The Vs. Studio Blog

“It’s time to reclaim excellence. Excellence is less about what you do and more about how you do it. You can aspire toward excellence in any worthwhile project.If you strive to do it well, just about anything can be truly transformative.” -Brad Stulberg

The reason to pursue excellence is…well…to pursue excellence.

Brad Stulberg in his book The Way Of Excellence points out that biologically we are wired to do so. He uses the concept of “homeostatic upregulation” to support this claim. While standard homeostasis is an organism’s baseline drive to maintain stability and survive, homeostatic upregulation is the innate biological tendency to go beyond mere survival and actively grow, adapt, and flourish.

Stulberg argues that even the most primitive organisms do not just sit passively in their environment; they possess a sophisticated form of “sensing and responding” that forces them to seek out better conditions, optimize their functioning, and expand. In humans, this exact same ancient, biological life force is what manifests as our psychological desire to master a craft, learn a new skill, and realize our full potential. According to Stulberg, because this drive is hardwired into our biology, working against it or living a completely disengaged, passive life feels inherently unnatural and unfulfilling.

So like it or not, it’s our job, our duty, our nature to constantly pursue excellence. That’s reason enough.

How you do anything is how you do everything.

In medieval and ancient philosophy, the Wheel of Fortune or Rota Fortunae is a symbol of the capricious nature of Fate. The wheel belongs to the goddess Fortuna (Greek equivalent: Tyche) who spins it at random, changing the positions of those on the wheel: some suffer great misfortune, others gain windfalls. -per Wikipedia

“Thirty spokes share the hub of a wheel; yet it is its center that makes it useful.” –Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu

“Happiness, fulfillment, well-being, and sustainable performance arise when you concentrate on being present in the process of living instead of obsessing over outcomes, and above all when you’re firmly grounded wherever you are.” -Brad Stulberg, book The Practice of Groundedness: A Transformative Path to Success That Feeds–Not Crushes–Your Soul

If life is a wheel of fortune, then the only way to avoid fear and anxiety is not to live in the ever-changing rim, but rather, to remain in the center.

What is the center? It’s that place where no matter what happens, you always come back to and feel grounded.

Find your center and you will find your peace.

“You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” -Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.” -Rumi

“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And you are the one who’ll decide where to go.” –Oh The Places You’ll Go by Dr. Seuss

To get started, you don’t need to know how to get there or if you will ever get there.

You just need to pick a direction and then take one step in that direction. That’s it.

Once you’ve taken that step, then and only then, will you concentrate on what the next step is.

For now, focus on one step.

Step by step. That’s how anything ever gets done.

It’s also the only way to ensure you enjoy the process. Which in the end, is the only reason to try and do anything, anyway.

“In 1977, the science fiction writer Orson Scott Card sent a draft of his later-to-be award-winning and film-adapted Ender’s Game to the science fiction magazine Analog Science Fiction and Fact. The magazine’s editor Ben Bova wrote back to Card. In the letter, Bova said that, though he liked Ender’s Game, it needed to be cut in half. Before he sent the draft out, Card had read and reread Ender’s Game over and over and over. “If something could be cut out,” he said, “I didn’t put it in.” As Card thought about Bova’s note, he eventually realized this: when Bova says the story needs to be cut in half, what he’s also implicitly saying is, ‘to me, it feels way too long.’ So Card asked himself, why did it feel too long? What did I do that made it feel too long? “I realized I probably had too many battles in it,” he said. “I went in and cut out one battle entirely. I cut another one in half. Then I realized a few places where I wanted to elaborate on things. So the manuscript I sent back to Ben was a page or two longer than the one he had told me I should cut in half. But I didn’t remind him that he told me to cut it in half. What I said was, ‘I addressed the problems you mentioned. Let me know what you think of it.’” The feeling that the story was too long was apparently gone, because Bova said nothing about the fact that the manuscript was now even longer, replying instead with a contract and a check to publish it. “So much for ‘cut it in half,’” Card said. -Billy Oppenheimer, Six at Six newsletter

“When people say that something is wrong, they are almost always right. When they tell you how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.” -Ryan Holiday

The Orson Scott Card story above reminds me of a classic Paul Newman story…I can’t recall which film or director, but supposedly after several takes, the director approached Newman, said the scene was dragging and politely asked if he could speed it up. Maybe talk faster?

Newman replied, “Sure thing.”

They went back, did the take. The director LOVED it. He came running up to Newman saying how wonderful the scene was. It was a print. They could move on. The director then asked Newman what he did to make it so riveting.

To which Newman replied, “I went slower.”

“The film editor Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now, The Godfather I, II, and III, American Graffiti, etc.) writes in In the Blink of an Eye that every time he test screens a movie, “there’s a lot of what is medically called ‘referred pain’ in the process.” Referred pain is when you experience pain in a part of the body different from the actual source or cause of the pain. Pain in your elbow, for instance, is often caused by a pinch nerved up in your shoulder—you just happen to feel the pain in your elbow. The pain in the shoulder is “referred” to the elbow. Audience feedback is often like that, Murch continues. If a percentage of the audience agree that they don’t like a specific scene, “the chances are that that scene is fine. Instead, the problem may be that the audience simply didn’t understand something that they needed to know for the scene to work.” So, instead of fixing the scene itself, “you might clarify some exposition that happens five minutes earlier. Don’t necessarily operate on the elbow: instead, discover if nerves are being pinched somewhere else.” -Billy Oppenheimer, Six at Six Newsletter

For the actor…

If you’re having trouble in a particular moment or beat of a scene, chances are that’s not the actual problem.

Go back a few pages and look over your all actions again. Most likely something is amiss in one or several of the prior beats. Get that right and everything else going forward will fall into place.

A Part Two to yesterday’s post and a little origin story of how Sawyer came to the Clark household…

We rescued Sawyer from a kennel. He was originally bred to be a show dog for an overseas owner in Japan. During Covid, when all the dog shows were cancelled, the owner called the kennel and decided he no longer wanted Sawyer. As he had no use for him. The kennel was also closing down and the kennel owner didn’t know what to do with this dog. After talking with the kennel owner and learning all this, my wife Amy and I drove down (a few hours away) the next day. We were prepared to take Sawyer on the spot and have him become part of our family. Our kids were beyond excited.

The kennel owner informed us that Sawyer was “afraid of males.” I thought he meant other male dogs, but when we got home, Sawyer immediately clung to Amy’s side. He was afraid of me and our boys. (Apparently the training for show dogs is very rough and not kind.)

I realized that unlike other prior dogs we had, where the kids could play with and the dogs would love on them and vice versa, Sawyer was different. Every time me or the boys went to pet him, Sawyer would flee towards Amy. I realized we had to switch our mindset. This would have to be total and unconditional love. It was our duty to just be kind and take care of Sawyer with no expectation of reciprocity.

This went on for years.

Eventually (after lots of love and walks and lots and lots of treats), Sawyer softened. He’d let us hug him and pet him (reluctantly I’m sure) and he learned to trust us. (He still of course was Amy’s numero uno and followed her around like a shadow.)

All this to say that Sawyer taught us true unconditional love. And that is a lesson we will remember for the rest of our lives.

Pets are remarkable, aren’t they? What a gift. What a blessing.

Thank you Sawyer. We love you and we miss you so much.

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” -C.S. Lewis

I wish it were otherwise, but you don’t get to feel all that love and joy and happiness without experiencing the sadness and grief and pain. You have to experience the full spectrum of emotion.

That’s the cost of opening your heart.

But I’ll pay that price every single time.

P.S. – R.I.P. dear Sawyer. We’ll miss you buddy so much. Thank you for all the love and joy and incredible memories you gave to our family.

“A Hard Day’s Night took less than 15 hours from idea to finished record. More Than a Feeling, from Tom Scholz and Boston, took five years. Each pleased their audiences. One is not 1,500 times more valuable than the other.

Sometimes, work that requires effort leads to scarcity, and that scarcity can increase its value. But not always.

And just because we put in effort does not mean we deserve the audience to reciprocate with a similar amount. Seven years to write a Ph.D. thesis but a professor on the committee might spend an hour reading it. The student’s effort is not related to the committee’s.

The mythology of creation seems to beg us to calculate the effort when computing the value. But in practice, buyers rarely do.

If the creation is what the audience needs or wants, it actually doesn’t matter how hard it was to create, or who or what created it.” -Seth Godin

“When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.” -Steve Jobs

“Hard work guarantees you nothing, but without it you don’t stand a chance.” -Pat Riley

Nobody cares how hard you worked on the thing you made. It’s not their job to care.

They only care about the thing you made.

But you, the creator, should very much care. You owe it to them and to yourself.

If not, why even do it in the first place?

“Never shirk the proper dispatch of your duty, no matter if you are freezing or hot, groggy or well-rested, vilified or praised, not even if dying or pressed by other demands.” -Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Even if you could get away with not doing your best, let alone fulfilling your duty, why would you want to?

“Everything is an audition…One of the biggest mistakes I see people make is they are too short-sighted…When I’m trying to build something, I pretend it’s an audition for a bigger stage.” -Turney Duff

“The Master gives himself up to whatever the moment brings. He knows that he is going to die, and he has nothing left to hold on to: no illusions in his mind, no resistances in his body. He doesn’t think about his actions; they flow from the core of his being. He holds nothing back from life; therefore he is ready for death, as a man is ready for sleep after a good day’s work.” -Verse 50, Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu (Stephen Mitchell translation)

No matter how last minute, the actor will move heaven and earth to prepare for and make an audition appointment. Especially if it’s for a project they care about. Suddenly all tasks become secondary and in that time, nothing is more important. Talk about focus!

Imagine if you treated everything in life that way? If everything was an audition? At the very least, what about just showing up and being present in every moment and every encounter with another person?

Your whole life will change if you do.

P.S. – This fantastic IG post from my friend Turney.