Surely being a pilot is a prime example of a job where you want your day to be as boring as possible, though? Most alternatives to boredom seem to include a high possibility of cartwheeling fiery death, or at the very least a change of underwear.
Reading the OP, I couldn’t help but remember the SNL skit years back about a backstage taping of ‘Behind the Scenes at Cats’, invoking this very concept (the cast was either bored, uninterested, or insane)…
Annie-Xmas, you mis-read my comment! I was half humorously referring to FILM actors as the ones likely to do drugs. I have read many accounts of how long and enervating a film shoot can be, how the crew can work from early in the morning until late at night doing the same scene over and over for a few minutes of printable footage, waiting hours in between setups, sometimes having to do all-night shoots at a moment’s notice. I suppose actors can do interviews, play poker, or knit while waiting around in their trailers, but doing drugs is hardly unheard of!
Of course I agree with you, a stage actor doing 8 live performances a week most certainly wouldn’t last a day if he/she weren’t at the top of his/her game. It’s a whole different ball game.
I call this question “dealing with tedium” and I ask a form of it during every developer interview I conduct.
And then there are the tour guides who do totally go on autopilot. Anyone ever toured the USS Constitution? With those guys, the spiel has become an all-but-unintelligible gabble. It’s like an old cassette tape, degraded by constant use, and played back at high speed. Pity the poor foreign visitors!
I’ve acted quite a bit and I think a good analogy is this: asking how actors keep from getting bored is like asking how pro athletes (or athletes in general) keep from getting bored.
Acting is a complex skill involving a number of people working together towards the same goal. As much as anything else it is a physical skill. If you are doing it right it will not be boring at all (well, maybe it will start to wear after 8 performances a week for months on end–something I’ve never experienced–but I would say that probably sort of qualifies as “doing it wrong”).
You could think about it this way: how many jobs involve that level of physical, emotional, and mental exercise all at once?
It’s the same situation in music, where circumstances require you to play something you have done a gazillion times before.
I’ve seen people in Broadway pit orchestras where they’ve played the same parts literally for years. Some of them get so deep in the rut that they not only don’t need their music – they dispensed with the music ages ago – but they can read the paper or People magazine or whatever while they’re counting rests, waiting to come in again.
I subbed with a circus band once – by the time they got to me that band had been playing two and three shows a day up the Eastern seaboard since January and this was late summer – they not only didn’t need music, they were actually thrilled to see me because it was something and someone new in what had long become monotony. They perked up considerably from having a new player on the bandstand and that made the situation fun for them, at least while I was there.
Like everything else in life, it’s how you approach it.
Here’s the thing that I suspect most actors and musicians understand: It might be the gazillionth time you’ve played something but that doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that there’s someone in that audience who is hearing it for the very first time. And no matter how many times you’ve played something or even how many times someone has heard something you as the person presenting the aria or the speech or the solo or whatever, you are still responsible for making your version as great as it can be. Your audience deserves no less.
I have found the challenge of making a piece of music as great as it can be in that moment more than sufficient to keep me interested. There’s always something that can be improved upon, always. Even if all you do is lay the performance in there, often the response you get from your audience reflected back to you is in itself educational and illuminating. So even the “trite and true” can be refreshed and an entirely new experience if you but look at it that way.
If you’re bored with what you’re doing you’re not in the moment, you’re not paying attention . . . and you’re not giving your best performance. Everybody knows when you’re “phoning it in,” that kind of performance always comes short of what it should be. Most pros overcome it and find something meaningful in every performance.
I have done thousands of tours, and without question interacting with the audience is one of the best ways to keep it interesting. I often find that a good question will cause me to add a new spiel to my programs for a while - until I grow tired of it.
There are limits however. My first gig was on a tour boat - 8 50-minute tours on Saturdays, and 6 on Sundays. Even with someone else picking up one or two of those to give me a break, there is no question that tour #6 was not as good most days. By then, even most of the questions were the same.
I believe the current Disney “Jungle Cruise” also leans against the “fourth wall” a bit in this manner, having the cruise guide slowly pretend (or not) to lose his sanity as he has to deal with Yet Another Boatload of Disney Guests.