I don't care what you say, I am going to be an actor.

Well, I hope you do become an actor. It is a terrific thing to be. I just want those who attempt it to really know what they are getting into. Professional acting is nothing like the Junior Class Play. It is a serious business that the investors have gambled millions of dollars on in the hope to make more money. My book, The Tao of Acting , and the recommended books therein let you know something about that business and how to be successful at it. It is not going to come fast. You cannot decide this morning to be an actor and be one next week. It takes years and years of preparation, of experience and training and networking. And it takes luck. And it takes a special personality. If there are, as Cohen says in Acting Professionally, only two or three thousand professional actors and there are tens of thousands of aspiring professionals in colleges and acting schools who graduate each year, what becomes of them? Frankly, most just give up after a while because they don't have the personal attributes to make it. And those that do make it may not be as talented as those that don't make it. Do you have a chance of making it? Maybe. If you are an extraordinarily gifted actor, have great personal charm, get yourself known, are photogenic (not necessarily beautiful or handsome, but interesting in some way), and you stay after it a long time and get lucky, you might just become an actor. That would be a good thing. Actors age and die like everyone else, and they need to be replaced by new actors. Maybe you will be one of them.