“flappy hand” goes away and the actor delivers a more centered and powerful performance than before.
Observation is a powerful tool. A primary trait of a gifted actor is their well-honed ability to observe humans in action. As a young actor, you “play” a character—you want a quick laugh or to milk a dramatic scene and you try to coax a certain response from your audience. That’s death, because it’s fake. For instance, in a comedy, characters don’t think they’re funny. The audience laughs because they identify with the people in the play. A good actor will inhabit a character, without judging the person they’re playing and planning for a certain response. As a performer, they may genuinely feel terror in a role while the audience howls with delight.
Here’s a story along these lines from the world of acting. You’ve heard about Method actors so caught up in their roles that they fully believe they’ve become another person. That can happen, but these stories tend to be overblown. As a professional actor, you’ve got to show up for eight shows a week in theater or hit your mark in film or TV. It’s great to be Method and passionate, but if you lose touch with reality, you won’t continue to get hired. This pragmatic aspect of performance also relates to the idea of playing an action in a scene. For instance, you can’t “play” being sad in a scene—sadness is the result of not getting something you’re pursuing.
There’s a famous story of the renowned acting teacher and Moscow Art Theatre founder Constantin Stanislavski working with a group of young performers, teaching them the importanceof playing an action in a scene. He asked one of his students to go onstage and sit in an armchair he’d placed there. Given no specific instruction, the young man sat and proceeded to make a series of faces that initially amused his classmates. As time wore on, however, the boy became flustered, unsure of what to do with himself. Nervous laughter from his friends faded into a tense silence. Stanislavski remained unmoving, watching with the rest of the class as a palpable sense of desperation exuded from the stage. After several more minutes, Stanislavski finally told the student he could sit down. The young man leapt back toward his seat, visibly relieved.
Then Stanislavski stopped. “Wait,” he said. “I seem to have misplaced my glasses. I believe they’re under the chair. Would you get them before sitting down?” The boy obliged, dropping to his knees and reaching under the chair. Then he removed the cushion, carefully examining to see if he’d inadvertently crushed the glasses by mistake. He continued looking for a few moments before Stanislavski spoke and said he realized his glasses had been in his pocket the whole time.
When the student sat down, Stanislavski revealed that the entire time the boy had been onstage, before and after looking for the glasses, had been a lesson in acting. When the boy pantomimed for his friends, he was going for an effect . When he was looking for Stanislavski’s glasses, he was pursuing an action . As Stanislavski noted to the class, when the student was actively en-gaged in trying to accomplish a goal, however mundane, he was riveting to watch.
This story illustrates a simple fact: Truth is revealed by action. The boy was initially uncomfortable because he was trying to fabricate an experience for his friends. This same principle applies to our lives and quantifying our actions. By taking action and measuring our data without judgment, we gain insights about our behavior we didn’t even necessarily set out to study.
But you won’t know until you start to measure.
The Numbers on the Numbers
The Pew Internet & American Life Project released the first national (U.S.) survey measuring health data tracking in their Tracking for Health report. Here are some of their top findings:
46 percent of trackers say that this activity [self-tracking] has changed their
Observation is a powerful tool. A primary trait of a gifted actor is their well-honed ability to observe humans in action. As a young actor, you “play” a character—you want a quick laugh or to milk a dramatic scene and you try to coax a certain response from your audience. That’s death, because it’s fake. For instance, in a comedy, characters don’t think they’re funny. The audience laughs because they identify with the people in the play. A good actor will inhabit a character, without judging the person they’re playing and planning for a certain response. As a performer, they may genuinely feel terror in a role while the audience howls with delight.
Here’s a story along these lines from the world of acting. You’ve heard about Method actors so caught up in their roles that they fully believe they’ve become another person. That can happen, but these stories tend to be overblown. As a professional actor, you’ve got to show up for eight shows a week in theater or hit your mark in film or TV. It’s great to be Method and passionate, but if you lose touch with reality, you won’t continue to get hired. This pragmatic aspect of performance also relates to the idea of playing an action in a scene. For instance, you can’t “play” being sad in a scene—sadness is the result of not getting something you’re pursuing.
There’s a famous story of the renowned acting teacher and Moscow Art Theatre founder Constantin Stanislavski working with a group of young performers, teaching them the importanceof playing an action in a scene. He asked one of his students to go onstage and sit in an armchair he’d placed there. Given no specific instruction, the young man sat and proceeded to make a series of faces that initially amused his classmates. As time wore on, however, the boy became flustered, unsure of what to do with himself. Nervous laughter from his friends faded into a tense silence. Stanislavski remained unmoving, watching with the rest of the class as a palpable sense of desperation exuded from the stage. After several more minutes, Stanislavski finally told the student he could sit down. The young man leapt back toward his seat, visibly relieved.
Then Stanislavski stopped. “Wait,” he said. “I seem to have misplaced my glasses. I believe they’re under the chair. Would you get them before sitting down?” The boy obliged, dropping to his knees and reaching under the chair. Then he removed the cushion, carefully examining to see if he’d inadvertently crushed the glasses by mistake. He continued looking for a few moments before Stanislavski spoke and said he realized his glasses had been in his pocket the whole time.
When the student sat down, Stanislavski revealed that the entire time the boy had been onstage, before and after looking for the glasses, had been a lesson in acting. When the boy pantomimed for his friends, he was going for an effect . When he was looking for Stanislavski’s glasses, he was pursuing an action . As Stanislavski noted to the class, when the student was actively en-gaged in trying to accomplish a goal, however mundane, he was riveting to watch.
This story illustrates a simple fact: Truth is revealed by action. The boy was initially uncomfortable because he was trying to fabricate an experience for his friends. This same principle applies to our lives and quantifying our actions. By taking action and measuring our data without judgment, we gain insights about our behavior we didn’t even necessarily set out to study.
But you won’t know until you start to measure.
The Numbers on the Numbers
The Pew Internet & American Life Project released the first national (U.S.) survey measuring health data tracking in their Tracking for Health report. Here are some of their top findings:
46 percent of trackers say that this activity [self-tracking] has changed their
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