Mark relates a discussion about goal-setting theory to one of the techniques he uses when teaching his acting students. Mark and his wife Tracy teach the Meisner Technique at their acting school in Paris. You can’t have generalized goals.
You need to be clear about what you want to achieve. That helps focus and motivate you. They have to be clear, specific, and measurable. Not “do your best.” I mean, this is the sort of thing we hear from so many people: “Just do your best, you know.” That’s really too amorphous for the human consciousness to grasp onto and for your internal motivation to actually do something with. You have to have a challenge. The difficulty has to be there. The goal should be hard but attainable. This reminds me of the activity exercise in The Meisner Technique. An activity has to be very challenging. It can’t be impossible, but you have to barely be able to do it in the time that you’re able to do it in.
Meisner, as the genius acting teacher that he was, developed this technique to hone focus and motivation, and it really brings out experience. If you just put your attention entirely on this difficult project or problem that you have to solve within a certain specific time frame—that you can barely get it done within that time frame—you’ll find yourself having incredible, actual experiences on stage. Not fake ones, not pretend ones, but real ones.
And it turns out, if you do that same thing in life, your performance enhances with the difficulty, up to the limit of your ability, of course. If the challenge is too easy, of course, you’re going to get bored. If it’s too hard, you’re going to get frustrated. So you have to find that sweet spot.
