Career Mistakes Quotes

I've seen many actors go awry by making the wrong choices early on.

At the beginning of my career, I can honestly say there were a few things I was doing wrong, and I was wondering why I was going a little bit off track.

My whole career has been one wrong answer after another as far as the left is concerned.

I have made a career of bumbling around places, stumbling on landmarks and generally being quite haphazard and shambolic about the way I go about things.

As an actor, there's always that fear. You don't know where the next job's coming from, so you say, 'I'll do that, I'll do that, I'll do that'. Your choices are not always clearly thought out, and you can end up taking mis-steps.

I've made many career mistakes in the eight years that I've been acting. I did films that I never should have. I was young, inexperienced, and a bit reckless.

I decided, "Well, I'll be a forest ranger!" Because I thought, "I'll get to go out in the woods, I'll be in the forest, and I can sit in a tower and watch for forest fires and play my guitar. That's what I want to do!" Well, I was an idiot, of course.

Of course I've done stupid things in my career, and I do always seem to be in the paper, but I hate seeing myself.

When I first started out in Telugu cinema, I signed anything and everything that came my way. I was 18, was immature, and it felt like a good idea that 'Oh, they are paying me a good amount of money.' I was young, naive; I had zero ambition, and honestly, it wasn't my calling.

People are generally badly advised when they're starting out in the creative field.

It's been a long career, and I've made some mistakes along the way.

My mistakes made were learning how to work with different groups of people. I mean, I went to school at Berkeley, which is a pretty diverse group, but working in a professional setting, I hadn't really done that before and learning about office politics, learning about interactions between different people and I made a lot of mistakes there during my time as a young person. I was 19 or 20 at the time. So, I would say those were my biggest career mistakes, but fortunately they were made in the context of an engineering co-op program and not in a professional field.

A mistake I've made is I have not worried sufficiently about the art world, really. I have not concerned myself with the other people in the art world. I've been a little too singular, and that's a mistake I've made. But everybody makes a mistake of some kind, and if that's my only mistake, I'm happy.

One tends to look back at the mistakes as the same thing - relinquishing control of something at some point in your career.

I think my biggest career mistake has been taking on too much. And I think this is kind of - I think it's related to the Internet world, where you're always multitasking and you have a million windows open and you feel like you can do a lot at the same time.

I stumbled into this business, I didn't train for it. I yelled 'Action!' on my first two movies before the camera was turned on.

In the past, I had a knee-jerk approach to work, and it showed on screen. I was doing movies for the wrong reasons - trying to juggle dates, do too many guest appearances, take up projects under pressure or for emotional reasons.

I've done things in the media I was not only not proud of, I was ashamed of.

I have made mistakes in my career by associating with films which were mediocre because I needed money at that time.

I had had some successes in the '90s, always made money, but the truth was I was like a man pushing a boulder up a hill. A huge, heavy, difficult boulder made up of some career mistakes, projects that didn't meet expectations, and twenty years of being a known quantity.

I had a lot of really terrible advice early in my writing career and I cheesed off people without even knowing it, all the while thinking I was implementing good advice.

I was an idiot in terms of career-building, but I had a great time.

I got my first part in Silent Fall, 1994 - I guess I was 15 or 16 - which was really outrageous because I still knew nothing. I don't think I really learned how to land on my marks until after Empire Records in 1995, 'cause sometimes I'll see a shot in that film, and I'm like "Whoa, I just walked over to the corner."

With hindsight, if you want to play for Real Madrid, sacrifices need to be made but I was too young to understand. There are things I shouldn't have said or done. It was early in my career, maybe too early. I didn't know it was the only Champions League I'd win, for example.

I made the wrong decision myself in my career. I tried to battle against the system. I should have never done that, but I didn't have anybody else who showed me how to do it before. I did everything on instinct.