When I began teaching, one colleague impressed me with her work and with the look on her face when a lesson landed. More than once I watched her drop into her chair, fling her arms, sigh, and say, “I did it again. I just gave the best performance.” She had finished a lesson on double-digit addition for 27 second graders. She nailed it. In her mind, it was Oscar-winning.
Bruno Mars seems to have that same love of a job done right. His Super Bowl sets and his Grammy tribute to Prince come down to one word: brilliant. On 60 Minutes he said, “I just really care about what people see. I want them to know that I’m working hard for this. The artists that I look up to like, you know, Michael, Prince, James Brown. You watch them and you understand that they’re paying attention to the details of their art. And they care so much about what they’re wearing, about how they’re moving, about how they’re making the audience feel. They’re not phoning it in.”
So the question worth keeping is this: are we giving the performance, or are we phoning it in?
I still fall into the trap of thinking great work—and success—drops from the sky onto a lucky few. For most of us it does not. It is built from the next small, careful performance.
Denzel Washington offered a useful correction for anyone still waiting on luck. Accepting the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Actor in a Motion Picture (Fences, 2017), he talked about getting up after a fall. He closed with: “Ease is a greater threat to progress than hardship, so keep moving, keep growing, keep learning. See you at work.”
Want to be brilliant? You can be, even if you are the only one in the room. Attend to the details. Treat a miss as a chance to grow. Use the thing you care about to give a performance that would satisfy you—Oscar or not.