Celebrities. We love to hate them. We also love to watch their every move, laugh at their mistakes, and scrutinize their decisions. Like them or not, their celebrity status means not only have they achieved career success but they’ve also got a hell of a lot to lose. And sometimes, whatever actions have helped catapult them to fame or rendered them B-list can provide valuable lessons for the careers of regular people like you and me. Excelle presents ten career lessons from celebrities. Some are good. Some are bad. Some are just plain ridiculous.
1. Madonna—Reinvent yourself often. Always stay fresh and relevant.
Never one to let things get stale, Madonna has reinvented herself over and over again since she first stepped into the spotlight in the mid eighties. There was the virgin, the “material girl,” the Evita era, and her disco-fabulous look and sound of 2005. She’s had as many new looks as she has albums, and always manages to stay on the cutting edge. Reinvention is so central to her career, she named a tour after it. And thirty plus years after her debut, she still manages to be at the forefront of the global music industry.
Elaborate personal transformations may not be realistic (or helpful) for mere mortals. But there’s a lesson to be learned from this pop icon. In order to thrive in a rapidly changing economy, it’s important to stay fresh, keep your skills up to date and be adaptable to new directions in your career.
2. Christian Bale—Don’t crack under pressure.
If you haven’t heard the audio, you’ve been living under a rock. The action movie star famously lost his temper on the set of this year’s Terminator sequel, shouting countless profanities at the film’s director of photography, Shane Hurlbut. His fit of rage was caught on tape and, of course, a YouTube video quickly circulated the internet. His reputation went from sexy, brooding screen legend to world class jerk (still kind of sexy though).
Getting worked up at work is not uncommon or unexpected. But keeping your cool in the face of blood-pressure raising circumstances is essential, not just to your reputation at work but to your overall health and happiness. Lose your temper like Mr. Bale and you may never live it down.
3. George Lucas—Don’t be afraid to take risks.
The creative genius behind Star Wars and Indiana Jones didn’t get to where he is today by following the rules. Sure, he went to USC Film School and interned at Warner Brothers, but so did countless other filmmaking hopefuls. Lucas was fearless in the face of risk. Combine this fearlessness with a knack for innovation, and you’ve got a recipe for multi-billion dollar success. Early on in his career, while negotiating his director’s fee for Star Wars, he agreed to take a $500,000 pay cut in exchange for all sequel rights and ownership of the film’s merchandising—things the studio thought were pretty much worthless. Silly studio! He made tens of millions of the merchandising and financed the making of the sequels himself. Which, as you can imagine, had a huge return-on-investment.
