IStop Telling People “It’s Never Too Late to Start”

Because it absolutely is.

You’ve probably seen this list floating around Facebook or Quora or Medium. It’s an infamous meme. There’s just one problem: it’s completely full of shit.

The Stephen King stuff is just made up. Sure, Harrison Ford got Han Solo in his thirties, but he was a career actor with many credits to his name built up over 8 years. He’d worked with Francis Ford Coppola twice by that point. Stan Lee had worked for Marvel (Timely, prior to that) for twenty years — his uncle owned the company!

Like, Jesus Christ people will believe any feel good wish thinking people will use to blow smoke up their ass.

Harsh truth — I’ve been working on movie sets to varying degrees of success for almost ten years now. I’ve met many actors and film creatives, many people would know — and they all, without fail, have one thing in common: they all started really, really, really, young.

There’s a lot of mythologizing about what it takes to have a career. Did you know Bill Murray would entertain his family after his father died, I mean that’s why he was so funny, right?!?! Or maybe, counterpoint, it was all his stage experience in high school. It was the fact that one of those brothers was working at the up-and-coming Second City, and got him an opportunity there. It’s that he spent 10,000 hours honing his craft. The thing about him entertaining his family is a nice story — but it’s not “the truth”. It just sounds less demanding.

Second harsh truth — people are lazy and look for the path of least resistance, constantly. In fact, that’s great advice for success. Many successful people just capitalized on the best opportunity presented. Did Bill Murray want to be an actor? He didn’t. He wanted to be a basketball player — he just sucked at it. Stan Lee wanted to write the great American novel and work in television — but his writing was not considered good enough, and it just so happened it worked better for comic books. Harrison Ford was frustrated with the roles he was getting and he had a family, and needed extra money — so he did what many entertainers do; take other jobs on set.

It’s weird because if your 30 year old friend came to you and said “Marvin, I’m chasing my dream, I’m going to train for the NFL” you would call the men in white coats. Somehow we intuitively understand if you missed out on the formative years of little league, and developing your body through puberty, high school, and then college, you simply cannot play NFL ball. You need to play in college. You need to play under different coaches and systems. You need to go to these exclusive camps where they train you at a young age to throw (and or catch/block/tackle/etc.).

For some reason there — this one thing that is so visually apparent to us — we know it is too late to start. Everything else though doesn’t count right?

Right?

Right?!?!

Wrong. Of course, it is wrong. Success is cumulative. Contrary to the movie title Revenge of the Nerds there isn’t any. Popular and successful people were usually popular and successful and high school, no matter how hard they try to milk the extreme oppressive of being made fun of because they drove a Toyota Camry…once…when their Lambo was in the shop.

Did you know Brie Larson lived in a one bedroom apartment in Los Angeles — because her mother, then divorced, moved her there because she was already well on her way to becoming famous or at least very successful as a performer. She was the youngest actor accepted to her Conservatory, and this was a strategically sound move on her Mother’s part.

Okay, but how about this, Daniel Craig was living in his car when he got the role of Bond — no shit? He lived in England and was auditioning for roles in the states. It was just cheaper than renting a place while he worked his way through those auditions. Most actors do this!

I’m no child psychologist, so this is just a guess, but I have to imagine you absorb a lot more during your formative years. If you start learning acting (or anything) at 5, you’ll probably gain a ton more experience in those early years than others who did not grow up in that environment.

There’s this idea that inside of us there is this Ernest Hemingway or Shakespeare or Van Gough just begging to get out — and that’s just not true. It might be true that with early intervention and dedication to a passion anyone could conceivably reach great heights, although the evidence for this is dubious at best.

The real truth is if you have a roof over your head and a steady job with a decent paycheck you are fine. Success doesn’t bring much besides more seats at your funeral. The idea that people constantly need the stress of finding their passion, capitalizing on that passion, and think this next year will surely be the year everyone else realizes how brilliant and amazing they are is nonsense we disseminate to create demand.

The problem with “it’s never too late to start” is it really undersells how hard, really, really, hard, on top of the lottery-sized amount of luck it takes to accomplish these things. So when people pursue these endeavors and realize how steep the talent pool is and how difficult the work is (and make no mistake, acting is as hard a job as there is, same with writing and other creative endeavors), they wash out.

It’s never too late to start…a hobby. If you want to act and the local theater is holding try outs or you have an “in”, take it. Sure. It’ll be a lark, and you’ll get some fun stories about it for the bar buddies, but it ain’t going nowhere. You ain’t going nowhere. And, as they say in show business, “don’t quit your day job”.

If you’ve been doing something that doesn’t fulfill you for ten years the best advice is to find a different outlet (besides your job) for fulfillment and double down on being better at the job that doesn’t fulfill you. That’s the easiest way to find success and make decent money. All a job does is finance the things you actually want to do.