Imagine watching an old episode of the Love Boat and special guest star Gabe Kaplan solves the problems of the crew members who are seemingly caught in a series of precarious positions. Now, that may work to a certain degree as something quite unexpected and as a departure from the formula of the show, but what if he totally made the crew look impotent in terms of their role in the program in the process? Or what if an episode of Columbo found the detective completely stumped and a faceless character from the police academy showed up and solved the crime making Columbo look impotent as well? It would be pretty bad, no? This is why you don't see peropheral characters making the decisions that lead characters would make. It'd kill the show.

If only life came with a head writer and director, we'd be able to avoid a number of problems would we not?

In our lives, we are the main and central character. We star in our own movie and everything rvolves around us. So, imagine this: as part of your movie you enroll in karate lessons and decide to ignore the instructor, go off and do your own thing, disrupt the class, bother other students? You would probably get thrown out and you'd get thrown out in a manner that would make you look bad and downright embarrassed. Nobody would script themselves in the main event of a film to be completely embarrassed, have no comeback and be rendered totally inept. Can you imagine Rambo tripping and falling on his face in the middle of the movie? Hardly. It would pretty much kill any chance at drama as the movie continues.

Here's the deal: the reason you would get tossed out of that karate class is because you wandered on the set of someone else's movie. You are, at best, a special guest star and, more likely, a mere peripheral walk on character or extra from central casting. It's not always you movie, dude.

While we do see ourselves often as the star of our own movie, we are also character actors getting work here and there as well. When we are in as support role, we shouldn't be trying to steal anything from the stars. If we do, we are asking for it. You'll end up one of those characters who the bad guys wipe out...savvy?