How Building a Website is like Building an Acting Career

Welp, I finally did it. The Actors Rise website is LIVE!

This may not seem like a big deal to you, but it has been a goal of mine to launch this website for months now and quite honestly this took wayyyyy longer than I would have liked. Have you ever had a goal take longer than you think it will? 

I know when I first graduated college I thought I’d have an agent and be auditioning professionally within a year. That didn’t happen for SEVEN more years!  

My goal of building a website started in early 2020. I thought it’d be done in 2 months – it took me over a year and a half! 

I tried just about everything to design and launch the site. I spent hours on WordPress, tried templates, switched around photos, wrote and deleted loads of content, got a hosting platform (Flywheel – they’re great) and I HATED IT. It didn’t feel like me. It didn’t covey what I wanted. I didn’t look great. So, I didn’t launch it. 

My taste was just way beyond my capabilities. Remind you of anything? 

It reminds me of two things, 

1. My favorite quote by Ira Glass (see below) 
2. My acting career. 

Read the quote and I think you’ll understand more what I mean,

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

― Ira Glass

Isn’t that quote amazing? My taste for a website was just way higher than my skillset.

And my taste for great acting work is almost always beyond my capabilities. I mean, I  think I’m talented, but I certainly wouldn’t compare myself to Meryl Streep!!! But that doesn’t mean I stop. You keep going to class, learning and trying new tactics. I am a much better actor now than I was 7 years ago and even last year. We keep improving and getting better with time so our taste starts to catch up with our capabilities. 

I eventually realized that my website was just not going to get to my taste level without some help. I was not going to put any more time and energy into learning something that wasn’t a skill I cared about having (I don’t actually wanna be a web designer, ya know?!) I needed to INVEST IN MY CAREER as a coach and get some professional support with my website. I needed my incredible designer Quinn Tempest to walk me through branding exercises, help me create a vision board and a real roadmap to where I was going – plus, I needed her to do some of the heavy lifting (aka designing) for me. Thank God I did! 

The same has been true in my acting career. It wasn’t until I hired a career coach that things really clicked, I got my first agent and booked my first real TV credit. Sometimes you gotta call in someone who has done it before! Now I love helping actors the way someone once helped me. 

So to sum it up, I’m proud of this website. And throughout this process I was reminded of a few things I learned in my acting career… 

• Goals sometimes take longer than you expect them to. That’s OK. Keep going. 
• Your taste is sometimes beyond your capabilities at the moment. Start anyway. 
• Sometimes you need to invest in a professional to help get you where you want to go. There’s no shame in that. We don’t know what we don’t know.

There will be new things coming to it in the future, but right now, I’m proud.