A Quote by Steve Martin

I just believe that the interesting time in a career is pre-success, what shaped things, how did you get to this point. — © Steve Martin
I just believe that the interesting time in a career is pre-success, what shaped things, how did you get to this point.
I feel like my life right now is so crazy; there's no time to dwell on difficult things. You just have to figure out how to fix it or get past it because there is no time to do anything else. Being a mom to a toddler, my career, and my husband's career - all of our worlds just kind of colliding at once, you just make it work.
I haven't given it (achieving 3,000 hits) much thought. I was taught a certain approach, how to come to the ballpark. I try not to do too much thinking about things like that. In this society we measure success in different ways. Three thousand (hits) represents success over a career, not a season. It'll be nice to get to that point.
I interviewed one of the most powerful lawyers in the world and he told me, "At the time, it was the worst thing in the world not to be able to get a job at a fancy law firm, but it's the greatest thing that ever happened in my life." It was a humble acknowledgment of how forces much larger than himself shaped his career. I really wanted to bring that point home.
Only one time in my career I had that feeling [that this is not gonna get made], it was for this movie [Life of Pi]. It was right before we started the physical pre-production. I pre-visualized the whole ocean part before we made the movie, I was that prepared. At one point they seemed to want to drop it because it was really risky. The budget we proposed was a lot higher than they expected, they wanted to [drop it]. After all, it's a philosophical book and a literature property, it's not Batman.
A lot of people think I had such a rosy career, but I wanted to identify that one of the things that helps you have a long career is learning how to deal with adversity, how to get past it. Once I learned how to get through that, others things didn't seem so hard.
I think plans failing is a really interesting question. I've been on a long journey. I'm 54 now and that's seriously old. I hope I still have heaps of years to go. Every day there's new success and some failures. But believe you me you can always get better - but things don't always go how you'd expect all the time. What you have to do is pick yourself up and keep going. That's part of life.
I believe that we all have ambitions and we all want to achieve something. But the larger things in life that happen to us are already pre-meditated, pre-destined. So we should just romance life.
But everything that I did starting out, every job that I had, I haven't regretted any of them. They've all been informative, interesting in one way or another. With a career, I think there's this idea that you're just trying to get somewhere. It's like, "Oh, okay, let's keep going, because if I do this, I can get this, I get this, this." It wasn't that way. I did what I wanted to do when it was in front of me, and I'm trying to continue to do that.
One of the reasons that I went to Mexico aside from the Maya and the pre-Columbian aspect of it was that I wanted to work with [Diego] Rivera, which I did, on a mural that he was painting at the time. But at some point I realized that I wasn't going to be a political artist, it just wasn't in my repertoire.
Ultimately, some of these things I did not get paid for, they did not further my career, they were done just for fun.
I just want to play really strong characters that get to do really interesting things. But I would also love to play someone really vulnerable. When I first started my career, I tended to do a lot of things just to get the work.
When I was writing 'Southeastern,' I'd just recently gotten sober. For me, that was a major turning point in my life. It changed things I did on a day-to-day basis. My whole routine was upended. It took me some time to get used to that and figure out how do I keep myself entertained.
It's really interesting to just look at the career of a musician and a producer that went into many different genres and many different styles and many different places but always breaking the barriers between genres and at some point reinventing himself all along the way but also inventing things at the same time.
I've made game-winners, I've missed game-winners. I've pitched shutouts, and I've given up 10 runs. You just deal with the experiences and learn how to get over the bad outings and learn from them, so they don't occur time and time again. You take what you did right from the good games and turn those into, 'How do I repeat that success?'
I can push through a lot of things, whether that's failure or success. I don't know how to explain it. I've learned how to overcome things that get thrown at you. In baseball, nothing's for certain, just like life. You have to roll with the punches. If you get knocked down, you need to stand up.
I think after 'The Day The Earth Stood Still,' I really stopped thinking strategically about my career. I just did. At that point, it became crystal clear to me that you can strategise your career all you want, but it's so difficult to get a movie made, and creativity shouldn't be subjected to that kind of strategic thinking.
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