درسنامه تفسیری

Improvise – Commentary

Improvise, that’s our topic. This can be summed up with one sentence. Decisiveness generally beats over planning. That’s what we’re talking about.

There’s a tendency in most people to over plan, especially when something’s important and the more important something is, the more we tend to over plan, to over think, to over analyze, because we’re worried, because we’re scared.

But, especially now in our modern world, things change very, very, very quickly. Situations change. The world changes. Everything changing, changing very fast.

And we need more decisiveness, because often things change too fast for our plans. We can’t plan fast enough, because we finish our plan and now the situation is different so our plans not gonna work anymore.

So we must learn to improvise, to flow, to make good decisions quickly, again and again and again and again, as the situation continues evolving and changing.

There’s a nice phrase in English - ‘paralysis by analysis’. Paralysis means you can’t move. You’re frozen. You’re stuck. And analysis means thinking about something a lot. Thinking about all the little details, analyzing.

What this whole phrase means ‘paralysis by analysis’, it means that often when we think too much, we become frozen. It means we don’t make decisions. We don’t take action. We just think and think and think, analyze, analyze, analyze.

I saw this in big companies all the time when I worked in a big company in the past. It didn’t happen often, I didn’t like those jobs, but I had a few jobs where I worked in large companies. One very large company, IBM, and then another large hospital.

And in both cases I saw, within those organizations, paralysis by analysis. They were such big bureaucracies that no decisions could be made quickly. Every decision was analyzed and analyzed again and then sent to someone else and then sent to someone else to analyze. And then they sent it to another person or group to analyze.

Everything had to be analyzed and planned for weeks and weeks and weeks before any decision was made.

As a result, many times these organizations were too slow to change. I was working for IBM back when I was quite young, when I was in university still. And at that time, they were the big computer company. They were the masters of IT. They were the masters of the personal computer.

But because they were so slow to change, they eventually lost. They’re not the biggest anymore. Google, Apple, Microsoft, first Microsoft then later Google and Apple and many others beat them. Because those other companies were faster to change.

IBM had paralysis by analysis. See, when you take action and you make decisions you create a faster learning cycle. We’ve talked about this long ago in another VIP lesson.

You take an action and then something happens and then you see, you learn something. It worked or it did not work. So you learn something very quickly. Then you take another action and then you learn again. That new action it worked or it did not work.

So when you take actions and you make decisions quickly, you tend to learn much faster. You don’t’ learn so much by analysis. When you analyze and analyze and plan and plan and plan too much, you actually slow down the learning process.

We can’t do that anymore, especially in our economy now where technology and economic conditions change too quickly. So we personally cannot have paralysis by analysis. It’s not good. It’s also not good for our teams or for companies either.

So let’s review, how can you learn to improvise? Because improvisation is a skill, in fact. Some people think that improvisation is just randomly doing stuff but that’s not true. It’s a skill. It has principles. Let’s talk about those. Let’s review those again.

• Principle number one, don’t try to be clever.

Meaning, don’t try to be perfect. Improvisation is not about perfection. It’s not about trying to be great or super smart or super clever all the time, but rather to be good enough, to make a good enough decision for right now.

Will it always be the best possible decision? No. But a good enough decision is fine, because you’ll be making many, many, many decisions. You’ll be improvising. You’ll be constantly flowing and changing with the circumstances.

And by making lots and lots and lots and lots of good enough decisions, you will do better than another person who’s always trying to make the one perfect decision. They’ll be paralyzed and when they finally make their decision, it’ll probably be wrong, because they took too long and things are now different.

But when you make lots and lots and lots of fast good enough decisions, then you stay with the circumstances. You stay with the situation. You learn faster. You’ll actually have a better performance by doing that.

• Another principle of improvisation is to just keep moving.

Keep flowing. Keep making decisions. Keep taking actions. Don’t stop. That’s probably the main principle of improv.

On the stage, we talked a lot about on the stage in the main lesson, people who actually perform improvisation, that’s a big, big, big thing with them. Those actors have to keep moving. They have to keep talking.

If everyone just stops to think about what they should do, then the whole stage would be silent and the audience would think, what’s happening? It would be very boring.

So even thought they might not always say something super funny or super interesting, those actors they keep talking. They keep everything moving constantly, never stop. That’s an important rule.

• Another principle of improvisation is that you must trust your feelings. You must trust your instincts.

This is hard for some people. For some it’s easy, for some it’s not. Trusting your instinct means you trust the first feeling or the first thought that comes up, and you immediately take an action from that thought, from that feeling.

Now when you first start, maybe your first thoughts won’t be so good, you’re not used to doing this. It feels strange. You hesitate. And so maybe your first thought might not be a great one, it might be so-so.

That’s okay, because the more you do this, the more the thoughts will come and the faster they will come. As you get used to improvising you get used to making fast decisions, fast decisions, fast decisions. You get used to trusting your first thought, trusting your first feeling.

As you do that, the quality of the thoughts get better. The decisions become better. You develop it, almost like a muscle where you’re making it stronger and better.

So just trust your feeling, don’t think about it. Don’t analyze it and think oh no, this is my first feeling, this is my first thought. Oh, but is it good, not good, oh I don’t know. Should I do it? I don’t know. Maybe I should try something else. No, no, no, no, that’s not improvisation.

Instead, a thought comes into your head, yes do this and you immediately go with it. You immediately do it. You immediately say yes.

Or maybe your first feeling is no, so you just say no I’m not gonna do it. I’m gonna do this instead. Whatever it is, the feeling comes up, you do it. But as we discussed, generally it’s best to say yes not no.

In improv if you say no you stop all the action, you stop the decisions. So it’s better to accept the situation as it is, and say yes to your first feeling. Say yes to your first thought. Say yes to your instincts.

• Finally, the last principle is speed.

Do this as fast as possible. Make decisions as fast as possible. Choose the first feeling, not the second or the third. Choose the first thought, the first decision, not the second, third or fourth.

And when it comes up act immediately, don’t think about it, don’t wait, don’t hesitate. It comes up and you act. The decision comes and you act. The feeling comes and you act.

Try to do that faster and faster and faster. Speed, speed, speed. The faster you go, the better you’ll become. It’s interesting. You have to trust your own brain is what you’re really doing.

Trust your own instincts, your unconscious to be smart. In many ways your unconscious is smarter than your conscious. You could say your brain is smarter than you are.

This reminds me of a scene in Star Wars. I love the movie Star Wars. You’ve probably seen it, if not go rent and watch it, the original. In that movie the hero, Luke Skywalker, he’s driving a plane. He’s flying a plane, a spaceship and he wants to destroy the big evil fort, the big evil planet.

He’s flying along and there’s a target, a very small target. He must hit this target. And in the movie, in the scene, the computer is on and the computer tells him when to shoot.

So he’s looking at the computer and the computer is beeping and it’s going to tell him when to shoot, but then suddenly, Luke the hero, hears a voice in his head. He hears the voice of his master, his teacher, his trainer.

The trainer is dead now in the movie, but still, he hears the voice reminding him. And the voice says, “Luke, trust your feelings.” So the voice tells him to trust his feelings, don’t trust the computer. Don’t think about it too much. Just trust your feelings and shoot when you feel it’s the right time.

So Luke turns off the computer, the computer goes away and then he trusts his feelings and presses the button. He shoots and the big evil spaceship blows up, it explodes.

So what’s the point? What was the message of that? What was the message from that movie? What was the message of that scene?

The movie was saying, trust your feelings. Trust your instincts. Trust yourself to improvise. Don’t analyze too much. Don’t think too much. Trust yourself. It’s exactly what we’re talking about in this lesson. Trust your feelings and make fast decisions.

You can do it you just have to get used to it, just practice it.

That’s what you’re going to do this month. That’s your assignment, your homework, whatever you want to call it.

Number one, pick an area of your life that’s tough, where right now it’s tough you’re struggling. It’s difficult. Maybe things are changing for you in this area of life and you’re having a hard time.

Number two, decide that you’re going to practice improvisation in this area of life and start making fast decisions and taking fast actions.

You’ve probably been thinking about it too much. If there’s an area of your life that’s difficult, you’re probably thinking about it too much, because that’s what we all do.

If you’re having trouble with money, for example, you’re probably thinking about it, analyzing it, what should I do? So much, too much probably.

So what I want you to do this month is not do that. Instead, notice what your first thought is, your first feeling and take an action. Make a decision immediately and then do it again and again and again.

All this month in this area of life make fast decisions. Trust your instincts. And, no matter what happens, keep going forward, keep making fast decisions. Maybe your first decision will not be good, maybe it’ll be bad and you’ll get a bad result.

Don’t stop and say oh no, now I have to analyze my bad result, this doesn’t work. No, whatever the result, trust your next feeling and make another fast decision. See what happens. Then make another fast decision and another, keep moving forward, just like improv.

Don’t stop. Don’t get paralyzed. Don’t have paralysis by analysis. Keep moving forward as fast as you can. Speed, speed, speed is important. Trust your instincts. Don’t analyze. Make fast decisions and keep moving forward.

And of course, share your experience on our VIP social site. Other members want to hear about your experiences, even if they’re difficult and especially if they’re successful. I look forward to reading about your experiences too. See you on our VIP social site and on our forum.

Bye for now.