Heroic Interview: Improv Wisdom with Patricia Ryan Madson

You're listening to Improv Wisdom, an Optimal.

Living interview with Patricia Ryan Madsen and Brian Johnson.

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today, I am so excited to be with Patricia Ryan Matson, one of my favorite new teachers, one of the world's leading improv teachers. I don't think she would describe herself that way because she is so humble, but taught at Stanford University for several decades in their drama department, wrote an extraordinary book called Improv Wisdom that Steven Pressfield actually turned me onto. I don't know if you guys. If you knew how much he's sharing your work. He said it was one of his few indispensable books, I think is how he described it. And I respect Steven Pressfield so much that when I read that, I immediately went to Amazon, bought the book, and. And I can see why he is such a big fan of you and your work. And I'm just really excited to be here today and chatting with you, and I appreciate you taking the time.

Thank you. Thank you, Brian. I'm really looking forward to this. You're very kind to invite me. So, yeah, Steven Kresfield, I'm one of his great fans, and when he made some comments and supported the book, I was over the moon. It was like, the highest praise I could imagine to have his imprimatur of okayness. He's a great guy. Wow.

That's so cool. Maybe today we'll do the exercise. He particularly adores and shares in his books. You know, what's inside the box. But to step back and just to talk about improv wisdom, we were talking before, just about. I'm a recovering perfectionist, and for me, I used to get stressed out. I started my career at Arthur Anderson, if you could believe it, in the auditing department, and did some other things there in a very brief stint. But I used to stress myself out with whether the staple was properly aligned to the top of the page. That's how bad I was. So your freedom to don't prepare, just show up, which is the subtitle of your book, is really empowering. And it's one of the things I'm excited to chat about today. For those of us who, like, I still do, I look at the improv performer and see a level of fearlessness, playfulness, that's deeply inspiring. And the way that you kind of deconstruct that in your book and in your work is really, really inspiring. And I want to start with what you describe as the password. So the password to that fearlessness which happens to be your first of 13 maxims. How would you describe that?

Really simple. The password is yes. And it's complicated and simple all at the same time. Because the most common response I get back to the notion of saying yes to life is, that's my problem. I'm totally overstressed because I'm always saying yes. Well, the idea of saying yes is opening yourself to life to be able to respond to it. Because an improviser isn't somebody who starts with any answer, who starts with any plan, who starts with any goal, but they start. They open themselves to whatever is coming their way, whatever offer comes. And the saying yes means, I'm going to let it in. Even if what we often do is judge something first and decide which things to let in. But it's crazy about that, because we may judge something that we don't like and push it away, but it's likely to come in anyway. It's just those things. Health's a good example of that. A lot of times, the health challenges we face, we would rather say no to, but we don't really have a choice. So the improviser is a person who, by definition, has agreed to let in whatever life's offers are and to step up to the plate and respond. And so it's not something. It's definitely not about being clever or coming up with something witty or funny. And the first piece of mythology is that improv's about comedy. Well, certainly improv can be applied to creating comedy, and there's wonderful examples of that on film and television. They're great improvisers and great musical improviser. But if you think about it, improv is a way, a dao, a methodology, an approach to how we. How we step up to anything. And so I think that my purpose in life has been to take these. The ideas that happened in an improv classroom where I was teaching actors and business people how to improvise, how those ideas seem to be part of the perennial wisdom, part of the good advice that's helpful outside of the classroom. So the notion of saying yes doesn't mean liking, doesn't mean agreeing with, but it means opening to. So a great example that recently came to mind was parents, for example, almost all the time are offers come to them from their kids that seem impossible. So, mommy, mommy, can I have a pony? Well, of course the answer is no, but the improv mom would say a pony. Oh, that's interesting. I didn't know you were interested in ponies. Hey, we could maybe Go to some pony rides or how about going to the library and let's look up ponies. Wow, I didn't know that you had a love of ponies. Let's explore that. So instead of just shutting down the obvious, what is it in the offer that comes to you that you can look for the beautiful source? What is inside of that offer that you can join, that you can develop? Because it's more than saying yes. It's yes. And that's the magic part of yes. For the improviser they add to it. And the example I just made, mom says, oh, great ponies. I didn't know you were interested in ponies. And maybe we can go together and look at one. Or I know somebody who's got a pony.

I love it.

Does that make sense?

It does. And it reminds me, just speaking of mythology, just the Joseph Campbell wisdom of say yes to it all. All of it, right? The good, the supposed bad. And you know, that idea of just being able to alchemize and turning poison into medicine by being willing to invite and have that deep self trust and a true confidence that we know we can handle whatever challenge life gives us and literally let it make us stronger. Can you just to use one more frame, how about someone who loses their job? How do we say yes to that?

Well, you say yes to that. The loss of a job is the beginning of something else. It's an open door. It means that while something has concluded, you now have the world in front of you. You don't know what the future is going to be. But it seems to me that if you look at a job loss as the entry into the next part of your life and you see it as an exploration rather than just a defeat. We put meaning on things all the time. We're taking whatever experience comes to us and judging it somehow, putting it in a compartment and letting it affect us that way. And humans are awfully fond of a kind of fatalism. A friend of mine who teaches leadership and improv in England, Johnny Moore, has just written a short, wonderful book that I'm very keen on right now. It's called Nothing Is Written. And I want to share with you a little story that begins the book, if you don't mind. May I? Okay. In the film Lawrence of Arabia, there's a scene where Lawrence is crossing the desert. One of his group, Gassim, has fallen from his camel and is lost. The tribesmen tell Lawrence that to return to him would lead to certain death under the unforgiving sun. It is written they say it's a common human response to stress. Rather than admit to anxiety or doubt, we double down on vehemently held beliefs. We seek to tame the unknown and the complex by eliminating any talk of risk or possibility. Rather than admit to sadness for Qassim or fear for themselves, they talk about the way things are. In so many work situations. People would rather say, that won't work, or this is how we've always done it, or I don't know. Unwilling to leave Ghassim to die, Lawrence defies this wisdom and vanishes into the sands in search of him. He subsequently returns with Ghassim alive and tells the Bedouin, nothing is written. And that's the title of his book, Nothing is Written. There's some way in which we. I think that's a profound truth. That we forget that anything can be possible and that the outcomes that seem predictable or that we fear are one of many. But nothing is written. We can write. We can begin making those writing that future in our lives.

I love it. Yeah, we were talking before just about Constructive Living, which I want to chat about. And Dan Millman, who introduced me to David Reynolds's work, he breaks down the word author inauthentic as sharing the same root of to literally be the author of our own stories. And as you described that story, it's just that opportunity that we always have if we're willing to say yes and then choose the most empowered response, which is a big theme throughout the work that I do. I want to share one other quote that you have, such a good one just on this sense of optimism and the idea that we can choose. I'm leafing through my notes here of your book. Where did it Go? Oh, yeah, you quote the travel guru Rick Steves. You say travel guru Rick Steves has a formula for the right way to approach travel. Be fanatically positive and militantly optimistic. If something's not to your liking, change your liking.

Isn't that great? I love that.

Yeah. It's so good.

That's really good.

So good. Well, let's move into a little bit of the Constructive Living idea, as we discussed a little bit before. And for those of you who aren't familiar with David Reynolds and his work yet, check out Constructive Living. I'll put some links with this interview to my notes and video on his work and where you can learn more about David. But Patricia and I were joking that he's one of the most extraordinary, unknown, relatively teachers out there. And Constructive Living is, I like to say, the best book most people have never heard of. And you, you've integrated his ideas into your improv philosophy. So I'd love for you to describe, however you'd like, your relationship to constructive living and how it applies to improvisation, etc.

Thank you. I would love to answer that question. Let me say first that constructive living, as Dr. Reynolds has written about it, is a very clear, pure way of looking at things. He derived his wisdom from two Japanese systems, Morita psychotherapy and Nikon psychotherapy. He brought them together and came up with some principles that are pretty simple to remember. It's know your purpose, accept your feelings, and do what needs to be done. Simple. And then the fourth is know your purpose, accept reality, accept your feelings, do what needs to be done in the light of noticing all that you're receiving. That's the Nikon part. So these four ideas of being purpose driven, rather than feeling driven, which most of our culture is, and being accepting, that's a good improv idea. Accepting not only your feelings, but all of reality. And it's letting it in, not picking and choosing, and then doing what needs to be done. So construct. Are we still together here?

Yeah. Yeah. This is great. Great.

I just touched a keypad and it's very sensitive and sometimes things happen that doing what needs to be done for Dr. Reynolds is the summum bonum. And we all each personally get to decide what that needs to be. He doesn't ever give you a prescription for what you need to do, but we find within ourselves what needs to be done and doing it. When I ingested that amazing clear philosophy into my life, I. It happened to sit alongside of the work that I was professionally doing teaching improvisation and acting at Stanford. And that work had a lot of the purpose of that work had to do with expression, had to do with, in a way, self actualization. Actors have to be able not only to be somebody else, but they have to find the part of themself that has thoughts and feelings and emotions. Constructive living doesn't deal really with any of that content. But somehow it came to me that if you use the constructive living principles of being purpose centered, accepting of reality, and then proactive, that a lot of this had much in common with the improv philosophy, because improvisers act first and then justify what they did. It's ready, fire, aim. And there's a way that we often want to think ourselves into long spirals of something before we act. The improv philosophy and the constructive living philosophy is based on what you think needs to be done. Sort of your first guess, step in and do something. Reality will then give you feedback about whether it's a useful direction or not. And you can adjust or continue with gusto. And I think that is a. It's a kind of a useful way to go about your life. Time is short. Most of us don't have nearly as much as we'd like, so. And we have so many challenges for our attention today. Choosing what we pay attention to becomes part of how we define our purpose. And you're doing a lot with your philosopher's notes about bringing people to really helpful thoughts about how to make every moment count.

I appreciate that. And such a beautiful reflection. And there's so many different angles we can take with what you just described. Let's go into. One of my favorite questions is the David Reynolds question, which he comes back to. Okay, you're purpose driven. You're accepting your feelings, knowing that you can't directly immediately change your feelings, but you can alter your thoughts and behaviors. And his question of how we get to work now, what needs to be done now, what needs to be done? That willingness to actually engage in what we need to do is just so profoundly inspiring.

It's really helpful because oftentimes the question we're actually asking is, what do I feel like doing now? And that can lead us in a lot of directions. Not that that's necessarily a bad question, but if we ask the question, what needs to be done? It's a profoundly helpful question. Sometimes it includes doing something about feelings. I'm feeling really tired. So what needs to be done is go to bed an hour earlier tonight. But sometimes what needs to be done is stay with the project I'm working on. Focus on this moment now. Appreciate all the help I'm getting with the project I'm working on and work for an hour longer.

Yeah, yeah. So good. Well, then let's go back to Ready, fire, aim. So you have One of my favorite ideas in the book that I capture in the note is your idea of Ready, fire, aim. And I share a story of. I first heard that from John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods, and he taught me, you know, ready, fire, aim. And I thought that was just amazing. Again, as a recovering perfectionist. And then when I interviewed him, he told me he actually prefers fire, ready, aim.

Fire, ready, aim.

Just get to work. There are very few things in life. Sure, the brain surgeon and the pilot need to go through their checklist, but for most of us, most of the time, we need to be willing to go for it. So Talk to me about that. The willingness to make mistakes and other things that come into your work and wisdom.

I think it's a mindset if you see life as an adventure that you're stepping into and you're not quite sure where it's going to go. If you can sort of get, I would say a little bit comfortable or used to that idea that it's, we don't know what's going to come next. Most of us really want to know what's coming next and then work toward some particular outcome. But if we can step back for a moment and say, I really don't know what the end of this sentence is going to be, what the end of this interview is going to be, I do have a purpose. I want to be helpful, I want to be responsive. I want to listen to my questions and try to answer them well. But I don't know where it's going to go. If I can trust that my whole life has brought me to this moment and provides me with the resources that will be needed, I can step into that adventure and see what happens. And I think if we see this adventure, model life being, I don't know what's going to come next. But let's see, let's discover. Let's discover it together. I bet as a parent, you know that, that children teach that all the time, don't they?

So much so. And the freedom to experiment is. And to the willingness to let go of the self consciousness, you know, of course the metaphorical and I'm now experiencing it as a new dad, this watching our son learn how to walk where, you know, it's a truism that if he had our adult minds, he would never learn how to walk because he'd constantly be judging himself. Right. Unless he went through one of your classes. Right. But to watch him so unselfconsciously explore where every slight, everything is a joy and sometimes you might fall down and it might hurt and there'll be the momentary expression of pain, but then there's this curiosity and this willingness to continue to make the adventure of it that's unbelievably inspiring. And I think ultimately it's the willingness to make mistakes. Right. And to redefine what that it's just data, it's just an experience.

Exactly.

Tell me more about that.

Oh, you've defined it really well. It's that somehow even the word mistake is not even helpful. It's. There's things happen, they're unexpected consequences. It didn't go the way that Even the formula said it would. But what we have to look at is not what it isn't. We have to look at what it is. Because everything that we do, it's redefining even the notion of mistake. And I think that's partly stepping back from the long list of shoulds and outcomes and formulas that we've often spent a lot of time learning. A lot of training, a lot of self help is about developing a formula for how to do it right. And you'll get a good outcome every time. Yeah. And I think that the improv way is open your eyes. You have to stay awake, though. That's the part of improvising you can't kind of lull yourself into. Now this is number three, or I'm going to go on script. It takes a certain amount of energy to stay awake to see what comes next. But what I've discovered is when I'm improvising afterwards, I really feel energized. There's a way in which the act of staying awake, responding to what's going on, making adjustments, noticing it was different, but not, I don't know, stopping to call it a mistake. In fact, there's a. An image that I like to use. I said so often when we make a mistake, we go into a kind of palm frond curl and sort of like this, oh, how could I have done that? We curl inside ourselves and we wonder, how did that happen? And we go mentally about what caused this problem. Instead, instead of opening up at that moment, something went differently. Not how did it happen, but what comes next. It's the what comes next. The next moment where we have any power or control or anything. Reynolds, when he talks about this phenomena, says, if you're on the beach and you're kind of trying to show off your bathing suit and a big wave comes and knocks you down, if you stand there wondering, how did that happen? Another one's going to knock you down. So you need to stand up. And in improv class, we learn something.

Called ta da, ta da, ta da.

We raise our hands in the air and we celebrate this moment and look out to what comes next. Because it's the what comes next moment where something really even wonderful can happen. Or certainly we can readjust from the wave and pull up our baby suit if it's. If the wave's pulled it off us.

Yep. And laugh rather than do that. Palm frond. Right?

Yeah.

That's really cool.

Yeah.

Wow. Okay. I love it. Where else do we want to go?

Would you like to open a Gift.

Oh, yes, yes. Good one. Thank you.

All right. All right. What we have to all do right now is imagine that right now, right where we are, right in front of us is a shoebox sized package that's wrapped and it just appeared there. So the first thing you do is look down at the shoebox size package that's wrapped and notice the wrapping. Okay. In fact, you can kind of describe it in your mind right now. What does yours look like, Brian?

I'm just forming it, but it's kind of a nice deep blue with a white ribbon.

Okay.

Faint white stripes. It's pretty nice.

Cool. Now keep your eyes open. Now can you pick it up and lift it in the air?

Yes.

Okay, do that.

Okay. All right.

You got it.

Very good.

Now, first thing I say is imagine what might be in there. Think right for a moment. What could be. It's a shoebox size thing. So what might be in there? And have you got that thought? What could be in there? Put that up in your mind kind of over here. All right, now we're gonna carefully open the package and find out what's there. And the only thing I can tell you about it is. The only thing it isn't is that thing that you've got in your mind that it might be. All right, let's open our package. And I'm gonna open mine too and see what happens. Okay. Take a moment there and open. Pull the ribbons off. Okay. Mine had a kind of brown paper. Okay. All right. Would you lift your lid?

I was so enthralled by your process.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. All right. Whoa. All right, cool. What have you got in your box?

I haven't gotten to my box yet. Again, I've been so excited about what's in your box.

Oh, okay. It's a small doll. It appears to have raggedy and kind of hair and a plaid dress. A little doll. She's about 8. 8 inches tall. Okay, open yours. Let's see what you got.

What do we got here? Going back to shaking it. How big is it? All right, we're opening it. Looking at it.

Yeah.

I'm trying not to be biased by what? I just opened up. My last box. I just opened up.

Just see what's there.

What's there? Well, not seeing anything quite yet. I'm totally stuck in my. In my head around what I just got and kind of what I wanted to see there.

I know, it's like the mind likes to do things. I think there might be something, I don't know in the corner. Put your Hand in and see if you can pull out something. Well, surprise yourself.

Surprise myself. All right, what do we got in here? Let me take a breath. Get back in. Okay, going back in. I'll go over here. I'll open it over here. Private spot. All right, I came back. Okay.

What's in it?

There was a video of my son calling up the Sarahs for the first time.

No kidding. Very cool. A video, A DVD cartoon, strangely.

So, yes, we have it on our iPhones, but that's actually what showed up. And it actually had a package like, you know, like you'd get from the old blockbuster style, like dvd.

Neat. Surprise.

There you go.

Yes, very cool.

It's cool, too, to see the moment of kind of the inhibition and the self consciousness and the. The desire to see what it was that I thought it was, you know, and it's the ability to step back and kind of get out of that space, clean the slate and see what actually is there.

You know, the experience you had is so common. A high percentage of students have that. Wait a minute. And there's something way in which the mind, the mind thinks it needs to do this, but if we can't kind of get out of the way and just find what's there, discover rather than put something there. I suggest that once a day on your desk, when you're taking a little break for something, you imagine that there's a package sitting there, it's wrapped, open it and see what's there. Because one of the things that I like to remind people is there's always something in the box. Reality puts it there. And if we keep opening the box to see there's something there and get out of the way of judging it, oh, it might even be something, something I don't like. Ooh, one day I got a whole pile of doggy turds. But the improviser, instead of saying, ooh, doggy turds, will say something like, oh, doggy turds. How can I use this? Oh, I've got a compost pile. I can use this to sweeten up that compost pile.

So cool.

So whatever you find in the box, you don't have to like it, but you. You want to find it useful. How can I. How can I accept it?

It's amazing. Just the ability to. To step out of your pre. You know, your. Your cognitively formed idea of what should be there. If I remember correctly, Pressfield uses this in the context of that creative exercise in the sense of if you're stuck on a particular project or whatever, just to allow that which is underneath to come out. Something is always there. There's always a next step. Step. There's always a next line or a next character coming into a scene or whatever it is. And that willingness to step back, particularly when we're kind of grinding on something and allow something bigger than us to come through. Right?

Absolutely. Because the mind can only do so much and we have to give it a little holiday, get out of the way of our thinking, preparing brain and just kind of make discoveries. It's very childlike when I do this. Kids love this exercise. If you take Alexander and pretend to give him a box and say this is a present, see what's there, I guarantee you he'll find something. Oh, it's a hehe.

That's really funny. Yeah, well, it's. It's his big thing right now. I can imagine he's a storyteller. When I tell him that I teach, he starts telling stories about raccoons are his big thing. So the raccoons are different colors, they do different things at the. So awesome. Definitely try it. And then on this. On the note of gifts, Another one of my favorite ideas in your book and in. In general ever in all the books that I've read is your idea about silent gifts. And you talk about the importance of love and service and appreciation throughout the book. And I, in the book that you sent to me too, I just loved the. The inserted port poem. I just discovered that and opened it up. But just this idea of giving ourselves to the world, which I want to talk about. But let's bring it back to the silent gifts of appreciating all the things that people have done for us. But can you, can you describe your conception of silent gifts?

Yeah, I learned this from David Reynolds and from this principle called Nikon, which has to do with never taking anything for granted. It's about developing a kind of a lens, like putting on some glasses that aren't necessarily rose colored, but they're realistic glasses. And everything that exists around me came from somewhere. And if I think about it from the vantage point of what am I receiving? There's this beautiful lamp here and I'm receiving light that allows me to see you. I'm also receiving a kind of incredible beauty because the lamp that I'm looking at is a Tiffany lamp. And some artists made this and made a design. It's that everything around us, objects, services, people, energy sources, offer us benefit. And it's very easy, I think, to. To notice and comment on the things that cause us Problems or grief. We're constantly aware of something that's in our way. When the computer Internet is down for a little bit, boy, we squeal and carry on. And oh, our life is a mess. But how often during the day do we thank that Internet source for the magic that it's allowing us to have this conversation and to share ideas together and hopefully help other people with these ideas? The silent gifts are all the 99% of the stuff in our world that we take for granted that's just there. And we might think, well, of course it's there. An example I love is the gift that we receive from somebody who's in a bad mood. If we're in a restaurant, for example, and a waitress comes and serves us our food, brings us our check and everything, but she's kind of having a day. And so it's very common to say, you know, the food was pretty good, but that waitress, really, she was a problem. You know, they ought to do something about her. If you can reconceive that scene as, gee, I received this meal thanks to this woman who maybe was having a very bad day. Rather than blaming people for their moods, I trained myself to look at what I'm receiving from others all the time. And it's different from just saying, I want to do a gratitude exercise. When I ask myself, what am I grateful for? For it's really easy what I'm grateful for. To find the stuff I like, the stuff that pleases me, the people that are nice, the kind waitress that served me. But I think this is a little bit more profound practice in that I'm looking for how I'm being served, even when I'm not noticing it. And life is a gift to start with. And the breath we have is a gift. Everything around is a kind of a gift. And to develop that muscle that sees the gift even in difficulties, I think is a healthy thing to do. We're awfully good at noticing what's a problem. The mind will do that. I don't have to worry about that. But I do have to, I think, train the muscle. The part of me that sees the gift in all circumstances, I love it.

Abraham Maslow said that taking things for granted is the greatest non Evil evil. Just struck me when I read that of wow, just this idea that exactly what you just so beautifully said. And to look at everything, all the mechanics are going on right now for us to be here and then it's literally an infinite thread that we can pull of the human beings who have dedicated their lives to make it possible for us to sit on a chair or stand on a cushion or to look into a camera. I mean, it's truly staggering. And to build that muscle when things are going pretty well, such that we have the capacity to go into that and to say yes to the harder and harder things is such a huge practice. And, yeah, I really appreciate the beautiful way you just framed it.

Yeah. Great. Now, I think that Maslow quote is absolutely right that we're often stuck on ourselves and we're missing that. That's why Reynolds book, which you might be interested in, called Thirsty Swimming in the Lake, is really about that idea that while we're constantly noticing our thirst, everything is supporting us all the time.

I'll definitely check that out.

He's got half a dozen books that had a kind of limited publication. He calls them the water books. Thirsty Swimming in the Lake, Playing Ball On Running Water. Even in summer the Ice Doesn't Melt, Plunging through the Clouds. They're all his water books. And it's just more Reynolds. He writes essays that just keep supporting those same.

Oh, I can't wait. I'm gonna definitely take all those. While we're on that theme, let's pull that thread. So what other books do you recommend?

What other books do I recommend? Oh, good. Let's see. Well, the book Nothing is written by Johnny Moore. M O O R E. There's also a new book on improv called Easy by Paul Jackson.

Not disappearing. Although we are recording this.

I'm still going to record Paul Jackson Easy, and I think it's just coming out. I'm not sure who the press is. The Nothing is written by Johnny Moore. J O N N I E M O O R E Johnny Moore is a very small book. In fact, he's giving it away right now in a PDF form. I'll send you a copy. It's a tiny little book. Keith Johnstone's book Impro was part of my formation of my thinking. It's a book about his philosophy of improvising. It's a social psychology book in a way. So I think I'm very fond of John o' Donohue to bless the space between us or his. Anna Karam o' Donoghue is one of the great. You may know Irish Celtic writers. Brilliant guy. That's what's on the top of my head right now.

Wonderful. Thanks for sharing. Love it. All right, let's go back into some of your other maxims. Okay, so give me. Give me your thoughts on being average, being willing to be Average.

Oh, a favorite one. It's actually, you can imagine telling my Stanford students that might seem like kind of heresy. You know, there's a kind of curse on us when we try to do our best. Pretty much everyone I've talked to has said, you know, you're going for the big interview, or this is got to be the perfect meal. There's some way in which, when something is important to us, we put a whole lot of stress on ourselves and a whole lot of stuff goes on that isn't happening when we're just being ourselves. So the principle of being average is, you know, get off it. Instead of trying to have the best interview, just can you come in with an average interview? Can you just be yourself? Can you talk naturally? Can you make. We have a group that meets twice a month on Fridays for Bad Art Night. The idea is we all get together and make some bad art. Everybody can do that. Right? And in the process of going for some bad art, you never can tell. Some kind of nice stuff shows up, but we're not putting the pressure on ourselves that we often do about trying to do our best. It's kind of counterintuitive, but just the notion. The notion to be average or stop trying to do your best actually liberates people to start thinking and behaving and using their natural intelligence. And the creativity comes through when you're not pushing it.

I've observed, and then there's a consistency, too, in my own experience of, again, that the perfectionist. And this needs to be at this level all the time, that you may be able to kind of go out and do some good work at times, but you're such a harsh critic of what you're doing, then when you inevitably fall short, which is essentially every time if you have high standards, then it's just. It becomes scattershot of, okay, I did this, but then I didn't do this, I did this. And I think that the constructive, living average sense is just show up, be willing to do the crappy first draft. That might wind up being the crappy third or fourth draft. But you shipped and you got to market with what you were doing, and you allowed that to be good enough. And that's been a big practice of mine over the last year. That's the professional. Just show up. And, yes, you want to hone your craft. You're going to do so by being in the game, not by thinking about how you're going to hone your craft. Right, Exactly.

And writers know this a lot. The work that happens in editing is different from the work that happens when that initial creative thrust goes through and we do have to just show up, let it out, see what it is. Then there's another pass at it where we sculpt it into something better or we change what we're doing.

Yeah. Which now you just hit on another one. Just show up is another one of your. So don't prepare, Just show up. We talked about it in different contexts, but bring that to light for us.

I want to say, too, I don't really mean don't prepare or don't ever prepare. We're preparing machines. Humans are. There's almost no way you can not prepare. Okay, so I'll say it a different way. Prepare, prepare, prepare, prepare, prepare, prepare. Prepare all you like, but then show up, set aside that for a moment and see what needs to be done. Let that preparation be part of your chemistry, be part of your operating system, and then do what needs to be done. But if you prepare, prepare, prepare, show up, and then do your preparation, you're always somewhere else. We all know what a prepared speech sounds like, but there's something really rich about a human being who is working from the inside out, who is talking now, in the moment, using all their knowledge, pulling from what they know. But you have to show up and then not do your preparation. Instead, you do what needs to be done. You answer the question or you respond.

Amazing. Out of your head, letting that essence flow through. Good. I'm going to look at my notes for a moment.

Okay, While you're doing that, here's a quote that I like from the Johnnie Moore book. Life is unruly and unpredictable, and our best approach is to remain open, curious, and flexible. Rather than giving people reassuring right answers, we may do better to model experimentation, curiosity, and openness. And I think that's the idea of stepping up. It's not that we don't have hopes and expectations. Of course we want an optimal life. Of course we want things to go well. Of course we want to be liked and appreciated. But all of those desires for success can get in the way of just fully stepping up to whatever is in front of you with curiosity and to discover what's there. That's where this notion of adventure comes in. People that leave an improv class are often really jazzed because things happen there that they had no idea would happen. They're truly fresh. We really love the things that happen spontaneously. Humans. For many millennia, we didn't have stuff to count on. So life was much more of a full experimentation. 24, the cavemen didn't. Couldn't tune into Facebook every day and find out they had to live the moment.

Well, that and being conditioned. One of the questions we have right now is just education and just looking at, you know, the natural learning models and all this stuff and just how conditioned we are to show up at a certain time to sit straight, not talk to anyone, do what we're told to do, when we're told to do. And it's truly a heroic task to free ourselves from that depth of conditioning. That's not an easy thing to do.

There's been some interesting studies recently too, about the essential value of the playground. If kids are sitting in class all day and they're having that kind of linear instruction, how then the body needs to fly out onto the playground and move the body around and see what happens. The whole definition of play is central to human learning and been a lot of good studies and things written about that. We tend to forget it. Play seems to be separated from work and serious stuff.

Yeah, even that. I mean, even the dichotomy of learning and play, it's really because again, go back to my son, I watch him. There's no dichotomy. I agree.

It's all one.

Yeah. And that idea of how do we truly integrate that is beautiful. What did we not talk about that you want to make sure we chat about?

Gosh, I think we've covered a whole lot of stuff. I'm so grateful that the little book has been alive. Did you know she just had a 10 year birthday?

Is that right?

Improv Wisdom was born. The publication date was May 3, 2004. This was May 3, 2015. So she's 10 years old and she has. She also lives in nine. Total of nine countries or nine different translations. So she's in Russian and Korean and Japanese and two kinds of Chinese and Italian and Spanish and whatnot. Anyway, so she's also an audiobook that I read myself. I produced that. And she's a neat book. So little book is kind of floating around. I think of her. The book is my daughter, so.

That's so sweet.

She's my little girl.

That's fantastic. Happy birthday to your wonderful, wonderful.

Thank you. Yeah, she's really done well. And the miracle of the Internet allows readers to share their enthusiasm. It's kind of amazing to get up in a day and realize that somebody in Indonesia has found your book in a used bookstore and wants to say thanks. So blessed. Truly blessed.

That's amazing. Well, and again, just to make the strongest Possible recommendation. It's such a good read. It's a quick, fun, super practical, inspiring read. And your energy comes through in the book as well. Even before we connected, there's just a sweetness and a lightness and a just a complete lack of pretense that is just. It's inspiring in and of itself, let alone the wisdom. So again, we'll put a link to that. And then where can people find more about you?

There's a website, improvwisdom.com has a little biography and some other resources about me. I'm retired now, and occasionally I will do workshops here and there. I'm happy to. My big passion right now is an art form called etagami. These are little Japanese postcards that have sayings on them with little artwork. So I'm enjoying that. And in two weeks, I'm having hip replacement surgery, so I'll be gimping around and I would appreciate everybody's good vibes and wishes for a good recovery from my new hip.

Well, we will absolutely send that. I'll send plenty in advance as well. Thank you. Yeah. Well, so beautiful. I like to wrap up with one idea. So if you had to share just one idea, and it might be something we talked about today or it might be something else. For individuals who are aspiring to create more happiness and meaning and purpose and joy and all these good things, what would you advise?

I'd say trust reality, which is a kind of a subset of trust yourself. But I think we're greater than ourselves. So trust reality and try stuff would be my best advice. I think that's improv kind of rolled into one. Trust reality. Notice the gifts and try stuff.

Hmm. I love it. That's so good. Fantastic. Well, here's a big virtual hug. Thanks again. I'm so excited to be connected. I look forward to a real one in not too distant future.

Thank you. I would love that, too. And my best to your wonderful son and Alexandra. What a great family.

Thank you so much. Okay, big hugs.

Big hugs.

We hope you enjoyed this optimal living interview.

Please visit Bryan Johnson me for more.