What Are You Devoted To?

What do you say matters most to you, and does the way you live support that claim?

That's a question I've been thinking about lately, not only as an acting teacher but in my own life. 

We all have a story about ourselves. We say we're artists. We say our work matters. We say we want meaningful careers, meaningful lives, and meaningful relationships with the things we love. But what happens if we stop listening to what we say and simply look at how we live?

If I watched how you spent the last thirty days, what would I conclude you're devoted to? And if you watched mine, what would you conclude about me? Would it be the thing we claim matters most?

Not what you enjoy. Not what you occasionally spend time doing. What owns your attention?

Your phone? Social media? Doomscrolling? Television? Work? Alcohol? Drugs? The endless stream of information and entertainment available to us every second of every day? Attention has become one of the great artistic battlegrounds of our time.

I struggle with this myself. I can fill every second of my life. There is always another article to read, another book within reach, another email, another piece of content to create, another project, another responsibility. I can call all of it productive, but productivity and artistry are not necessarily the same thing. At some point, an artist needs quiet.

I think boredom has become almost intolerable. Stand in an elevator and watch how quickly people reach for their phones. Sit alone at a restaurant. Wait for a friend. Ride the subway. We have trained ourselves to eliminate empty space.

But empty space matters.

When was the last time you sat alone without reaching for something? No phone, television, music playing in the background, nothing to consume. Just you and your own thoughts. Can you call yourself curious if you never allow yourself to be bored?

Actors need to observe. They need to daydream. They need imagination. They need an inner life capable of being affected by the world. And that requires some room.

I believe artists should be voracious. Read. Watch great films. Look at paintings. Listen to music. Study people. Read history. Travel. Spend time in nature. Go down strange intellectual rabbit holes. Encounter things that have absolutely nothing to do with acting. All of it feeds the imagination.

But there is a difference between nourishment and consumption. If every quiet moment immediately gets filled, when does anything settle? When does something you've read actually work on you? When does an image stay with you? When does your mind wander somewhere unexpected? What is constant distraction doing to your imagination?

Curiosity requires openness. Sometimes openness requires doing absolutely nothing.

It's also easy to claim you love something when you feel inspired. What happens when you're tired? What happens when you're distracted, angry, grieving, or overworked? What happens when nobody is paying attention, and there is no immediate reward?

I've had to ask myself this repeatedly. I had to ask it about Creating Behavior. There was a long period when I didn't want to come back to the podcast. Creating an episode requires hours of reading, preparation, recording, editing, finding guests, and thinking about what I actually have to say. I could always find a legitimate reason not to do it. I'm busy. I'm exhausted. I'm teaching. I'm running a studio. I'm working on something else.

All true.

But underneath those explanations was another truth: I was avoiding something I cared about because doing it required something from me. That's where devotion gets tested. Not when something is convenient. When it isn't.

We make promises to ourselves constantly. I'll start reading again. I'll get back into class. I'll work on my voice. I'll start writing. I'll see more theater. I'll get serious about my craft again. I'll stop phoning things in.

Then life happens. A week becomes a month. A month becomes a year. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, a standard disappears. The danger isn't breaking the promise once. The danger is repetition. Because when you repeatedly fail to live up to the promises you make to yourself, something begins to happen to your self-respect. You stop believing in yourself.

That's why the choices we make when nobody is watching matter. They establish a relationship with ourselves. When I say something matters, do I behave as though it matters?

This isn't an argument for perfection. I don't believe in that. I lower my standards. I avoid things. I procrastinate. I get lazy. I find reasons why I don't need to work as hard as I know I should. The important thing is being willing to see it.

Where does your behavior contradict your values? Where have you started telling yourself, I'll get back to it? Where have you stopped tending to something that was once important to you? Where have you quietly decided that good enough is enough?

Those are difficult questions because they require us to stop blaming circumstances and turn the examination back onto ourselves. But that examination is necessary if you're serious about your life as an artist.

There's another part of devotion that doesn't get talked about enough. You have to be willing to be bad.

Nobody likes being confronted with their limitations. 

I see this constantly in the classroom. Students arrive wanting to be good at acting. Then serious training begins, exposing everything they can't yet do. That's uncomfortable. But how do you become excellent without spending years being inadequate? How do you acquire craft without struggle? How do you develop mastery without failure?

You have to stay with something long enough for it to change you. That requires humility. It requires resilience. And it requires a willingness to continue when your ego would prefer to walk away.

Maybe the question isn't, How can I become more disciplined?

Maybe it's: What do I love enough to tend to?

If it's acting, tend to your craft, your imagination, your body, your voice, your curiosity, your emotional life, and the quality of your attention. Tend to the standards you established when you first decided this art form mattered to you.

You won't always feel inspired. You won't always want to do the work. You'll get tired. You'll get distracted. You'll avoid things. You'll disappoint yourself.

Then return.

Because discipline doesn't have to mean punishment, toughness, or forcing yourself through life. Maybe discipline is simply the evidence that you care. You prepare because you care. You show up because you care. You maintain a standard because you care. You tend to do something because you love it.

Maybe discipline is what love looks like when you take your life’s work seriously.

Bring Your Attention Back to the Work

Devotion is not something you announce.

It is something you practice.

At the Maggie Flanigan Studio, we train actors to build the attention, discipline, and artistic habits this work requires. That training can begin in our Professional Actor Training Program, Summer Acting Program, or in classes like Acting, Voice, and Movement.

The work asks for more than interest. It asks for your attention.

Call us when you are ready to give the craft that kind of attention.