Edoardo Ballerini

We’ve all heard the metaphors about careers being a journey, or a road, or some kind of travel experience. But as important as the journey is the vehicle doing the journeying. If you’ll play along for a second, think of the vehicle as being a single wheel.

There are many aspects to an actor’s career – training, marketing, representation, appearance, industry knowledge, networking – and each one acts as a spoke of the wheel. The spokes need to be equal in length, and equal in strength. If one of them is too short, or too weak, the wheel stumbles, doesn’t turn, or outright falls apart.

Your training needs to be equally as strong as your representation, which should be equally as strong as your networking efforts. Failure to pay attention to the different areas will usually lead to some imbalance and eventual collapse. It may get you by for a while, but it’s not a great long term strategy.

If you’re not buying the “wheel” analogy, I’ll offer two others: exercise and money management. You cannot get in any real shape if you only work out your biceps, and you can’t expect to make any money in the market if you put all your cash into tech stocks. Whatever the analogy, it’s about balance, and every career needs it.

Too often I meet actors putting everything into one area of their professional life. Either they overload on classes, or they spend their days networking and little else, but I’ve yet to see these strategies yield any real results. As I say, it can catch for the short-term, but ask yourself this: what kind of wheel would you like beneath you for the journey?