What Colman Domingo’s story taught me about resilience, curiosity, self-respect, and creating your own opportunities.
There is something strangely comforting about hearing a successful person admit that, at one point, they almost walked away.
We tend to meet people at the bloom.
The awards. The recognition. The beautiful house. The impressive career. The photographs where everything looked inevitable, as though success was simply waiting patiently for them to arrive.
We rarely see the seasons before that.
The rejection. The uncertainty. The exhaustion. The years when nothing seemed to be happening.
I was reminded of this while watching an interview with actor Colman Domingo. Today, he is an Oscar nominee and Emmy winner, but his story wasn’t a straight line from talent to recognition.
And what stayed with me wasn’t really the success.
It was the garden.
The space you need to bloom
Domingo talks about how, earlier in his career, he needed the energy of big cities — San Francisco, New York, the hustle, the movement, the creative electricity.
But eventually, something changed.
He realized he needed land and sky. Nature. Space to regroup and pour back into his work.
Now he lives surrounded by nature, and he describes it as a reset — a place where he can wake up, listen to nature, and become centered again.
That made me think about how often we try to bloom in environments that continually drain us.
We tell ourselves we need to be tougher.
More disciplined.
More resilient.
More ambitious.
But sometimes the problem isn’t the seed.
Sometimes it’s the soil.
There are environments where you spend your entire life trying to prove that you can survive, when what you actually need is somewhere you can grow.
Creating the right space for yourself isn’t laziness. It isn’t running away.
Sometimes it is wisdom.
You have to know what allows you to do your best work — and eventually, you have to be brave enough to create more of it.
When the door doesn’t open
Domingo’s career offers another lesson I can’t stop thinking about.
He started as an actor. But after encountering rejection and frustration with the roles being offered to him, he began asking questions.
What was being made?
How was it made?
How could he bring different stories into the world?
Those questions led him to become a writer, then a producer, then a director.
He didn’t simply keep knocking on the same door.
He learned how to build another entrance.
At one point, he describes doing his own shows on Sundays at a bar where he worked. There was space, so he used it. He invited people. He created the atmosphere himself.
There is something wonderfully rebellious about that.
We can spend so much time waiting for someone to give us access that we forget to ask a more powerful question:
What can I create with what I already have?
Maybe you don’t have the audience yet.
Create for ten people.
Maybe you don’t have the perfect office.
Start at the kitchen table.
Maybe nobody has invited you into the room.
Build something worth inviting people into.
Maybe the platform isn’t there.
Find another one.
Start where you are.
Not where you think you should be.
Resilience is not pretending it doesn’t hurt
I especially appreciated that Domingo doesn’t tell a tidy story about perseverance.
Because he almost quit.
After years of auditioning and working, he reached a point where the rejection had become exhausting. He was in his mid-40s and thinking seriously about his future.
Then came an audition that particularly devastated him.
He had gone through the process, done the work, and was ultimately told that he was too brown for the role.
He went home and told his husband that he thought he was ready to leave the career.
Think about that.
This wasn’t someone who hadn’t tried.
This was someone who had spent years trying.
And sometimes that distinction matters.
Resilience isn’t endlessly telling yourself to try harder.
Sometimes resilience is being honest enough to say:
This is hurting me.
This isn’t working.
I need to rethink this.
You are allowed to be tired.
You are allowed to question the dream.
You are allowed to reconsider the path without declaring yourself a failure.
Say yes one more time
And then something happened. A friend encouraged him to meet with a manager who had apparently been trying to meet him for some time.
Domingo initially said no.
He was done.
But his friend insisted: just meet him once.
So, he did.
That meeting changed his life.
I love this part because there is no guarantee in it.
There wasn’t some magical sign telling him, This is the moment. This is the person. Say yes.
He simply had enough openness left to say yes one more time.
Sometimes that’s all we can do.
Not promise ourselves we’ll keep going forever.
Not convince ourselves that everything will work out.
Just leave the door open for one more possibility.
One more conversation.
One more idea.
One more application.
One more attempt.
One more yes.
And perhaps that is a gentler form of resilience.
Curiosity can become a career strategy
There is another thread running through Domingo’s story that I found fascinating: curiosity.
He originally studied journalism.
His acting career began almost accidentally, after he took an acting class as an elective. His teacher noticed something in him and asked whether he had ever considered acting professionally.
His response was essentially: I don’t even know what that means.
But he was curious.
That curiosity became a doorway.
And later, when he encountered problems in his career, he responded with more questions.
That is what makes curiosity so powerful.
It doesn’t always give you an answer.
Sometimes it gives you another question.
And that question takes you somewhere you couldn’t have planned.
Perhaps we don’t need to have our entire lives figured out.
Perhaps we need to remain interested enough in our lives to keep exploring them.
Know what you bring to the room
There is also a point in his story where persistence evolves into something else: self-respect.
After building 25 years of work, Domingo decided he no longer wanted to audition simply because the industry expected him to.
He knew what he had built.
He knew what he brought.
He wanted to have conversations about the work.
That distinction matters.
There comes a point when continually asking someone to prove that you belong can become an insult to the body of work you’ve already created.
Self-respect sometimes sounds like:
This is what I bring.
This is what I know.
This is what I am willing to do.
And these are the rooms I want to be in.
Knowing your values gives you something to stand on when circumstances become uncertain.
It allows you to say no.
Not because you have stopped dreaming.
But because you have finally become clear about what kind of dream you are willing to build.
Build where you are
And then we arrive at the garden.
Domingo’s advice to people still pursuing their dreams is not to obsess overreaching the top of the mountain.
It is to start small.
Build wherever you are.
Find peace and joy wherever you are.
Create within your community.
Pour love and care into something.
And eventually, you may look around and realize that you’ve built something much bigger than you thought.
A garden.
That image stayed with me.
Because gardens don’t appear overnight.
You plant something.
You water it.
You wait.
You lose things.
You start again.
You discover what grows well in your particular soil.
You learn which plants need sunlight and which ones need shade.
You prune.
You protect.
You make room.
And one day, almost without noticing when it happened, you look around and realize:
You’re standing in something you built.
Maybe that’s what we’re doing with our lives.
We keep waiting for the big moment when everything finally blooms.
The promotion.
The book.
The business.
The money.
The relationship.
The recognition.
The dream.
But perhaps the real work is happening in the ordinary days before any of that arrives.
The small decision.
The uncomfortable conversation.
The new skill.
The boundary.
The tiny project.
The unexpected yes.
The question we were curious enough to ask.
The room we created because nobody invited us into theirs.
The environment we finally had the courage to leave.
All of it is part of the garden.
And maybe the goal isn’t to spend our entire lives chasing the view from the top of the mountain.
Maybe it’s to become so present with the process of building that, one day, we look around and realize we are already surrounded by flowers.
The garden is not something you arrive at.
It is something you build.
And perhaps, if we are willing to keep planting, keep learning, keep choosing, and keep creating where we are, one day we’ll look around and realize:
we are already blooming.
Salima
Just me thinking out loud over here