The Long Game

Why Good Work Needs Time, Pain, and Patience

I used to think success came to those who were fastest. Now I know it comes to those who can stay.

Stay through the silence. Stay through the self-doubt. Stay through the years where it feels like everyone else has passed you by.

There’s a strange alchemy in this business. You don’t always get to choose the timing. You don’t always get to know when your work will matter. But when you’re not booking, not taping, not even getting seen—that’s when the work gets made.

It’s forged in the hours you spend alone, pacing your house, rehearsing to an empty sound booth. It’s buried in the journal entries you never show anyone, in the voice notes you record half-asleep at 2 a.m., in the scenes you play out in your head when you’re roaming the streets. It’s in all the invisible places where craft and pain and curiosity collide.

I took time away from voiceover. Maybe it took time away from me … Life hit, and I shifted. Then recently, I came back to it—not with the same voice, but a deeper one. A voice that’s been bruised, stretched, buried and reborn. That distance? It gave me resonance I didn’t have before. Now I speak from the gut, not the throat. I speak with a point of view.

Same with acting. Same with writing. Same with any damn thing worth doing.

Some roles arrive when you're ready. Others make you ready.

A character I’m working on now—he couldn't have found me five years ago. I hadn't lived enough yet. I hadn’t lost enough. I hadn’t learned how to hold still inside chaos.

What I’ve learned is that the long game requires a brutal kind of faith. You have to believe in yourself through years of quiet. You have to become your own director, your own audience, your own damn scene partner. You have to be willing to sit in the silence and trust that one day, it’ll be your turn. That sort of faith …

“It takes real cojones to make that kind of bet. It takes a steel spine and a middle finger to the odds.”

So if you’re in that place—that silent place where nothing seems to be moving—don’t mistake it for failure. It might just be the cocoon. The compression before the expansion.

Stay. Stay with the work. Stay with yourself.

Good things don’t just take time. They take the right time. And when that time comes—you’ll be ready. Not because you waited, but because you endured.