When I was a first-year acting student at NYU’s Tisch School for the Arts, we had a phenomenal lecture series.

The actor Kevin Kline told a story that I keep with me always. He had auditioned for every single acting program out there. And had been rejected by every one. By the time he got to his Juilliard audition, he had given up completely. Juilliard, for those of you who don’t know, is the holy grail of acting schools along with Yale School of Drama and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

Mr. Kline said that he knew he had absolutely no chance of getting into Juilliard, so he went in to the audition with a sense of “whimsey.” That whimsey, that playful, buoyant, light ,and maybe even silly quality, turned out to be just what Juilliard was looking for. When Mr. Kline let go, stopped pushing, his work came alive.

This week, let go of perfection—it doesn’t work anyway. Play with whimsey!