whiskey

Because it has now reached epidemic stages, I feel its important to re-iterate a truth: if someone became interested in whiskey in the 2000s and started a distillery as a result, they are NOT a master distiller. It doesn’t matter what type of success or failure they have, who their distributor is or how many markets they’re in, they are not a master…of anything.

To infer, or just as wrongly, let other infer on their behalf, that they’ve mastered this craft after only a few years in, is a slap in the face and a profound insult to those that actually have achieved mastery.

The test is simple: stand in the same room with Jimmy Russell, Jim McEwan, David Stewart, Maureen Robinson, Shinji Fukuyo or Richard Patterson and refer to oneself as a “master” in their presence. It would be cringe-inducing to watch and what’s more, these very same personages wouldn’t refer to themselves as such. These, and others like them, have spent the better part of their lives in the pursuit of their craft in an industry that has seen severe downturns during their tenure. We tend to anoint them now with rock-star like plaudits, but even if the whiskey industry hadn’t taken a moon-shot in the last 15 years, they would still be regarded as masters. They put in the time and they’ve lived through the pain.

True mastery is conferred on you by your peers and the industry you’re in, not self-annointed, or worse, bestowed upon you by a publicist or a blogger or a hack writer from Thrillist.

Mastery is the result of thousands of hours laboring in every part of an industry, coming from under the tutelage of others greater than you
Mastery is the great humility of learning over time what your mistakes are and understanding the thousands of permutations in the production of an end result
Mastery is understanding how to not just teach, but to guide those who come to you for direction and knowledge, a conveyance of not just facts and information, but true wisdom as a result of a deep understanding
Mastery is having the scars of failure and succeeding as a result of them
Mastery is an outward recognition that you stand above others in a pursuit of acknowledged excellence and have achieved it through your labors
Mastery is conferred upon a few. It is not a Participation Award.

There are those in this industry who after a rocket-glide to success in a few short years attach the “master” label to themselves. At the beginning of this wave, it was easy to dismiss it as youthful exuberance, but no more. It is undeserved and by stealing this honorific they rob themselves of the richness of their own process and experience. What they may be is talented, skillful and resourceful, all achievements in and of themselves. They may be lucky or someone who knew the right people at the right time; someone gifted with the time and money to pursue a task or discipline at one’s leisure without the burden of monthly bills. All of these are fine, there’s nothing wrong with them, everyone has different paths to success.

But the hyper-titling we are experiencing is not the result of any of these. It’s a combination of a number of things that are troubling in our larger culture:

The hyper-need for instant self-gratification, driven through the prism of social media
The confusion of facts with knowledge and knowledge with wisdom as a result of the hyper-reality of the internet
A service economy vs. a production economy where there are few examples of long-term effort
The commodification of titles (Manager, Director, VP, CEO, etc.) as a result of “entrepreneurial glorification”, a syndrome where anyone who starts something new on their own is considered a prodigy, a genius or brilliant simply by the act of starting, not on what they’ve achieved
Outside investment money with no historical investment in the industry, seeing a distillery or a brand as just another commodity and titles as a marketing edge over the competition

This sense of entitlement is enabled by the wholesale showering of diluted “awards” from the huge number of competitions that have sprung up as a cottage industry, many of them coming from the organizations that purport to help grow and guide these young craftsmen into industry leaders.

One cannot demand transparency if one is not going to live it. If the craft movement is going to grow up to fulfill the destiny that is waiting for it, the capacity to re-arrange how hard spirits are made, marketed and consumed for a generation, it needs to start by looking inward at its practitioners and demanding a truthful accountability of their capabilities: not just to create, but to lead and guide, to pass their wisdom onto a new generation. Right now, I’m not seeing that happening enough to make me hopeful that it can.

In the middle of my acting career, I took two years out and committed to learning a new technique (for me) named after its founder, Sanford Meisner. He, along with Lee Strassberg and Stella Adler, studied with the Russian genius Stanislavski, the father of modern acting, and returned to train 2 generations of American actors that changed the art form forever.

During my 2-year stint, I was not allowed to pursue any work in the industry: no films, plays, commercials, voice overs, nothing. It was harsh but they demanded the commitment from you. Robert Duvall called his time learning the technique “worse than my time in the Korean War” because it is emotionally brutal. It is brutal in that it does not allow the bullshit tricks and shortcuts that actors fall into during their career, things that got them work in the past; things they’re known for in the industry; little bits of business they use over and over again: the eyebrow raise, the cocked smile, the walk or strut. It had one goal, emotional truth, played truthfully in the moment from your own imagination. You learn to listen actively, be in the moment and serve the script and your fellow players.

In the first year you never work with a script; for an actor, this is madness. It’s nothing but exercises designed to strip you of your ego, to strip you of your pride and strip you of any falsity you may harbor: all the enemy of truth. These are exercises based on repetition: 2 students facing each other, and one repeating what the other one says. Its madness and that was the point. The repetitions were designed to evoke a true response from you: not one you think might work, not one that seemed funny or dramatic (indeed, there was no “acting” going on at all here), but what was true based on your response to your partner. It was always 2 things: frustration and anger. One quarter of the class dropped out in the first year and in the commission of the exercises, you could tell who would be next: the ones who actively resisted, the ones who put up the walls, that clung tight to a reverie of themselves in the past, that tried to pull out their safety net of tricks. One by one, we all got called on it and it infuriated us, it made no sense why we were being castigated and harangued by our teacher. It was humiliating because each one of us was being stripped down to our emotional core in front of the entire class, we were being called on our bullshit, our insincerity, our falseness, our ruses that we all use in our everyday life to shield us from the harshness of it. There’s no place for that in the theatre, in the service of a character you may play. There is only truth. We would have rather shown up disrobed and naked (which happened a few times) than to be robbed of the persona mask we wore as protection and have the real us shown glaring in a spotlight. And yet that was what the work demanded. Our fragility was being exposed, each one different than the other. We, the class as a whole and guided by our teacher, came face to face with each other’s weaknesses, neuroses and secrets.

And here’s the secret you learn, the one you take with you your whole life after its reve

aled: that when you get stripped of the layers of sophistication that you adopt to hide your insecurities, you get angry, very, very angry, sometimes a rage. Its the first line of defense, the first impulse, its very primal, the engagement of fight/flight at a higher level. I’ve seen nuclear bursts of rage coming from the tiniest of people that made me frightened in that moment: it was real, it was enormous and it was locked inside them their entire lives before this exercise released it. Its why there is a mattress hanging on the wall of every Meisner studio in the country, because in the course of the exercises when that anger got so big and had to be exorcised, the teacher would yell, “go to the mattress” and you would leap at it flailing, crying, screaming, pounding and kicking until the anger was purged like a toxin from your blood. Then you would return to your partner and continue the exercise. And what happened in that moment, over and over, with each person in their own unique way, was why I was committed to being an actor, to pursuing art in this form for what I thought would be the rest of my life. You saw an almost transcendent human transformation happen in front of your eyes. With the anger purged, the emotional truth of that person was revealed, and I’m not kidding, as if it came down from heaven. You saw into that person’s soul, in the context of this repetitive dialogue, and you could not believe it transpired in front of you. It was scary, sexy and huge, it attracted us like flies to sugar in that we all wanted it, we all wanted what we saw to happen to us. So we came back day after day, week after week, filled with the homework assigned to us, ready to go to the mattress for our art. I did not go to war like Duvall did, but I have a sense of what he was talking about. At the end of 2 years, I was forever changed as an artist. And not surprisingly, its when I began to actually make a living at it.

I teach sales techniques to spirits industry salespeople and brand narratives to small brands. I’m bringing a lifetime of content mastery and methodologies I learned through 3 different businesses: acting, technology and liquor. But what I’m really doing is a modified Meisner technique. Sales is difficult, its one of the most demanding careers anyone can pursue, and as a result, its easy to fall into a host of tiny traps that prevent you from growth that end up as a barrier to sales. What I’m hoping to do is challenge each person to purge those habits from themselves, to re-educate themselves as to what the customer and the brand may need, and in turn, what they may need. With the narrative work, I’m hoping to strip away the ego from the entrepreneur to get to that transcendent light inside their brand, the unique glow that separates it from other similar ones on the shelf. They have to commit to some time with me to do it, but I think it pays off for them.

Let me know if you have any leads: robin@robinrobinsonllc.com

Bile

Rants, some musings, lots of commentary

Master this…

Go to the mattress and get the sale