Writer, director, and actor Mark Duplass gave a 2015 keynote at SXSW where he debunked the concept of what he calls ‘the cavalry.’ The cavalry is any person, group, or company that you think will miraculously happen to notice your tremendous ability, your amazing work, your untapped potential — and, from there, pluck you out of obscurity into success.
As he explains it,
“We’ve all heard these amazing tales of how that 21-year-old kid had a script, and his cousin worked in the mail room at Warner Brothers, and he gave it to him, and the script got up to the head of Warner Brothers. They loved it, and they bought it for a million dollars, and got it made.
That’s an exciting story, but a super dangerous one, because I don’t know anyone that’s happened to.
…
Every single project I have made I’ve had to self-generate. The truth is, still, when you are at this place — when I am at this place that I am at — the cavalry is not coming. You are the calvary.”
I think more and more in terms of his concept of the cavalry these days, as — through both failure and success — I’ve come to recognize just how right he was about it. You don’t have to do it all yourself, but you will almost certainly have to be the one who at least gets the ball rolling by putting yourself forward for consideration in some way.
His keynote includes some specific pieces of advice on how to be the calvary within the context of the industry he works in, so it’s worth a watch if that industry is also your industry. I talk a bit about ways I’ve practiced that kind of self-advocacy here.
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This post is 1 of 3 posts included in the March instalment of my “As [month] ends, I’m thinking about…” series. You can read the main post here.
Jana M. Perkins is a computational social scientist. An award-winning scholar, her research has been federally funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada since 2019. She is the founder of Women of Letters, a longform interview series celebrating women’s paths to professional success. Together with Miranda Dunham-Hickman, she is co-authoring a book that will be published by Routledge.
To learn more about Perkins and her latest work, visit jcontd.com or follow her on Bluesky.