Four Ways To Make Your Own Luck

Keeping yourself prepared is one significant way to make sure that luck is on your side. Success in our business requires 120% effort every day, so you must always be preparing and working on your craft. Work hard on your dialects, monologues, auditioning and camera skills, so that when opportunity comes, you are ready.

You will never know when opportunity will come knocking and when it does, if you’re not ready, it will fly on by. Opportunity will always award those who are prepared and ready and by investing time and energy in being prepared, you will keep luck on your side. The deceptive thing about luck is that it is not luck at all, those who are 'lucky' are those who spend hours behind the scenes preparing and practicing.

“Diligence is the mother of good luck.” — Benjamin Franklin

Don’t procrastinate on a project, instead focus on it and follow it through. Don’t allow yourself to make excuses about why you are not working on scripts or audition material. Have the discipline to always be working and you will see that with the energy you exert on yourself and your career, opportunity will come and luck will reward you.

This is an analogy I have used many times: You have to think of yourself as a professional athlete. You can’t expect to play any sport professionally or dance professionally and not train on a continuous basis. You have to keep your skills sharp and ready, so that when opportunity comes, you can jump to it and create your own luck. The more skills you have, the more opportunity you will have to be lucky. If you’re always ready and always preparing, luck opens her arms to you almost always.

When Carli Lloyd scored a key goal for the United States women’s soccer team against the Germans in the semi-finals of this year’s World Cup, she was asked how she prepared to take such an amazing goal. She simply said that it was countless hours of taking penalty kicks after practice for the past four years that helped her to be ready for her big moment. A clear example of energy and preparation that helped her create her luck.

Here are four ways you can help create your own luck

Don’t procrastinate. You have the thought of an idea, so act on it immediately. Trust that your idea will create something for you. It always does! As Mel Robbins says, do a countdown of five, four, three, two, one and ACT!

Create your own projects. Shoot a short with your iPhone and upload it to YouTube or Vimeo. Have a reading at your house and invite some people to help create a performance atmosphere. This type of energy will always open doors for you.

Always be reading. Read out loud and read to educate yourself about the world. It will spark inspiration in your creativity and give you ideas to create your own projects.

Always be auditioning. If you’re not getting called in, audition yourself so that you can be ready. You can’t expect to have a good audition when you haven’t placed yourself under pressure in weeks. Put yourself on tape, send it to a friend and work on your monologues with a friend.

About Douglas Taurel

Douglas Taurel loves working on stories that are a bit dark and dramatic. He is consistently drawn to playing characters that are intense, gritty and live on the harder side of life.

He has had the opportunity to work on many of NY’s TV dramas like Mr. Robot, Blue Bloods, The Americans, The Following, Damages, Person of Interest, Nurse Jackie to just name a few and recently played a hit man, Tom McCarthy’s “The Cobbler” starring Dustin Hoffman and Adam Sandler.

Douglas has also been fortunate enough to grace many of New York stages in many classic and dramatic plays and his favorite role is Lee in “True West”. Douglas had the opportunity to perform the play both in New York and Edinburgh Festival Fringe where, as a cast, they received a five star review and a strong review by the New York Times - "Douglas Taurel is a fine actor as George".

He studied with Wynn Handman, his mentor and the foundation of his acting training. He also had the incredible opportunity to study and work with some amazing artists; Alec Baldwin, Kathleen Turner, Marian Seldes and Edward Albee, to name just a few. Taking on huge challenges is in his DNA. He boxed in college, ran marathons in New York and Philadelphia, ran with the bulls in Spain and climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro.

Douglas feels very fortunate to be the son of Hispanic parents and was given the opportunity to live in South American and to learn how to speak fluent Spanish. 

He has recently produced and performed his solo show The American Soldier which was nominated for an Amnesty International Award and received strong reviews in it's Off Broadway, The Huffington Post - "A flawless and powerful show", and earned four stars at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2015.

Twitter: @DouglasTaurel IMDB: http://www.imdb.me/douglastaurel Website: www.DouglasTaurelActingBlog.com Website: www.DouglasTaurel.com

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