#92. Are You An Individuals, Tag team or Faction Type Of Professional Wrestling Creative?
In the wrestling industry, there are two ways in which a professional wrestler can come up and “go over” which is basically getting success with the fans.
The professional wrestling industry is one that is almost solely based on the response from the fans.
If you can not get them on your side or hating you, both in the ring and with what you are saying then you will not be successful.
Now as a lifelong wrestling enthusiast I have learnt a couple of things about this industry and I wanted to share with you, some strategies that I think will help you to be successful in your creative practices.
So in the wrestling world, they have 2 kinds of wrestling competitions.
There is single competition and there is tag team wrestling which is where you partner with another wrestler to take on another two wrestlers and you each take turns wrestling your opponents.
Now there are many kinds of wrestlers out there and this is what I need to break down first before we get into the nitty-gritty of how this can be translated to a creative career please bear with me because this is important.
So as a wrestler one can make 1 of 3 choices in the way they would like to pursue their career and gain success in the wrestling world.
You can be a single competitor and wrestle on your own as an individual and run as a lone wolf. This is what people like Stone Cold Steve Austin and John Cena did at the beginning of their careers.
You can run as a tag team, this is where you and another wrestler work together and basically build the hype of the team and then go off eventually hopefully to become two great entities and entertainers as individuals whilst always gaining from the strength you build together. This is what wrestlers like The hardy Boys and edge and Christian did. Who all four went on to have extremely successful singles careers after building upon the tag teams that they came up in. All four even became world champions at different points in their lives.
Then finally there are factions. Factions are groups of wrestlers that consist of 3 and above members. Factions usually have about 3-4 members in them to not clutter the understanding of the audience of who is and isn’t part of the team. A faction works the same way a tag team does it just has more members and sometimes a leader who is a little more popular than the others. The team works as there are already strong individuals who are coming together to collectively become stronger as a team, thus propping up every member to levels of success they could never have dreamt of as individuals. Some historically successful factions have been The Hart Foundation, The Shield and The New Day among others. These factions are important as they can also help bolster up potential talent with already established talent like Evolution, the team that consisted of Dave Bautista and Randy Orton as young guns and Triple H and Ric Flair as established marquee talents. These factions can push forward individuals and skyrocket them much further than they would have come had they been singles competitors. Now Dave Bautista is not only a six-time world champion but he has gained worldwide success with marvel movies and others alike. Randy Orton is now a 9-time world champion, Ric Flair his a 16-time world champion and triple h a 14-time world champion.
PART. 2
Okay now that I have just spent the first half of this episode filling you in on all things wrestling and how the industry works.
Let’s dive straight into how this can be translated into a creative sensibility.
Let’s start with the individual singles competition.
Individuals Competition
Individuals competition can be hard, it can be brutal to go out on your own as a creative and try to build connections, take steps and make things happen for you as an individual/ singles competitor.
However it is not impossible, some people just have the charisma, energy and drive to do so. Some peoples work and determination will garner them big success but this is a special individual.
Someone like Banksy and Shepard Fairey are great examples of this as they were unwavering artists who did the work that came from their hearts and changed the world and industries they were in forever.
Working as an individual is not easy but by the same token yields its own set of rewards.
If this is where you are at in your career and feel like this might be the path you’d like to pursue then you may just be the John Cena of your industry or even The Rock.
Tag Team Competition
Okay, Tag Teams.
Are you an artist with talented friends and you want to help them and you, well this might just be your creative strategy.
There have been so many success stories with this tag team creative strategy.
I like to think of this strategy as this image from the emperor's new groove where Cusco and panache although they don’t like each other, they need to survive this rock face so they use each other to bolster the other up because they will not succeed alone.
This image is so powerful and could explain why forming a creative tag team will help you and your friend succeed much better than you could have alone and then with the name of both of you established you can go on and have individually successful careers.
However not unlike this image, if not for each other neither of them would be able to make it up as high as they do without the other.
Some examples of successful creative tag teams are Sonny and Cher, a couples duo who both went onto have very successful individual careers and most notably Matt Damon and Ben Affleck who met working on Kevin Smith’s film Dogma and then went onto co-write and co-star in Good Will Hunting together which skyrocketed the two of them to international stardom.
Tag Team Competition
What’s a faction?
Well, a faction is a group of artists, in this case, coming together to form a supergroup kind of like an artist Voltron.
When factions are formed in the wrestling world they are formed to bolster up talents that are great as individuals but need that extra push.
These factions can be formed by already established creatives and young creatives coming together.
They can also be formed by putting together a group of straight-up young raw and hungry talents together.
In our industry, myself and a group of artists came together to form the lost boys collective.
We have come together to help each other out and keep the industry alive and positive.
We have collaborated on a few projects over the past year and we are continuing to grow not only our following but our individual and collective success.
Factions are a good way to come together to build collective strength and help ourselves out by helping others out.
This is the one I recommend most highly because if you can come up together, then one you will be far stronger in your success than you could be on your own, but two you will have someone to share in your success with and the karmic and just life achievement value of that is phenomenal.
Even if you can team with already successful artists and your friends and have them as your mentor in your group well then you need to take that opportunity.
Look, ladies and gentlemen, I believe we can most definitely learn something from professional wrestling and how they use all of these strategies to build success for individual talents and as almost a stomping grounds for young talents.
Outro
By no means do I you have to use all of the heroes that I have this week, I have just added them all in there to give you a better understanding of how all the facets of the Shazam method works and how I use this method in my life.
I do hope that you got something from this episode dear listener and can upgrade your self this year and build your creative philosophy by using your heroes teachings to become your own SHAZAM!
Thank you so much for listening,
I love you all.
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