THE TIGHT VERSION: AN ANECDOTE / ANALOGY

At every stage of your Hollywood career you will be given an opportunity to practice THE TIGHT VERSION or to take the lazy way  out.  Every time you take the lazy way your dream gets farther away from you because you are surrounded by peers who are throwing down with THE TIGHT VERSION.

NOTE: THIS LETTER WAS FIRST WRITTEN AS A PRIVATE MAILING TO MY CLIENTS 7/5/19. 

This is my 4th of July message. Because if you look at the espoused American ideals, everywhere you look, you see THE TIGHT VERSION. In our industry, the "Entertainment Industry", you will see corruption, nepotism, cronyism and luck everywhere you go. But don't give in to any of that, because if you succeed by any of those methods it will not be satisfying nor will your success be long-lived. As they say, Hollywood is a marathon not a sprint. Or as Mrs. Waddlesworth says, Hollywood is one decathlon a year for the rest of your life, not a marathon like your social proof friends told you (recall: the marathon is but one event in the decathlon).

THE TIGHT VERSION: BEATING THE ENTRENCHED INCUMBENT
This is an elaboration on the principle of THE TIGHT VERSION.  This is an essay about a field of endeavour which has nothing to do with acting or auditioning or anything else.  I am writing this essay to draw ANALOGOUS COMPARISONS so that you may see a principle more clearly without your own emotional & conceptual entanglements with false beliefs that you may still be holding onto about success in the entertainment industry.

In order to rise in Hollywood, you literally may need to defeat an incumbent in a competitive auditioning scenario and the entrenched competitor may be an established actor with hundreds of episodes of television on their resume. Generally speaking, everyone "knows" this is impossible.  But I've seen it done, but only with the tight version.

THE TIGHT VERSION: PILZ VS. GARNBRET 2018 WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS IN LEAD
Most of you are not interested in rock climbing, which, for people like myself is simply"climbing".  However, due to the OSCARS being a Hollywood event, many of you probably know who ALEX HONNOLD is (Free Solo won an Oscar for Best Documentary).  You might even think that Alex Honnold is the best climber in the world.  However, you would be mistaken.  Although Honnold himself is a shining example of THE TIGHT VERSION, I am going to use another, more compelling study of performance to illustrate this concept.

You might even think that Ashima Shiriashi is the best climber in the world.  She's famous in America, but again, she's not there yet, maybe in a few years.

Climbers who know climbing know that the best climber in the world right now is either Janja Garnbret or Adam Ondra, depending on who you talk to and depending on whether you're focused on indoor sport climbing on synthetic holds or on actual rock climbing outdoors.

The IFSC is the governing body for sport climbing on synthetic holds and the master climbers who design the routes that the climbers must climb are called "route-setters."  And the most senior routesetter in the IFSC said that Janja Garnbret is the best climber that has ever lived.  I'm going to run with his opinion.

At just 20 years old, be advised that Janja Garnbret is a child climbing prodigy from Slovenia who has been competing on the international competitive climbing circuit since she was 14 or 15 or even younger.  Climbing will be an Olympic sport at TOKYO 2020 and you won't be surprised if Janja wins the gold medal because I just told you she is favored to win the gold mostly because she is currently dominant in all lead and bouldering (female) climbing competitions.

To understand how dominant she is, there were five major international bouldering (climbing) competitions this year (2019) and she took the gold medal (first place) in all of them.  Easily.

She is so good that it is generally understood that she is going to be winning the competition if she chooses to compete.

So generally speaking, it is "impossible to beat" Janja Garnbret.  

Or is it?

Because I'm "on the spectrum" and because every IFSC climbing competition has been streamed live on YouTube since 2014, I have watched (on YouTube) every IFSC bouldering competition that has been held since they started putting them on the internet.  I go in reverse chronological order and I'm currently around mid-2017 for lead climbing competitions. (Subsequent to writing this blog I had the opportunity to train with a former World Cup Champion which was also very enlightening.)

Every two years a climbing competition (called the world championship) is held to determine who is the world champion in both men's and women's climbing.

Since Janja is the best climber in the world (or at the very least the best female climber in the world), she won the world championship because she is unbeatable, right?

The answer is no.

The world championship in lead climbing was won last year by a female climber, who, in 2017 wasn't a serious challenger to Janja or any of the top 6.  Sure, she was competing and doing well, but compared to Janja, she was just one in a large field of excellent athletes who were actually quite far behind Janja in terms of consistency and winning.

This is the story (or at least my version) of how Jessie Pilz of Austria used THE TIGHT VERSION to win the World Championship in lead climbing in 2018.  Janja came in second place.

In climbing, being precise with your movements is paramount to success.  Any of you who watched FREE SOLO already know that.  Of course in FREE SOLO, failing to be precise results in death whereas in competitive sport climbing failing to be precise simply results in poor competition results.

Jessica Pilz is an Austrian climber and the first thing that you notice when you see her climbing is how disciplined and intentional she is every time she moves her body on the route.  While Janja is a flashy climber pulling off breathtaking and spectacular movements that awe the crowd, Pilz is decidedly unflashy and methodical in her approach to climbing.  

In addition to being precise, a key to climbing and especially lead climbing is muscular efficiency.  In order to ascend a challenging route, you must conserve energy by climbing most efficiently so that when you reach the upper sections of the route you still have enough energy to continue climbing.  In sport climbing at the world championship level, the routes are carefully designed to exhaust climbers as they ascend so that only the very best climbers reach the top of the wall.  Scores are calculated by the number of holds that the individual climber reaches on the wall up the wall.  If more than one climber reaches the top, then the time that they took to reach the top becomes the determining factor on who wins.

At the world championship level most climbers do not reach the top of the route.  This is by design.  And in 2018 only two climbers reached the top of the female lead route: Janja Ganbret and Jessie Pilz.

So imagine you are a competitive female climber who was born in the same era as Janja Ganbret.  Janja is dominating every competition, why even bother to compete at all?  Well that's an excellent question and someday if I meet Jessie Pilz I might ask her that question.  One reason might be so that she could beat Janja Ganbret in the 2018 Lead climbing World Championships when Janja Garnbret was at the very peak of her climbing career.  Now that's a feather for the cap, isn't it?

In any event, if you turn back the time to 2017 or 2016 you can see that Jessica Pilz is an excellent competitor and also a strong youth competitor, but she was quite low in the rankings compared to some of the others dominant in the sport.

So the question is, how did she rise in the rankings in just 18-24 months in order to beat Janja Ganbret who was universally acknowledged to be "unbeatable?"

I learned the answer by listening to more than 200 hours of "color commentary" provided by the broadcasters in the IFSC competitions.  During the competitions there is always a main commentator describing what is happening on the wall.  And there is always a guest commentator from the sport who is filling in additional details about what the audience is seeing. Some of the guests include the route-setters, other professional climbers and former professional climbers.

Now, to digress for a moment.  Austria of course is a mountainous country and so it's not surprising that climbing is a popular sport in the country.  In fact, many top climbers hail from Austria.  But what is significant to this story is the construction of the Kletterzentrum in Innsbruck, Austria which is essentially the best indoor climbing facility in the world, especially for lead climbing (climbing long routes wearing a harness and protected by a belay system & ropes).  The Kletterzentrum is where the Austrian national team trains.  Guess what?  The Kletterzentrum was opened in 2017 and Jessica Pilz moved to Innsbruck so that she would be able to train on a daily basis at the Kletterzentrum.  This is the factoid I learned from the color commentators.

This figures significantly in the world championship because the Kletterzentrum is one of the few facilities (possibly the only facility) where climbers can find indoor climbing routes that are longer and more challenging than the routes that they will actually face in the world championships.  So if you want to develop climbing endurance and be surrounded by the top coaches, the Kletterzentrum is the place you want to be.

So, here you have a top notch climber who is just one of a large field of athletes who are placing in the top 50 regularly while Janja is placing in the top 2 of every competition.  And Jessica Pilz somehow emerges from that group to defeat Janja in the most important competition of 2018.

How did she do it?  Well, you can watch the final match online here.  You will probably do that if you like watching grass grow.  Watching climbing is not really like watching the superbowl.  I think you can see that Jessica Pilz climbed this route perfectly, efficiently and without making any errors.  And you will also see that Janja climbed the route easily and perfectly but unfortunately made one error: she rested too long near the top of the route before climbing the final pitch to the top.  And so Jessica Pilz and Janja Garnbret were effectively tied based on the climbing performance until you factor in the time taken to climb the route.

Most people consider Janja Garnbret to be freakishly talented as a climber.  Obviously she trains hard and is very skilled.  But she also seems to be unusually gifted as a climber.  In fact FREE SOLO climber ALEX HONNOLD discusses "freakishly talented" climbers in this TED TALK that he gave in Vancouver in 2018.

"I was never a talented climber." - Alex Honnold

Now to re-contextualize this fable for your own endeavours:  maybe you weren't born into a family of actors and had access to a rich childhood experience in the entertainment industry where you could emerge at 18 as a child movie star.  Well, so what!  There is another way.  Unfortunately this latter method also requires the most stringent, disciplined life with no room for errors.  It's a life of sacrifice. You're sacrificing a comfortable ordinary American life so you can live the American dream.  It's the life of someone who continues to study, improve and better themselves by immersing themselves in their craft and seeking out the very best teachers and very best training environments in which to grow.

I personally believe that human beings are designed to be self-evolving "growing machines."  The only reason that people stop growing is through fear/laziness and/or failing to expose oneself to new methods of approaching the same thing.

For example: you get foundational improv training at iO or Second City but never venture over to the Groundlings to see how those crazy people live.  That would be an example of excluding oneself from valuable educational environments that potentially could change your destiny.

Almost all the incumbent stars in the entertainment business, as I have described previously, are essentially child prodigies who became movie or television stars when they were as young as 15-16.  Unless you have a time machine, it's not going to be possible to travel back in time and claim those accomplishments for yourself.  

You will need a different approach.  I recommend THE TIGHT VERSION.

Or maybe you'll be lucky.

I don't believe in luck as a life strategy.  If luck is your preferred game, I recommend buying lottery tickets instead of wasting your money on writing, acting, comedy and auditioning classes.

Some of your friends and associates will be lucky.  But luck is a fickle thing: this year you're lucky and next year you're just another schmuck.  Maybe luck will get you over the first hurdle in Hollywood: a television Series Regular credit.  But will it also get you over the next hurdle?  

The point here is: if you moved to Hollywood as an adult and aspire to succeed in the entertainment business, I believe you will find success if you uniformly practice THE TIGHT VERSION in all areas of your career.  Because the TIGHT VERSION is a recipe for success in every discipline, it's a universal recipe for success.

And by the way, neither Janja Garnbret nor Jessie Pilz are my favorite climber.  My favorite climber is Akiyo Noguchi, who also is an embodiment of THE TIGHT VERSION.  But in her case, she is additionally considered to be TOO OLD.  Akiyo is 10 years older than most of the other top female climbers in the world and every time Janja comes in first, Akiyo typically comes in second.

I'm basically "TOO OLD" for everything I've been interested in (like becoming a rock star) so Ima throw in with Akiyo. 

About 6 months after writing this blog I got a chance to travel to Japan and climb at the top facilities in Tokyo.  I mostly discuss individual climbing achievements above, but as far as a team sport goes, the Japanese dominate.  I leave it to the reader to travel to Japan and learn why that is. HAI!