There's nothing better than discovering, to your own astonishment, what you're meant to do. It's like falling in love.
Until I discovered cooking, I was never really interested in anything.
The first step is to find out what you love - and don't be practical about it. The second step is to start doing what you love immediately, in any small way possible.
I knew I wanted to be a writer before I knew that being a writer was possible.
Once I was in L.A., I realized anyone could act. Why not give it a shot? I started going to a ton of acting classes, and I found I had a real passion for it, probably the biggest passion I've ever had in my whole life.
I fell into makeup by accident, but I found my love for it, and once I realized that I could actually turn it into a huge business, that's when I started taking it a little bit more seriously, but it's always something that I knew could be something.
I joined an amateur drama group as a teenager, fell in love with theatre, and it totally changed my life.
Find your passion and follow it. You wont find that passion in things or money. Your passion must come from what fuels you from the inside. It will be grounded in the relationships you have with people and what they think of you when your time comes.
I wanted to be a vet, a nurse, a chef - I mean, anything but the music industry. But once I hit high school, the bug really bit me. You can't deny where you come from and what's in your genes, and music definitely was. I haven't looked back since.
But knowing what I don’t want to do doesn’t help me figure out what I do want to do. I could do just about anything if somebody made me. But I don’t have an image of the one thing I really want to do. That’s my problem now. I can’t find the image.
My parents believed in exposing each of their children to an abundance of varied activities in the hope they would find something they loved. They each had found a passion - Dad with his music and Mom with her horses - so it was natural for them to encourage experimentation.
I was playing a relatively high level of hockey, and I thought that's what I wanted to do. But I had my first movie audition, and I was hooked.
I got a part in a play in 10th grade, and that changed everything, woke up my love of theater.
The first time I won a medal in the all-around competition is when I realized that's what I wanted to do pretty much for the rest of my life. Even though I was still doing baseball and soccer at the time, I think I just found that that was more my passion, where I saw a lot more success... I was probably eight or nine years old.
I always saw my peers finding some cool passion, but every time I tried one of those things, it never clicked. I would leave school and go to my theater class, and that's when I'd actually sit down and listen.
My best advice to anybody who has a child with a disability is to really find the tools for that person to thrive and find what their true passions are, because the rest will follow.
I'm fascinated by people who have to reinvent themselves. I did it a few times - I was going to be a physicist before I was passionate about philosophy - and I realized that one more change, and I'm going to start looking like a dilettante.
Give yourself a chance. Now, everyone can't play basketball. But find something you're interested in.
My idol was Johann Cruyff (a Dutch soccer player) and I wanted to be like him. But when I realized that I would never be, I decided to do something else. I met the kitchen by chance and quickly became completely enamoured by it.
I always loved writing, but never considered that I could do it professionally.
Yes it did really. It was very exciting to find that my energy could be directed into something more useful and positive. I was starting to get panicked. I was thinking 'what am I going to do with my life?' I wasn't sure what was going to happen. Then I became crazily obsessed with acting. I suddenly had a work ethic and then everything changed completely for the better because I knew what I wanted to do with my life.
It just clicked that it was the next step for me; choreographing didn't interest me, and opening a studio wasn't a passion for me. I didn't know if I'd be very good at acting, but then my first scene in acting class... I just loved it.
In my time at St. Mary's College, drifting out of sports because it was something that began to feel really finite. And I could see that I didn't have the passion to sustain a career in sports.
I sat down and wrote some jokes and went to the talent show, got up on stage, fell in love with it and never turned back.
I went to UCLA as pre-med. When I was there my freshman year, I auditioned for a play and got it, and I was so passionate. I just loved acting so much that I decided to switch majors and pursue acting.
