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After spending years struggling in the performing arts, I can tell you this much: the most important thing in being a performing artist is confidence. Creativity is second, and talent is a distant third at best. Allow me to explain. If you want to get involved in the performing art of your choice – be it dancing, singing, acting, modeling, or whatever – you need to believe that you are the perfect person to be up there on stage. That doesn't mean that you can't be realistic about your weaknesses, but you have to play up your own strengths. If you don't think that you should be there, other people are not going to think you should be there either. No matter how talented you are, you won't succeed without faith in yourself.

Creativity is almost as important. There are plenty of people in the performing arts who aren't actually that talented. What they have is a novel approach or a way to combine things that haven't been done together before. If you want to just sing blues, for example, you have to be fabulous because there are so many people who do it. If you integrate a little bit of gypsy jazz and some pop rock in just the right way, however, you might be able to come up with a new sound. Even if it doesn't sound that good, people might listen to it just because they haven't heard anything like it before. If you can do it with style, you can succeed despite having no musical talent – it has happened before, and it will happen again.

That isn't to say that talent is not important. People spend thousands and thousands of hours perfecting their performing arts because they want to give a flawless performance. Having a natural ability and pursuing that ability relentlessly is crucial if you want to succeed. And there are people out there who succeed on talent alone. Nonetheless, you have a much better chance of succeeding if you can do something new and do it with confidence. People might get sick of you fairly quickly, but you will definitely have your five minutes in the limelight. That is enough to get your career going. After that, you can try something else. Once people recognize you, it is much easier to break into other performing arts besides the one you start off with. You can even get a position teaching a performing arts school.