Bettering our Acting Training and Practice with Brooke Macnamara (REWIND)

Happy New Year! Thank you for listening to Why I’ll Never Make It!

The next season is just a few weeks away and I wanted to start off the year by going back to conversations I had to with two psychologists in 2020. I think their insights are a good reminder for us as we continue to grow and better ourselves as artists.

The first one you’ll hear from is Brooke MacNamara, Ph.D. We talk about the amount of training, coaching, and practice it takes to continually hone our craft as performers. One often talked about strategy is called the 10,000 Hours Rule, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, who you’ll also be hearing from throughout this discussion. But Dr. MacNamara, has done research that shows the importance of quality over quantity.

In his 2008 book Outliers: The Story of Success, Gladwell proposes this 10,000 Hours Rule based on a study of violinists conducted by psychologist Anders Ericcson. And the rule is pretty simple: mastery comes after someone practices one skill, like playing the violin, and according to Gladwell “10,000 hours is the magic number of greatness.” This rewind episode focuses on this rule, its implications, and how or if it can even be applied to us as artists.

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Why I’ll Never Make It is an award-winning, Top 25 Theater Podcast hosted by Off-Broadway actor and singer Patrick Oliver Jones, and it is a production of WINMI Media. Background music in this episode by John Bartmann and Blue Dot Sessions is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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