Meet Aldo Casabona

 

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Aldo Casabona. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Aldo below.

Hi Aldo, thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?

Growing up, it was always hard to organize myself and plan in advance. My family and friends might disagree: On the surface, I always showed up. I was tidy with my toys and did well in school. Yet for a long period of my life, I despised doing homework, chores, and basically anything that I was tasked to do, postponing it until the last minute. That dichotomy always got me wondering…

Will I succeed in college if I don’t learn the habit of studying for an exam NOW?

Will I live my ENTIRE life uneasy from untidy spaces?

I think that it was when I started to let go, that I truly managed to develop a strong work ethic. I started doing this way later than I thought I would: When I moved to college, thousands of miles away from my family.

How? Well, I believe putting myself outside of my comfort zone, inevitably turned my survival skills on. Moving to a city as big as New York, with my lifeguard (my family) so far away, forces you to fend for yourself. I could give up at any time and go back home, but I went there with an objective: To become the greatest actor I could be.

The thing is, I realized, a clear objective makes you let go of the things that hold you back. It makes you focus. You schedule yourself to MAKE IT WORK and you focus on the GOALS required to achieve said objective.

And honestly, it forces you to grow up in the process.

This doesn’t mean that to accomplish a good work ethic you need to perform such a radical change like I did, although it definitely helped. The fact is, I have learned that as long as you get out of your comfort zone to achieve any goal, big or small, you will start building invaluable survival skills needed to become a better person.

I will be working on my work ethic probably my entire my life as I go accomplishing my objectives. There will be tougher days and there will be easier ones… Learn to value both, because from them, you earn the skills that will clear the path forward towards your dream.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

Aldo Casabona is an actor born in Santiago, Chile. At the age of 19, he moved to New York City to train at AMDA College of the Performing Arts, completing his degree at the college’s Los Angeles campus.

Since very young, Aldo has had the desire of working in many different fields ranging from business to healthcare. But the one passion that has prevailed amongst them all has been his love for the arts. This has led him to write stories and films for as long as he can remember, as well as providing “eternal but also outstanding for a 7 year old” puppet shows to his friends and family.

Year after year, his passion has been a beacon of inspiration and creativity to the people around him. From producing a short film in 2014 where he played eight of his 4th grade teachers who were “astonished like never before from Aldo’s vision and innovation” to a year later leading a cast of 11 student in his grade to produce a 30-minute film titled “Dear Royal Me” for the school’s film festival (which was ineligible to win for it’s lengthiness, something that didn’t stop Aldo from organizing his own film premiere in a nearby venue with a red carpet, Q&A session and a screening of the movie for the cast and their friends and family).

Aldo has also been training his acting brain and muscles long before arriving to AMDA. From 2012 to 2015 he took acting classes at Estadio Español, a social club in Santiago for Spanish descendants. As soon as Aldo got to high school, he got into the world of musical theatre, participating in the ensemble of the productions of “Mamma Mia!” and “Grease”. In 2019, Aldo attended the New York musical theatre school: GO Broadway, founded by Valentina Berger and took classes from artists like Taylor Louderman, Thayne Jasperson, Marcelo Velasco Vidal and Regina O’Malley.
Almost 2 years after the 2020 theatrical hiatus, Aldo got his chance to play the titular role in “Dear Evan Hansen” and while on his senior year, the triple role of Mr. Pinky, Mr. Spritzer and Mr. Wimsey in “Hairspray”.

Now, Aldo Casabona is on the auditioning phase of his journey and hopes to keep finding new ways to further develop his craft, now in the bigger pond of the United States. His creativity and determination cannot be denied and will be present until his final day.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

If I had to choose, I think the three most important qualities and skills that have helped me get to where I am now and where I want to be are PATIENCE, LOVE & AMBITION:

PATIENCE to wait for the day you get what you want finally arrives. It will make the journey much more tolerable.

LOVE for the craft and LOVE for the process. If you don’t love what you are doing or only want to get there without valuing the path, then success is harder to achieve, and way less rewarding.

AMBITION is key to achieving goals towards your objective. Dream big. Patience is important, but don’t get too comfortable. Train, create and find new ways to enrich yourself and achieve your objective.

From experience, I have learnt the BEST WAY to acquire these three qualities is to put yourself out there as much as you can. Impulse yourself to meet new people and try new things. You never know what you might find and discover if you say YES. You might learn to value things you didn’t take into consideration or you might find you feel really good after you do a certain activity. Everything you do can get you closer to your dream. So why not try it?

We’ve all got limited resources, time, energy, focus etc – so if you had to choose between going all in on your strengths or working on areas where you aren’t as strong, what would you choose?

I definitely think, it is better to be well rounded and try a bit of everything rather than excelling at just one. At the end of the day, improving little by little in multiple areas will improve your skills in other areas, subsequently. Many skills you learn from different disciplines intersect with each other.

For me, for example, trying different sports throughout my life has allowed me to learn to work as a team and to endure through pressure. Even if I am not the best at football or volleyball, I can later apply those skills learnt in my acting career and become stronger in my craft.

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