Resourceful Actors and Trading

By Jenna Pastuszek

Resourceful people create abundance. 

According to A Beautiful Constraint, these people “see resources as not simply what THEY  control, but what they can access: what the rest of the company has, what those in  their network have, what their neighborhood (literally or figuratively) has, and indeed what  the big resource owners they have yet to meet may have that they can use…Resourceful people  see that if they lack something (money, time, people, ideas), and that scarcity is one of their  apparent constraints, it is an opportunity to access abundance from elsewhere.” 

Put simply: Resourceful people see available sources of abundance and find innovative ways to  enable them to flow in their desired direction. They get creative both in where they look for  sources of resources and how they reframe their apparent scarcity into a resource worth  trading. 

Before taking the altMBA, I’d never thought to think of myself as a resourceful person, and now  I can see that actors are innately VERY resourceful. We’re handed a pencil and can go three times around a circle of ten people telling everyone that the object is anything BUT a pencil for Patti's sake! 

What if, as actors, we viewed ourselves full of resources: storytelling and networking resources,  creative singing vessels, collaborative visionaries, among other things, that are worthy of  trading others for the things we want? 

I’ll trade you my time and talents for your audition appointment slot. 

I’ll trade you my ability to connect you with three actors right for your project if you trade me consideration in your next concert reading. 

I’ll trade you my audition preparation for your perusal script. 

I’ll trade you my accepting this job offer if you trade me a transportation stipend. 

We seemingly give this resource (ourselves) away without considering the potential power we  have to trade for something else. I’m not saying we need to always be trading, there is  definitely room to give things away generously for free, but when met with a “big resource  owner”, perhaps it’s a good time to remember that it’s a common business practice to trade.  Said another way, trading is a normal business posture worth trying on in your own artistic  career. Consider the power you might feel in owning that you’re a commodity worth  negotiating over.