The Best Advice I Ever Got (13 page)

Hugh Jackman

Tony Award-Winning Actor and Producer

Trust Your Gut

1. Write down five things you
   love
   to do. Next, write down five things that you’re really good at. Then just try to match them up! Revisit your list once a year to make sure you’re on the right track.
   
2. Resist the urge to write lists, especially if the list is “Pros and Cons.” Just go with your gut.
   
3. As the doctor who delivered my son said to me moments after his birth, “Don’t rock the baby.”
   
4. Learn to trust the feeling of “not knowing.” For most of us, most of the time, that is the truth.
   
5. Oh, and take it from me, the label is right:
   Don’t Drink the Paint!
   

Marc Shaiman

Oscar-Nominated, Tony/Grammy/Emmy Award-Winning Composer, Lyricist, and Arranger

Oh, Miss Midler …

When I was around fourteen or so, I was exposed to the gargantuan talents of Bette Midler and became quite obsessed. I cut school once to take the bus from New Jersey to New York City to see her in concert. As she sang (and for many months after that), I imagined myself running down the aisle saying, “Oh, Miss Midler, I know every note of every arrangement of every song on every album of yours. Please let me play for you.” In this daydream, I then sat down at the piano and was—of course—fantastic. From her perch atop the piano, Bette would look out at the audience with a “Damn, he’s good!” expression. Nice dream.

When I was sixteen, having recently received my high school equivalency diploma, I went into the city with a friend to see an Off Broadway show. Afterward, we ran into some friends standing in front of a little bar and we all decided to stop in. Lo and behold, it was a piano bar—so of course I sat right down and started playing.

The bartender, sweeping up the bar (like right out of an old movie), stopped and said to me, “Stay right there.” He ran out the door and came back a minute later accompanied by five people. They were rehearsing an act next door and explained that they needed a funnier piano player. They asked if I could play “cheesy,” and I said, “You mean like at a bar mitzvah?” I played in that style and got the job playing with the troupe, who called themselves Cocktails for Five. One of those five people was named Scott, and he became my partner (in all ways) and we are about to celebrate our thirty-second anniversary. But that’s a whole other story.

Anyway, I would stay with the Cocktails for Five gang on the weekends to play for their act and, as fate would have it, one of Bette Midler’s backup girls (who are called the Harlettes) lived across the hall. The Harlettes were looking to do an act on their own and, to make a long story short, because I knew all about the harmonies they’d want (from studying Bette Midler records and the records those albums led me to), because I lived across the hall, and mostly because I would work for free, I got the gig.

The Harlettes’ solo act was a hit, and Bette invited the girls to go back out on the road to open her show. I was flown to Los Angeles to put together the girls’ opening act. After rehearsal the first day, I sat at the back of the hall as Bette herself came in to start her own rehearsal. At some point, she asked her band (all strangers to her repertoire) to play a song from her third album,
Songs for the New Depression
. The band members were stymied. One of the Harlettes whispered something in Bette’s ear and pointed to me in the audience. Bette yelled out, “Hey, can you play ‘No Jestering’?”

And I actually got to walk up to the stage saying, “Oh, Miss Midler, I know every note of every arrangement of every song on every album of yours. Please let me play for you.”

So what’s my point? To be a success, cut school and play the piano in an empty piano bar in order to meet your future lover and, subsequently, your idol? Well, that might be hard to re-create, but I will tell you this: Do not ever be afraid to dream, to imagine yourself doing exactly what you want to do in life, because it happened to me!

Matt Goldman

Co-Founder of the Blue Man Group and the Blue School

I Don’t Want to Be Reasonable

In the late eighties, Phil Stanton, Chris Wink, and I dreamed up a crazy idea for a show called the Blue Man Group. We took to the stage in New York in 1987, appearing as a trio with cobalt-blue skin and plain black clothes who had no ears, no hair, and did not speak. From the start, Blue Man was often misunderstood. All he wants to do is connect. He wants to connect with his fellow Blue Men onstage, with his audience, with everyone and everything around him. When an audience member comes into the theater and sees this strange being—bald and blue—for the first time, the natural reaction is to think he’s someone strange or alien. But a third of the way through the performance the audience realizes, “I’m actually watching myself, someone very human.” Blue is not a mask that we put on. It’s about what has been taken off. Once you take away hairstyle, skin tone, ethnicity, gender, and fashion—all the things that get us through our daily lives—what you’re left with is the thing that is essentially human in all of us. I think that is why Blue Man has endured over the years; it allows us to look at ourselves with fresh eyes.

The first time Chris, Phil, and I went bald and blue, and looked in the mirror and at one another, if at that very moment I had said out loud, “We’re going to make a living at this,” someone would have carted me off to a padded cell. If, the first time we went bald and blue, I’d thought,
I’m going to make a living at this and play ten thousand shows in New York City, and an additional twenty-five thousand shows on five continents (North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and New Jersey);
if I’d said we would collaborate with artists like Moby, Dave Matthews, and the Kodo drummers; if I’d said to myself,
Yeah, we’re going to sell out
Lincoln Center and perform at a football stadium in front of eighty-five thousand people;
if we’d imagined we were going to be nominated for a Grammy Award and perform live at the Grammys, to a standing ovation at the Staples Center; if I’d told you that all three of us would meet our wives at the show; that we’d get audience members to donate a few bucks at a time, adding up to three million dollars, to help families with AIDS; if I’d told you that we would go to the nation’s capital and lobby senators and congressmen to fund music and arts education in the public school system; if I’d predicted that we would start an elementary school and sit on a panel discussing creativity with two Nobel Prize laureates, a British knight, a psychologist, and the Dalai Lama himself—if we had said all that the first time we went bald and blue, they’d have thrown us into that padded cell and tossed away the key. But that
is
what happened. That’s what happened even though a lot of people—smart people, good-willed people, even loved ones and relatives—said that we were crazy. “It’s not reasonable. It’s weird. People won’t get it. It’s too smart. It’s too childish. It’s too strange. There’s not enough humor. There’s too much humor. It’s too long, it’s too short.” You get the picture—we heard all the reasons why it was not going to work. But guess what? It did work.

The lesson here, to me at least, is this: Don’t listen to anyone’s advice. At least, don’t listen to the advice of people who tell you what you can’t do. Instead, find some good advisers whom you respect and trust and care about and listen to them. Then integrate what they are telling you with your own thinking, and really listen to yourself, your own learning, your gut instinct.

I wanted to be crazy, and I advise you to be crazy. To be weird. To be unreasonable. That’s my favorite one. People are always saying, “Oh, come on, be reasonable!” And I want to shout, “No! I don’t want to be reasonable!” I want to be completely unreasonable. I want to change the world. I want to be creative. I want to change the world creatively. And I want other people to be unreasonable with me.

Phil Stanton

Co-Founder of the Blue Man Group and the Blue School

Inspiration Lives in Unexpected Places

Something important took place in my life at the age of eighteen. It seemed mundane and pedestrian back then—maybe even a complete waste of time—and I never thought it would have any relevance to my future life. But in fact this experience has proved to be not only relevant but essential to the path I’ve taken in life: my first job out of high school.

I was born in Texas and raised in Georgia. I grew up being a little bit of a tinkerer and a builder, and I got those traits from my dad. He was a minister and a self-taught architectural designer, so he built homes and churches with his own two hands. At the time, I didn’t have the slightest inclination to pursue a life in the theater. Even though both my mom and my dad were musicians and singers, I considered myself kind of shy and had no desire to be onstage. After graduating from high school, I needed to find work for the summer and a friend of the family got me a job in a hardware store—not a Home Depot like you find on every corner these days but a store that sold tons of industrial materials. I developed this geeky fascination with gears and nuts and bolts, PVC pipes, stainless steel, and different kinds of metal. Eventually, that job ended and I forgot about it for ten or twelve years. I ended up at a liberal arts college, where I bounced around between several majors until I finally found my element: acting. A few years later I was living in New York, where I met Chris Wink on my very first job as a waiter, and we became friends immediately. I met Matt Goldman soon after. Years later, the three of us would go on to create the Blue Man Group, a multimedia theatrical production that mixes music and comedy. But when we were just starting out, as we were conceiving the character of the Blue Man, all that stuff from my job at the hardware store years before came rushing back to me. All that fascination with pipe and metal and building materials. Matt, Chris, and I constructed strange instruments and other kinds of mechanical things as set pieces, and after scores of performances, television appearances, and tours around the world—well, the rest is history. The point here is that you will find your element, you will find your intelligence, if you pay attention to each and every experience life has to offer. Something you find along the way—even by accident—just might have the power to change your world.