I talk a lot about grinding. I won't shut up about work ethic and hustle. But there is something that I've learned relatively recently that can feel like the opposite of hustle and grind, yet can result in great success: surrender. Surrender is a little different than relaxation and meditation, which you'll read about later. Surrender does not always wait for an invitation to join your life. It is a party-crasher. And, while surrender is not always something that is welcome, if it decides to show up, it can't be denied and generally can't be kicked out until it has run its course.

The Art of Fighting Without Fighting

When I was a kid, I loved Bruce Lee movies. One of my favorites was Enter the Dragon. The setup for Lee's character includes a scene in which a bully threatens him. Known for his fighting prowess, Lee's character was a magnet for such meatheads. Riding a boat across a harbor, surrounded by others who were eager to watch a bloody match, Lee accepts the challenge. But, he adds, they should fight on the attached lifeboat where there is more room. He gestures for the bully to climb onto the dinghy and the bully willingly goes, confident he can beat Lee regardless of where they fight. While bantering back and forth with all the onlookers waiting in anticipation, Lee nonchalantly unties the lifeboat from the main boat and it, with the bully on board, drifts away from the larger boat. The bully is furious but there's nothing he can do to get back to Bruce and the rest of the crowd. It is the perfect execution of Lee's patented “art of fighting without fighting.” Sometimes surrender can bring victory to you quicker than anticipated, but usually that victory will come in a different form than you originally envisioned.

Surrender is generally associated with weakness and defeat, but when it comes to surrendering ourselves to the unknown, it requires a strength of character and self-possession that few can boast. When you surrender you are telling the world that your self-preservation is more important to you than maintaining whatever public persona you have carefully crafted. It means that you are willingly admitting defeat and not above being deemed a quitter. It does not mean, however, that you are admitting permanent defeat.

“If they're stuck on the ‘quitters never win, winners never quit’ … look at how many people who have quit things, even very publicly, who are people we definitely consider winners. Michael Jordan: how many times did he quit and unquit? And he's arguably one of the biggest ‘winners’ in basketball of our time.”

—Lynn Marie Morski, Founder/CEO, Quitting by Design; Physician, Attorney, Speaker, Author, and lifelong quitter

As I shared in Chapter 1, in college I had plenty of pain and feelings of being overwhelmed that led to my eventual shift to acting. Pain that brings us to our knees can come from anywhere without warning. Sometimes, a debilitating accident can cause physical pain and limitations that force us to surrender, regardless of how strong we may be. This happened to my friend and former 10,000 NOs podcast guest Matt Long. A tough New York City firefighter, competitive marathon runner, and Ironman triathlete, Long was forced into the reinvention he eventually underwent by the limitations placed upon him after being run over by a bus.

The accident occurred as Long was riding his bike through Manhattan on his way to work. A young bus driver, with zero experience driving in the city, jerked his bus across three lanes of traffic without warning, pinning Long and his bike underneath. Long nearly bled out on the sidewalk as his bike was sawed from the undercarriage of the bus. Doctors gave him a 1% chance of survival. In an astounding comeback, Long recovered, got rid of the colostomy bag he was forced to wear for two years, and learned to walk again. If that weren't miraculous enough, he relearned how to run before willing himself to complete another New York City Marathon less than three years after the accident. He then regained his Ironman status by completing the grueling 2.2-mile swim, 110-mile bike, and 26.2-mile run under the allotted time in Lake Placid, New York, the following year. He now credits his accident as the source of everything that's good in his life today, particularly his wife and kids. But there was a time immediately after his accident when his outlook was far more bleak and hopeless.

“The fire that burned inside me was out and I had no idea what my life was going to be like, what the future held. I knew I survived but I didn't know what kind of quality of life that I was going to lead. I led a life full of quality and it was taken away from me. And it took me a long time. When I was in this dark place and I saw no future I couldn't see past the external fixators that were coming through my chest to hold my pelvis together or the external fixator coming through my leg to keep my left leg together. Because I was basically cut in half and I couldn't see past that. And that's where things got dark.”

—Matt Long, Author, The Long Run

In a similar story, former Navy SEAL Jason Redman sustained injuries during a nighttime mission in Iraq when he and his platoon were ambushed. Injured, Redman recognized in the moment that he had to surrender, not to enemy forces but to the capabilities of his highly trained platoon. While Redman firmly believes that it is a fatal flaw for people to wait for a bad situation to fix itself without making an effort to “get off the X” themselves, even he acknowledges his surrender on that battlefield. Had his platoon not won the battle as he lay bleeding out, he never would have survived his nearly fatal wounds.

“I remember lying there thinking, ‘This sucks. I can't move. I'm pinned down. I think I lost my arm.’ So I'm thinking, ‘You're gonna bleed out quickly.’ And I knew from our training that our guys could not come get me. We have trained that in a fierce firefight, if someone gets wounded, you cannot run out to get them. The enemy will use it as a tactic. They'll wound someone on purpose to try to lure other people out there to get them. So I knew I had to wait. I had to be patient and just trust my guys to win that fight.” Part of what evolved out of this experience is Redman's current role as author and speaker, in which he teaches others about responding to what he calls “life ambushes.”

The “All Is Lost” Moment Is Not Only in Movies

Unlike Long and Redman's physical pain, what I experienced in Italy was emotional. It was the surrender to an emotional pain that friend and former podcast guest Suzy Batiz experienced when she, before creating and running her now-$500 million (as of 2019 when we spoke) company Poo∼Pourri, went bankrupt for the second time. She explained to me that her surrender period was the thing that led to her breakthrough with Poo∼Pourri after the age of 40.

After hearing the crank of the tow truck pulling her repossessed car out of her driveway as she literally lost everything, she lied to friends and family, telling them she had to move. This led to a four-year period where she didn't attempt to start any businesses, but instead sought refuge in seclusion, listening to angry music and painting: “I'm just painting my house. I'm just painting walls and just screaming with rage. Just going insane, the first time in my life I think I let myself actually feel what was happening.”

At a Thanksgiving dinner, Batiz's brother brought up a project he'd been toiling with for a couple of years. He asked the table, “Can bathroom odor be trapped?” This one offhand question, in the midst of Batiz's period of surrender to the idea that she'd never attempt to create another business in her life, changed everything. “I'll never forget the feeling, it's like a zing up my arm … everything goes into high-def and I went, ‘I can do that!’” As a hobby, Batiz had been working with essential oils for about 15 years. She had always been intrigued by natural products. “Everything just clicked. ‘Oil floats on water.’ It wasn't even as much of a rationale as it was literally like, ‘I can do that!’ I just saw it all.”

It took her nine months, but after that dinner she went home obsessed with solving her brother's challenge. Everyone thought she was crazy. Today, when she speaks around the world she coaches entrepreneurs to stop seeking others' approval and follow their own “alive ideas.” Her alive idea became an astoundingly successful company after she invested $25,000 of her own to begin it and then advertised it via word of mouth for the first six years. Her grit, determination, and perseverance helped it to grow exponentially, but it never would have been born had she not surrendered prior to its inception.

My experience in Italy, while external because it was incited by a breakup, felt more internal. My panic attacks, exacerbated by the breakup, were really the result of years of internalizing aspects of my parents' failing marriage, unspoken sibling differences, and schisms within myself without expressing them outwardly. Regardless of the root cause, my reaction to the pain was to surrender. I surrendered the persona and facade I had created up until that point, even while I was feverishly scrambling to understand all of the thoughts and emotions that had exploded from within.

Rather than continue to be ruled by my former mandate of showing up to class, like the “good boy” I always told myself I was, I surrendered to the overwhelming feelings that were threatening to sink me. I chose, instead, to skip class so I could pour my heart into my journal for eight to ten hours a day. It was anything but restful, and yet it was necessary if I was going to find peace. I was racing against the clock to unravel complex feelings inside me before their twisted mass suffocated me.

The overall effect of this intense period, particularly when I view it in retrospect, was that I pulled away from many of my previous associations and eventually focused myself on new ones, sending my life in a new direction. It is worth repeating that this process did not complete itself overnight. The rumblings of it began a few months prior to my trip overseas, in the spring of 1992. And while the most intense part of it took place over a one-month period while I was abroad that summer, I was still experiencing the fallout in the late fall after I had returned to the United States, when I finally quit the lacrosse team. Maybe you could say the following spring, when I did my first play, was the beginning of my new phase, but there were still many parts of my new self that continued to fall into place over the next several years.

“I've learned how to let go more, and I'm not saying I've mastered this, but I've learned how to let go more and be in that state where things are coming to me with less effort than I used to think was necessary. And to not have that only happen at the end of a long period of exhaustion and suffering.”

—Mike Boyle, Psychotherapist, PTSD Specialist

I mention this time frame because many people will write in to the podcast saying something along the lines of, “I surrendered yesterday and I still don't see any signs that it was worth it. There's nothing on the horizon for me! Why did I give all of that up?!” Impatience can act like liquid poison, seeping into our psyche and causing us to second-guess ourselves repeatedly. Surrender takes a mountain of patience, and the universe has a funny way of knowing when we have really accepted our new circumstances. One of my favorite scenes in one of my favorite movies, The Shawshank Redemption, written by Frank Darabont, involves Morgan Freeman's character, Red, who has been imprisoned for a lengthy sentence but is allowed to go before the parole board. Every year he explains to them how he has rehabilitated himself and why they should allow him to go free. In this scene, after many failed attempts over the years in which he has tried his best to give them the answer he thinks they want to hear, this is how he answers:

This scene exemplifies the way surrender works. We cannot trick the universe, or ourselves, into believing that we are ready to move on from whatever proverbial prison we are trying to escape. There is a purity of true surrender that must be reached before we are allowed to advance. It is one of the great contradictions of life: you cannot have something until you truly don't need it any more.

Grown Men Shouldn't Punch Walls

When it comes to my career, I don't need to go back very far to find a story about surrender. In December 2017, as the year drew to a close so did my run on Amazon's Goliath, starring Billy Bob Thornton. Perhaps filming my character's demise, when Danny Loomis plunged backward off a downtown Los Angeles rooftop to avoid being killed by his assailant after having his ear cut off, was a glimpse of what was to come of my career in the following few months. That incredible work experience, with artists and storytellers I truly respected, had me on a high from which I quickly slipped down into what felt like a cavernous gorge of unemployment.

If the unemployment wasn't enough to snuff me out on its own, I gave it some help. With the aid of a little alcohol, I made a boneheaded decision to punch a wall repeatedly. Not the hollow part of the wall, the part with a stud beneath it. In my mind, at the time, it was a passionate display to my wife of just how ready I was to prove “all the naysayers” wrong. For the record, our kids were both out at sleepovers, so at least they did not witness their father's idiocy. If this book is a compilation of all the mistakes I've made and the trials and errors of mine that can serve as guideposts for you to make better choices, then this is Exhibit A.

You know you've screwed up when, the following day, your hand hurts so badly you need to sit in the sand nursing it rather than partake in a beautiful day's surf session. The mistake is compounded even more when, later in the afternoon, your hand has swelled so much that it barely fits into your baseball mitt and the subsequent game of catch with your ten-year-old son is so painful that your eyes are filled with tears every time you catch one of his throws. Thank God, when I was persuaded the next morning to go to Urgent Care, I was able to tell the medics that both of my kids were out of the house when I committed this dumb act. That did not stop them from ogling me as though I was guilty of domestic violence, nor did it stop them from delivering the news that I had fractured my fourth metacarpal, also known as a boxer's fracture. That's a generous nickname for this considering a real boxer doesn't hit inanimate objects that can't hit back.

So there I was, out of work, unable to play baseball with my son or go on the trampoline with my daughter, and sporting a big, fat, maroon cast that wrapped around my entire wrist, half of my thumb and my entire pinky and ring finger. There was no hiding it. Everywhere I went, people would ask what happened. I considered making up some story about it being from a skiing accident or a boxing class, but ultimately I decided to surrender to it. If I was going to be honest with myself, I had to admit that this was the result of being a man who cares deeply about his craft and his career, and is painfully aware of how short he has fallen from the goals he had as a young actor. Despite having just finished the best job of my career, auditions were bearing no fruit and it felt like nothing had changed. This bonehead move just hurt my chances of employment even more because very few roles call for a moron sporting a big, doofy maroon cast. But the surrender to the truth of my actions, to not only myself but anyone who asked, ended up leading to my salvation.

I think I'm pretty straightforward with people, but when you start telling near-strangers that your 45-year-old self broke your hand punching a wall, it is a new level of exposure. It forced me to confront parts of myself that I'm not proud of and don't like very much. Several very generous fathers my age tried to lessen my discomfort upon hearing my tale, admitting that they had done the same thing. When I pressed them, however, and asked how old they were at the time, the age range that shot back was between 18 and 22. That only served to further solidify my stupidity and immaturity. But when you face this kind of shortcoming in yourself, over and over, day in and day out, eventually you accept yourself. You start to think, “Yes, I was dumb. But it doesn't define me.”

Take Your Medicine and the Cure Will Find You

And sometimes, as eventually happened to me, the universe or God, depending on your beliefs, comes to your aid and throws you a bone after you've taken your medicine like a champ, much the way Red was granted his freedom once he finally accepted his guilt and took responsibility for his actions. After a dismal pilot season and a multitude of self-tapes, on which I tried to convince myself the cast would actually help, I found myself still looking for work that June. That was when the audition that led to the performance which got me the most individual attention of my career thus far came hurtling through the universe and landed in my lap.

Out of nowhere, I auditioned for the Netflix comedy series Huge in France. The role was that of Jason Alan Ross and the first time I read the material, despite finding it incredibly funny, I thought there was absolutely no way I would get it. On the page, Jason was 30 years old, blond, buff, and not the sharpest knife in the drawer. That last part may not have been a stretch, but physically I wasn't right at all. I was nearly 46, dark-haired, and lean. It just didn't match. Luckily, though, on the inside I had just lived through months of Jason-like experiences. As I first recounted in Chapter 4, Jason was an actor, almost incessantly out of work, very proud and defensive of his dedication to his craft. According to him, a method actor. His girlfriend, who was also “employing” Jason by paying for his gas and cell phone bills in exchange for mentoring her teenage son through the paces of modeling and weight-training, did not view his acting with the same pride as Jason. In short, this guy was a down-on-his-luck loser with a big heart. On second thought, I was perfect for it!

One of the things I always say about acting is that any experience can be used. Really, that is another way of saying that if we surrender to any experience, we can eventually use it for us rather than having it work against us. Billy Joel was able to use what I'm sure was sometimes an excruciatingly frustrating experience working for paltry tips at a Long Island piano bar as a young musician to help him write the song for which he is most famous. In the case of Huge in France, despite a rushed schedule that lacked a surplus of prep time, my previous several months' surrender to my own desperation as an actor, combined with the diet and exercise regimen I explained in detail in Chapter 4, proved to be all the prep I needed.

Sadly, the series was canceled after one season, but that didn't completely erase my memory of when Netflix representatives, having watched a cut of the season for the first time, reached out to my representatives to tell them they'd be getting behind me for an Emmy campaign for my individual performance. Once the season was canceled, that never happened, but at least I know that my work didn't go totally unnoticed. I suppose I owe Netflix a thank-you—after all, they just added another “no” to my pile of 10,000 as well as a few sentences to this book. It's very simple: I can get mad and punch another wall, or surrender to it and have faith that this “no” will one day lead to a future Emmy campaign that ends with a “yes.”