela and she was hearing about it for the very first time. 

So this is how it works: the casting is done through the Spotlight system - major casting directors will use Spotlight to find actors for their projects (whether it is a film, TV programme or ad) and so Angela said, yes I get it, so how do I join Spotlight? I said to her you can't unless you have had some professional work, so if she tried to apply to Spotlight today, she would simply be rejected on the basis of not having done any professional work before. However, since the only way to get "professional work" is to get it off Spotlight, then outsiders like Angela as basically locked out of a system which is designed to keep the work for those who are already on Spotlight and deny it to people like Angela trying to get into the system. Angela really struggled to get her head around that concept and I had to explain it a few times, finally the penny dropped and she said, "but that's not fair, is it?" I rolled my eyes and said, "I never said it was fair, of course is is very unfair. It is a system designed deliberately to keep people like you from ever getting any professional acting work." She then asked me if there was any way around it and I told her, "well luckily for you, there is in fact. It is called social media - there's nothing to stop you from finding fame on various social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram or Youtube. You can start making your own content today, upload them within the hour and start getting loads of followers. There are a lot of comedians and musicians who have started out that way on social media and it is not a bad way to get started. After all, you're not waiting for some casting director to decide that you're suitable for the role, you can say yes to yourself every time you want to get creative on these social media platforms." Angela baulked at that and made a face, "but that's not what I want to do, I just want to do what you're doing." To be fair, I was given a script, I was told what to do by the director and I was entirely passive in this process - all I had to do was follow the instructions whilst I was asking Angela to be creative. Now that's the one thing I was actually forbidden to do in this process, the director doesn't want to hear any of my bright ideas - as an actor, I have no say whatsoever in the script or the concept, I'm merely there to do as I am told. So I suppose Angela took a look at that and thought, well that is rather easy, anyone can just follow instructions like that. 

This does beg the question though - why are people like Angela expected to do things the hard way by producing her own content on social media whilst people like me can simply get a lead role in a big budget commercial, get chauffer driven to set and back and get paid a lot more for my time? In fact, I had worked out how much Angela was getting paid for her day as an extra and how much I am getting paid: if this ad is only used in Canada, then I would be paid 45 times more than her. But if it gets used in other territories in Europe, then that figure could be easily around 80 to 90 times. In short, I have a good job in finance and I wouldn't bother with acting these days unless it is very well paid work and modesty aside, this is ridiculously well paid work and I really enjoy being treated like a super star by the lovely production crew. The simple answer is that Angela is late to the party. I have been doing this for so many years and Angela has zero experience - I think it is time for an analogy. Imagine you want to go to the big black Friday sale, if you want to nab yourself a great bargain, you had better wake up especially early and be one of the first customers to run into the store the moment it opens. If you think, oh I'll just nip in there after work at about 6:30 pm, the store may still be open but don't be surprised if all the good stuff is long gone. If you then have the cheek to complain, "this sale sucks, it's a complete waste of time - I can't find anything decent here", then you really should have turned up a lot earlier if you were serious about buying anything on sale. Angela is in her 30s, she is up against people who have been acting for a long time - the odds are very much stacked against her. I'm not saying that she can't make it in the industry, but she has to try a lot harder than most people to get others to notice her and using social media is a great solution to that challenge. Is it going to be easy for Angela? Hell no, it's actually really difficult. But can Angela simply get well paid acting work without doing something to make her stand out from the crowd? No, sadly she stands no chance at all in such a crowded market. There are just way too many aspiring actors fighting for the very small amount of well paid work in showbiz. Just like the Black Friday sale, if you want to some of the best jobs in the industry, you need to turn up very early, not late like Angela. 

So using Angela's example, let's talk about my reader Choaniki - he has switched from healthcare to finance this year and it has been an uphill struggle for him, this transition has proven to be very challenging. I'm sure he wasn't expecting it to be easy but it has turned out to be even harder than he had originally envisioned. Now this is no reflection on his abilities to thrive in this sector, but allow me to illustrate how the odds are stacked against him. I am regularly given 'accounts' to take care of - so for example, the boss would say, "Alex, we have this guy in Panama called Manuel whom we have been dealing with for a few years, he does some business with us but his English is limited. You speak Spanish, so why don't you take over that account and see if you can improve that relationship with him and get more business out of him?" So when I call up Manuel in Panama, he knows whom I am, he is an existing client and so he is receptive to what I have to say. The fact that the conversation is in Spanish is an added bonus as well, it is not that hard for me to engage Manuel and if I can get him to invest more of his clients' money, I get to earn a lot of commission. It is rather easy to earn this kind of money. However, would Choaniki be 'given' accounts like that to manage? No, he wouldn't - as this kind of 'easy' work would ironically be given to someone like with a lot more experience. Try to look at this from the perspective of the boss, if the account needs a manager, the boss could give it to someone like me and relax, knowing that I am very experienced and thus a safe pair of hands. However, if the boss were to hand it over to someone like Choaniki who doesn't have that much experience, then there is a greater chance of things going wrong if the client comes up with a complex or unusual request. You would also want the client to feel cherished and special - so imagine if a VIP client turns up at a famous restaurant, do you get your head chef to personally prepare the meal of this VIP client or do you get one of the trainees to do it? The decision would be based on just how important the VIP client is rather than what the client has ordered - so even if the client orders a simple salad that anyone can make by simply putting the few ingredients together in a bowl, you still get your head chef to do it just to please the VIP client, even if it means leaving the trainees to prepare the more complicated dishes whilst the head chef is preparing the simple salad for the VIP client. 

So you might argue, hang on a minute Alex, none of this makes any sense. The trainees are given far more difficult tasks to do and are far more likely to make mistakes when the head chef is told to serve the VIP client, wouldn't it be more efficient to get the trainees to make the salad for the VIP clients given that it is a very simple dish to prepare whilst allowing the head chef to prepare the far more complex dishes? It wouldn't be unreasonable to think that of course, but unfortunately, there's a simple reason why this would not be the case in the real world. In any commercial organisation, there is usually a triangular power hierarchy. That means that there is usually a small number of people in senior management whilst the bulk of the employees are workers near the bottom of the hierarchy. If you look at the ratio between the nice jobs at the very top of the hierarchy and the terrible jobs at the bottom of the hierarchy, then it is obvious that most people usually get stuck at the middle of the hierarchy and consider themselves very lucky if they ever manage to haul themselves up to middle management. But in this system, I'm afraid most people will be always stuck closer to the bottom of the food chain and in some cases, such as in Angela's example, the ones at the top of the food chain would deliberately erect barriers to prevent those at the bottom of the food chain from progressing any further - their motivation is to safeguard the limited amount of well paid work to those who have already made it to the top of the food chain whilst keeping out the competition. I'm not saying that it would be impossible for someone like Angela to make it as an actor or Choaniki to establish himself in the world of finance, but my point is that because they are so late to the party, then the onus is on them to try harder than those who have already started much earlier to prove their worth and they need to recognize what they have to do when the odds are stacked against them like that. So it is not about whether or not it is fair or not to expect people like Angela or Choaniki to do a lot more to prove themselves when they are simply trying to do the same jobs as those who are already established themselves in the industry, it is more a question of recognizing that the demand for such well paid work is much higher than the supply of people willing to do it; it is like a game we all have to play, it's all about how we can fight our way to the top of that food chain to get hold of the best jobs. 

Now the problem with Angela was that she had this misconception: she asked me if there was an acting course she could take so she could learn how to become a professional actor - she then assumed that if she had that piece of qualification, she would be hired for lead roles and would become successful and famous. It doesn't work like that - yes there are plenty of acting courses out there she could take, there is a massive industry catering to people like Angela chasing their acting dreams. However, she assumed that she would be able to get work easily the moment she had the right qualifications - that is totally not true. Likewise in the case of Choaniki, he could go do some courses, even pursue a degree in finance to try to boost his chances of gainful employment in this sector but there is very little correlation between the paper qualifications and being able to get the best jobs in the industry. But the issue isn't about having the right kind of training or qualification to do the job well, the problem here is the mismatch between the oversupply of people desperate to get into the industry and the limited supply of good jobs within the industry. So a good example of this is the situation of youth unemployment in China today - there is a massive oversupply of graduates in China and simply not enough graduate level jobs to employ all of these young graduates in China today. The problem isn't that these young people didn't study hard at university or that there was something wrong with the courses at the university, the issue is that the Chinese economy simply isn't in a position to offer all of these young graduates with the kinds of jobs that they were hoping for. Thus most of them end up looking for that ideal job that they will never find and some of give up and accept non-graduate menial jobs just to pay the bills. But let me use a simple analogy to make my point: if there are only 50 seats on a bus from Bristol to London, but then they are selling unlimited number of tickets for that bus journey, would you take a risk and buy a ticket for that bus knowing that you may not get on that bus if it is full and there are no refunds if you couldn't get on that bus? Most of us would not want to take that kind of risk, but that's the kind of risk that the students in China take all the time when they pursue higher education, knowing that they not find a job that suits the degree that they eventually get; this is a risky game they are willing to play despite the rather poor odds of success. Thus I'm not saying, "you can never play this game", I'm saying you need to understand the rules of this game. 

Thus in both finance and acting, the real challenge isn't a matter of acquiring the skills to do the job, rather it is more a matter of dealing with the intense competition - to fight your way to the front of the line when it comes to getting the best paid jobs. I only spent a little bit of time with Angela but I get the feeling that her attitude in this case is very working class; she thinks that as long as she gets the skills to do the job, she will find work relevant to her qualifications. That's only true in very working class jobs, so for example, if you want to be a nurse, you get your nursing qualifications and you will have little problems finding a job as a nurse given that there is a chronic shortage of nurses. However, the reason why there is such a shortage of nurses is because it is not a well paid job, the hours are long and it will involve some rather unpleasant aspects of caring for patients who are unable to take care of themselves. Whilst I can wax lyrical about how noble nurses are, I do not want to have to clean up after the elderly there will always be more jobs than workers available, but it is the opposite for very attractive jobs. So let's contrast that to the glamorous world of showbiz - in the UK, if you wish to perform as a stuntman, then you need to get on the stunt register and that is notoriously difficult to get on because you need to pass a very difficult exam. The body that runs the stunt register has made the exam a lot more difficult over the years given that the older stuntmen don't want to have to compete with younger people trying to enter the industry. they deliberately raise the bar so high that only a small number of people each year can ever qualify and join the stunt register, candidates now have to perform a list of very difficult skills across a very broad range of disciplines from gymnastics to weapon handling in order to pass the exam. For more stuntmen, passing the exam is usually much harder than the actual work they have to do once they are finally on the stunt register and once they are qualified, they think, "if I have to work that hard and do that much to get on the stunt register, I'm not going to make it any easier for others to get on that stunt register." So in short, Angela is totally mistaken when she thinks it is all about her ability to act. 

If I may offer you analogy to make my point: if you turn up late in a sale, then you are only going to find items that no one else wants to buy. For example, if you go to a clothing store, chances are you are going to find either the items in very large or very small sizes, whilst the ones that would fit most people would have been sold a long time ago. So it's not a question of whether or not you have the money to purchase the item you want, it is purely a matter of turning up early enough to get your hands on the very limited number available in the sale. They key to success is being able to identify exactly what the most difficult part of your challenge is and this was exactly where both Angela and Choaniki have gone very wrong. I feel bad in using Choaniki as an example but I hope he will learn from this - he does this one thing that often irks me. When I am talking to him about a very practical issue about business development and how to make money, he would go off tangent and "show off" his knowledge by talking about something that is not relevant to the topic. For example, when we discussed the Japanese market, he went off on a tangent about the Japanese central bank to "show off" to me how knowledgeable he is about the Japanese economy. I'm afraid that's a very Singaporean trait - he is behaving like the very hardworking Singaporean student in a Singaporean school so keen to prove to the Singaporean teacher that he has done his research and he expects some kind of reward for that. But to be fair to Choaniki, I don't think he is actually trying to impress me - instead, he really has no clue about how to solve the incredibly hard challenge of trying to sell a fixed income investment product into the Japanese market, so instead of simply saying, "sorry but I really have no idea at all how to do this", he turned the conversation towards a topic that he does have knowledge of (in this case, the Japanese government and central bank) in order to have something intelligent to contribute to the conversation, even if that piece of information that he is offering doesn't bring him any closer to solving the problems and challenges that he is facing. So whilst what Choaniki said about the Japanese central bank is 100% correct, it is also unhelpful to his situation. I hate to be harsh, but if people simply ignore the questions they don't know the answers to and talk about issues that they know a lot about, then they will never solve the difficult challenges that they are facing in life. 

When reacting to a difficult challenge, there is a difference between what I can do (easily) and what needs to be done. Of course, we hope that what we can do would also be what needs to be done, then that way our problems can be solved. So let's take a very simple example: I am about to walk to the gym but I look out of  the window and realize that it is raining - no worries, I have a big umbrella which I can use to keep myself dry and the problem is solved. Thus in this example, I really didn't have to think that hard to find a solution to my problem as long as I remember where I kept that big umbrella. However, when faced with complex problems, some people will offer very simple solutions that are completely ineffective because that falls under the category of "what I can do easily" as opposed to "what needs to be done". So for example, when my nephew was studying for his A level exams, my mother kept asking him to read the newspaper as she said it was important for his education. I had to explain to her that whilst there are benefits to reading the newspaper (improving our English, learning about what is happening in the world, improving our general knowledge etc), the chances of him finding something in the newspaper that is directly relevant to his A level syllabus is actually pretty low and thus not really all that useful in terms of helping him prepare for his exams. What my nephew actually needed was an adult who was an expert in subjects like economics and physics to test my nephew's understanding of those topics that will come up in his exams and that adult can then identify areas where my nephew needs further help in his preparations for the exams. My mother isn't educated enough to do that so she is in no position to even begin to help my nephew but since she already has a subscription to the local newspapers, it is easy enough for her to pass my nephew the newspapers and ask him to read it whenever he comes to visit her. My mother insists nonetheless that reading the newspaper is still extremely useful activity for my nephew, even if is no substitute for a really good tuition teacher to help my nephew prepare for those exams. Whilst you must be all all shaking your heads now at my mother's approach to trying to address this difficult challenge that my nephew was facing for his A level exams, this really isn't that different from how Angela and Choaniki reacted, when faced with an equally complex challenge with no simple solutions. 

So that's it from me on this issue - what do you think? Why do you think Angela is so oblivious to the biggest challenges that she is facing? Is her reaction normal? Can you explain her mindset? How do we square up to the difficult challenges we might encounter when switching industries later in life? Please leave a comment below and many thanks for reading.