Mentorship: for the Mildly Unhinged, and the Art of Productive Chaos. 

Dominick LaRuffa Jr, founder

(and famous essayist)

You know that famous saying, “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day; teach a man to fish, and he’ll immediately start a podcast about fishing and try to get verified on Instagram.” Close enough. Anyway, that’s mentorship in a nutshell. Except in my case, replace fish with dramatic monologues and whatever flavor of existential dread comes from auditioning for the role of “Guy Who Walks Past the Cop With Purpose.”

At Blue Collar Artist Studio, mentorship isn’t just some lofty concept we toss around because it sounds impressive, though admittedly, it does. It’s the reason we roll out of bed in the morning, right after caffeine-fueled determination, the sound of screaming toddlers, and the faint hope of a residual check. The truth is, I value mentorship so deeply because I had so painfully little of it myself coming up in show business. I left drama school with a shiny BFA in “Being a Super Talented Actor,” a lifetime of debt, and absolutely no idea how to actually make a living as a working artist.

I often found myself in the wrong circles, listening to the wrong advice, making enough mistakes to fill several tragic one-act plays, and learning almost entirely from trial and mostly error. Everyone at our studio shares a similar story. We built our artistic lives through sheer determination, grit, and a refusal to quit, not through family connections or easy access. That is exactly why we are so passionate about mentoring. We understand the brutal necessity of balancing real life and responsibilities with the dream of becoming a full-time artist, a dream that is not just achievable but sustainable.

Unlike traditional school structures, our coaching and mentorship happen one on one. We believe in the power of personalized guidance tailored to each individual’s journey, goals, and challenges. This is not a one-size-fits-all classroom. It is a deeply personal experience designed to meet artists where they are, often right at the intersection of art, fear, and rent.

Our mentorship involves helping artists discover talent they might not even know they have, or gently breaking the news that their high school drama teacher lied about their “natural charisma.” Both scenarios require equal parts honesty and compassion, traits I had to piece together myself from watching the wrong examples and learning what not to do. Because when it came to actual guidance in this business, I was mostly on my own.

When I was starting out, the family closest to me insisted that if I wanted to “make it,” I should avoid marriage and kids at all costs, as though happiness and artistic success were mutually exclusive. Yet ironically, my career only became sustainable after getting married and having children. Not saying that has to be you. But I am saying most people have no idea what they’re talking about most of the time. Mentorship here is about helping you understand that your personal life is not a distraction. It is fuel.

Our mission is to help you find meaningful work, whether creative side hustles or jobs outside of the industry, that will not crush your soul but instead support your real purpose. I have seen it firsthand. People who walked away from years in medicine with a mountain of debt and realized that what they truly wanted was to act. People who only after their marriages fell apart finally admitted this was the thing they were meant to do all along. People coming out of the service with real trauma who found themselves again by creating, by learning a new discipline, by discovering the artist they didn’t know was still in there. These moments are not rare here. They happen all the time. Because mentorship, at its best, is not just about helping someone get better at their craft. It is about helping them become who they were supposed to be in the first place.

At our studio, we preach loudly and often that we are all in this together. Our clients are not just students. They are collaborators in a constantly evolving conversation about what it means to be a working artist today. Whenever I or my staff book a gig, whether it is a Broadway show, a TV series, or a particularly humiliating producing job where you have to pretend the fourth rewrite of a scene set in a dry cleaner at gunpoint is still elevated material, we immediately turn it into a lesson plan. This is not outdated advice from teachers who used to do it decades ago. It is live intel straight from the trenches of an ever-changing industry. We are active participants, not nostalgic observers.

Real mentorship is about humility. It is accepting that you might know more than someone else, but having the patience not to rub it in too much. It is the art of listening, even when your mentee insists their reinterpretation of Hamlet set in a Williamsburg bodega is groundbreaking.

Because ultimately, mentorship and life is about the pursuit of excellence. Once more, the pursuit. It is about recognizing that purpose does not live in the destination but in the messy, exhilarating, occasionally maddening journey itself. At Blue Collar Artist Studio, we teach that finding purpose is not about achieving some mythical end goal. It is about continuously striving to become better, more thoughtful, and more impactful every day.

None of this comes easy. Struggle and discomfort are not roadblocks to greatness. They are prerequisites. Getting uncomfortable, being bad at something, wrestling with doubt and fatigue, that is the job. If you are not struggling, you are probably not growing. And if you are not practicing kindness through all of it, the grind, the hustle, the missteps; then you are missing the best part of the whole journey. The work ethic we teach here is not about ego or hustle culture. It is about being honest with yourself about how hard this life can be, and doing it anyway, because you believe in the life waiting on the other side of that discomfort.

Having struggled through the industry mostly alone, I have come to treasure what it means to be the mentor I never had. One minute I was bartending across the street from the Neil Simon Theatre, and four months later I was winning a Tony for co-producing All The Way with Bryan Cranston. I was twenty-four with zero wherewithal. Truthfully, I should have kept the bartending job. Eventually, I did put those bar pants back on for a few years. But that is the story you will have to pay for.

I was suddenly surrounded by people who probably had a lot to teach me, but they were leagues ahead. Even if they tried, I could not yet understand. Some steps just cannot be skipped. I made dumb choices trying to compete with people who had decades of experience and generational wealth. I was never going to win that race. The only person I am, or should ever be, in competition with is me.

I now pay that forward through Blue Collar Artist Studio, training everyone from people who have never had more than two dimes to rub together to those born into privilege, from artists recently out of the military to kids who packed a bag and took the bus chasing a dream. We work with people from every walk of life, because whether you grew up in a Manhattan brownstone or, like me, in a middle-class Brooklyn apartment where Broadway felt as far away as Mars, the desire to create comes from the same place. Watching their faces when something clicks, when they finally nail that monologue, finish their first draft, book that debut gig, or raise the money to make their dream film, is priceless. Actually, it is very much priced, but luckily ProducerHub.org helps us with funding, so I can keep pretending money does not matter.

Here is the magic of mentorship. It always goes both ways. Sure, I am teaching actors about craft, business, and the fine art of surviving on three hours of sleep and unearned optimism. But my students constantly teach me resilience, creativity, and new slang I immediately misuse in front of my kids. They remind me that I am still learning, still evolving, still in pursuit.

Mentorship at Blue Collar Artist Studio is not about creating little Dominick clones. Trust me, the world does not need more of those psychos. It is about empowering artists to craft their own narratives. To teach them that even in the worst of times—a pandemic, a dry spell, a rejection that stings harder than it should—something transformative can be born. Because I lived it. My entire business started from an email I almost ignored. A student reached out when I was down to my last few dollars, and that conversation changed everything. That one act of faith, his not mine, rebuilt my life one Zoom session at a time.

So yes, mentorship is worth it. Not because of some grand sense of selflessness or legacy, though that sounds nice, but because it transforms lives, mine included. And also because “mentor” looks pretty impressive on a LinkedIn profile. Just kidding. I am clearly not a “find me on LinkedIn” guy. I do not own a single Patagonia vest.