“Fear believes in a negative future. Faith believes in a positive future. So if neither has happened yet, why wouldn't you choose to believe in the positive future?”
—Jon Gordon, New York Times Best-Selling Author
Belief and faith go hand-in-hand with risk. If risk is on the tactical side of the equation, involving real-world choices and operations, belief and faith are on the spiritual and philosophical side. You may not need to have faith or belief that your light will reach others if you're going to keep it hidden under your own little bushel—but what kind of a life is that? Cramped and lonely, with no room for growth, such a life would not be very fulfilling. It might be safe from the potential dangers of the world, but at what cost? If you never take the leap, there is no chance that you will fly. But if you do have the courage to take the leap, you will need a healthy dose of belief in yourself, for doing all of the things described in this book, and faith in the world beyond you, that it will support you and provide the wind beneath your wings so you don't crash upon the shore below.
A good path to believing in yourself is finding a way to believe in the world around you. This can be a challenge if you were mistreated or abused or grew up with very little. By acknowledging that the world has already supported you, even with very little evidence that it has, you can grow your faith by embracing the idea that, if you do your part, the world will eventually support your effort. There are some men and women who have pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps and they deserve our respect. It may be hard for them to give in to the “weak” concept of having faith. They don't need faith, the logic goes, because they were prepared on their own. They don't need protection, they say, because they were strong enough to withstand harsh realities. While I completely understand that logic, I believe that even the strongest among our race of imperfect humans got to where they are today because at some point, maybe after massive amounts of effort on their part, they had to start relying on something or someone outside of themselves.
One needs only to experience an earthquake to realize that we are actually employing faith in things we mostly take for granted, like gravity and the ground beneath us, every single day. By logging all of these things that we can already be grateful for right now, we can make ourselves more aware of this belief and faith and then cultivate more of it. This is a way to increase the chances that it doesn't show up only when the wind blows at exactly the right angle.
“I got to the point where I had everything I thought I ever wanted, but I still didn't feel happy. So I sold my companies and started a new one. The whole point was that I wanted to replace the thought, ‘I'll be happier when ______’ with the thought, ‘I'm happier now, because ______.’”
—Nataly Kogan, Owner/CEO, Happier, Inc.
Nataly Kogan, one of my past guests on the 10,000 NOs podcast, had every reason to believe in herself. When her family came to the United States from Russia she did not speak English. She credits Alyssa Milano and reruns of Who's the Boss? for learning the language. Eventually, through inordinate amounts of hard work, she became a successful entrepreneur. But, just as Oprah preaches that happiness comes from gratitude rather than material possessions, Nataly discovered that what was lacking in her life was the acknowledgment that she had plenty to be grateful for right now. She created an entire company and mobile app to encourage herself and others to stop looking for happiness around the next corner.
I have never coined a catchy phrase like my guest Charlie “Rocket” Jabaley. His mantra, “I'm on a winning streak,” went viral after he convinced the Duke men's basketball team to shout it in unison with him on Instagram the day he delivered a motivational talk to them. Prior to that, he had repeatedly told his followers the mantra can be uttered to celebrate things as trivial as having an espresso made at Starbucks and as monumental as closing a business deal. I did realize, however, that I'd been doing something similar my entire life without being aware of it. As my kids can gladly tell you, I am annoyingly consistent when it comes to acknowledging beauty around me.
Every time we drive down the California Incline strip of road between the Santa Monica bluffs and the Pacific Coast Highway on our way home, I point at the mountains near Malibu jutting into the Pacific Ocean, “Do you realize how lucky we are? People travel from around the world to see this view!” As would be expected, they show their gratitude for Dad's life lesson with an eye-roll and a shake of the head, but I can't help myself. Likewise, I make a point of telling family and friends how much they mean to me on a regular basis, whether through text, email, or just in a conversation. Try it. What you'll find is that, when things are going horribly wrong in your life and it feels like you can't catch a break, you'll at least have evidence that reinforces the idea that the world is good to you in some way, shape, or form. It will systematically increase your ability to have faith.
Looking back at the skydiving story I shared in the chapter on risk, what allowed my wife and me to experience hurtling through the air toward the earth from 13,000 feet at terminal velocity was an implicit trust in the equipment and the manufacturer's ability to design and create it. Our faith was not just in the ropes, pulleys, and parachutes, but also the plane, the engines, and the pilot. We had to have faith that our guide, Gus Kaminski, and his training and expertise as the captain of the Navy SEAL Leapfrog team would get us to the ground in one piece. In fact, from the minute every one of us wakes up each day, we are placing our faith in hundreds, if not thousands or more, of people who came before us. The reason I can type these words into my computer is the hundreds of thousands of hours of research, trial and error, bloodshed, and hardship that went into its creation, as well as that of every little gadget we take for granted. Life requires a hefty amount of faith in others, both living and deceased. And yet, when we are called upon to have faith in larger areas of our life, we become skeptics and cynics, unable to take chances for fear of getting hurt.
“He said, ‘What do you want to do, Little Heath, when you grow up?’ I was like, ‘Oh, I'm gonna play in the NFL.’ And I remember him looking to my Dad, and this is my first conscious, memorable thought of someone kind of doubting what I felt like God just put in me as a youngster. He said, ‘The kid doesn't have a clue how hard it is to make it.’ And I was four. How I remember that, I don't know. I think it was that first kind of heart wound of like, ‘Oh. You tryin’ to squash what I'm dreaming of?'”
—Heath Evans, 10-year NFL fullback, Super Bowl Champion
When I decided to become an actor, with no Plan B, it was faith that kept me from turning back. I had a trust that if I did the work, and had some talent, someone would eventually acknowledge it. It required grit and determination on my part, sure, but all of that would have amounted to nothing if not for the teachers, friends, mentors, and opportunities that I believed would show up to help me. And they did show up. Except when they didn't. And when they didn't, I'd just tell myself it was for a reason I couldn't yet see, and I'd believe they'd show up the next time. Some people hear my stance on this topic and think that it's blind. They're not completely wrong. Remember that phrase I told my wife, “willful denial”? I could also call it “intentional blindness.” Having faith requires us to see what we want to believe, even if it's not right in front of us. And while faith is not asking us to ignore what is right in front of us when it is not pleasing, it is saying, “Yes, this may be the case right now, and you need to accept it, but that doesn't mean you have to focus on it and make it worse than it really is, or that it can't change for the better.”
My late cousin David Ferrara, a successful entrepreneur before his premature death, used to say, “If you're not stretching, you're not growing.” Morgan Freeman's Shawshank Redemption character, Red, whom I quoted in an earlier chapter, famously said, “Get busy living or get busy dying.” Either direction, change is occurring all the time. Faith is a belief that that change will not always be against you. Cancelling my bartending shift the night before my Sopranos audition was in faith that, against the likely odds, I would at least have a shot at that role. I can't count how many times before and after that audition I have risked from that same premise and lost. But, because I choose to see those losses merely as steps toward my next win, triumph is inevitable.
I am aware that the cynics among you think this sounds like complete and utter hogwash. Bad things do happen to good people, and great effort is often not rewarded while cheating and boisterous behavior many times are rewarded. All that being true, my question, like Jon Gordon's, is:
Why believe anything but that which will empower you?
When I failed to score the role in the soap opera after my screen test, would it have been smarter to interpret that as a sign that I had no right to be a professional actor? If I had done that, I never would have auditioned for The Sopranos just a short time later. When I was told I was the frontrunner for the role on The Sopranos, but at the final callback saw the names of actors from the biggest agencies in the business on the sign-in sheets, would it have been smarter to leave the office and take the subway home? I remember considering that. I had made it this far, but it was ludicrous to think that a show of this stature would ever give this job to me. But the fact is, they did. Sometimes it is you. This is why I often ask myself, “Why not me?”
I'll never forget walking down Fifth Avenue about an hour after that final callback, December 20, 2001. I had a message on my phone from casting director Georgianne Walken and it didn't sound good. “Hey, honey … I just wanted to tell you …” her voice sounded somber until, after a brief pause, she uttered the line that changed the course of my career, “You got the part, kiddo!” When I woke up that morning, I didn't know that would be the case. And, likewise, wherever you are right now, you have no idea where you'll be tomorrow. None of us does. It could be in the position you've dreamed of for a lifetime, or it could be in a morgue. Sounds morbid, I know, but it's that razor's edge that we straddle every day that gives value to every breath we are lucky enough to breathe above ground. With such limited breaths, why would you choose to believe in anything but your greatest dreams coming true?
Rather than just share an example of where belief and behavior led to a win, I want to share a story of one of my 10,000 NOs guests, Rob Whitaker, who was battling cancer when we sat down to talk, a battle that, sadly, he eventually lost. Whitaker had every reason to complain and be a victim: at age 43 he went in for a typical annual physical and just a few days later, completely out of the blue, was told by a doctor that he should “get his affairs in order.” Rob was diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer. He could easily have rolled over and died right then, but instead he chose to fight his cancer by living his life to the fullest with his wife and children. He also fought it with an irreverent humor not commonly applied to cancer.
“I see a lot of this at Sloan, cancer patients are funny, right? They like to talk and they like to talk to other people with cancer … but they like to talk to people with cancer that are worse than them. Right? It's kind of a f#%ked up hierarchy in there, right? There's, like, ya know, the Freshman and the JVs and the Varsity and then, even to like the Grad guys, ya know? The pro level cancers. And, uh, unfortunately, I'm like pro level cancer.”
—Rob Whitaker, on his fight with Stage IV colon cancer
Instead of using the hushed and precious tone that is commonly associated with conversations about cancer, Rob would write beautifully crafted, wickedly funny passages that documented his trials and tribulations in bimonthly emails to his family and many friends, titling them “Rob's C-Notes.” They were so funny and unique that when my sister-in-law, a friend of Rob's, read them to us one morning after I had just launched my podcast, I said I needed to meet him. By approaching his big “no” with the heart of a warrior, Rob inspired not only his wife and children, who have suffered through his death, but many other cancer patients and their families who face similarly long odds. He is a prime example of how a good attitude and belief in something larger than the challenges in our immediate sight can allow us to win the war for others, even if we lose our own particular battle.
Many people defend their lack of expansion by vehemently exclaiming that “you are who you are.” But humans are capable of huge change. Even doubters admit they have a capacity for change when it comes to tangible skills. They just don't believe it applies to aspects of life that they consider to be intangible, like belief and faith. These skeptics write off the idea that they can systematically increase their ability to believe in themselves because they mistakenly imagine people like myself proposing a program that consists of repeating a mantra for eight hours a day while not doing anything differently. What I am proposing, however, is more along the lines of Don Saladino's advice in the chapter on transformation: start small at first, and allow your ever-increasing self-belief to grow with each tiny win.
Biting off more than you can chew is a good path to eventually quitting. I've seen too many young actors throw in the towel because they compared themselves to Gary Oldman. The gap between his ability and theirs was so large that the only logical thing to do was quit. While I wholeheartedly believe in striving for greatness and eventually being considered one of the elite, part of the problem with this approach is that it's like an ant weighing itself on an elephant's scale. Had I berated myself for not being nominated for an Oscar for my performance in The North End, my first feature film, that would have been insane. Just as NFL great Tom Brady does not berate himself for not hitting as many homeruns as former Major League Baseball star Derek Jeter, because football doesn't allow for homeruns, you need to pull things into your own wheelhouse first. Once you build momentum and gain confidence, then you can recalibrate your scale and start to work toward your next goal. The way one eats an elephant is one bite at a time.
Momentum is a game changer, so you need to cultivate it. My friend Chris Messina and I used to jokingly call ourselves “The Dali Chrissy” or “The Dali Matty” when we were on a hot streak as actors because, at those times when one of us was employed, our advice to the unemployed counterpart (me or Chris, depending on who was up and who was down) was always, “Just relax … it'll come to you.” That's easy to say when things are going your way, but not so easy when you can't get a job if your life depended on it.
For that reason, my friend Blake Robbins and I came up with an approach to scoring our own auditions that did not rely on outside opinions. After reading a book on John Wooden, one of the winningest coaches in college basketball history, I shared one of my takeaways with Robbins. Wooden told his players that when they returned to UCLA on the bus from away games, he did not want their families or girlfriends to know if they won or lost based on their behavior. He believed that too much celebrating after a win, or too much sulking after a loss, meant they had judged their performance by the final score on the scoreboard. In his opinion, the game was won or lost before it was played by the way the team prepared. He was more interested in them “leaving it all on the court.” Ironically, when they did that, they usually won on the scoreboard, too. From then on, when Robbins and I would grade our own auditions, we would describe them as a “win” or a “loss” before we found out if we got the job. This was a way to control our own internal barometer and set it for success rather than allowing someone else to turn it way up or down.
Regardless of your field, or what aspect of your life you are dissecting, self-belief and belief in others around you is imperative. Do everything you can to cultivate it and with each small victory you'll be on your way to unlocking a more confident version of yourself. Some of you may view this in religious terms and look to God for your strength. Others may view it in the sense of putting faith in the universe. Still others will view it more pragmatically, based on tangible, measurable accomplishments. Regardless of the semantics you use, belief and faith come from gratitude for what you have now and what you will eventually gain on your own.