Keith John­ston is the founder of improv com­edy. The pas­sage below comes from his sec­ond book, Impro for Sto­ry­tellers, which elab­o­rates on many of the ideas from his sem­i­nal first book, Impro.

Be Aver­age

A stu­dent still looks up-tight, so I say, ‘Are you try­ing your best?’

‘Of course!’

‘Is that a good strategy?’

‘If I don’t try I won’t get anywhere.’

‘If we saw moun­taineers “doing their best” we’d know that they’d moved out­side of their area of com­pe­tence and were fight­ing for their lives. An admired team of gym­nasts at the Olympics saw the gold medal reced­ing, and they “tried” with al their might, and started to fall off the bars.’

‘But how can I achieve any­thing worth­while if I don’t strug­gle for it?’

‘Just be average!’

Con­ster­na­tion.

‘Look at the room!’ I say. ‘Look at the chair! Now “try” to look at the room; “try” to look at the chair. Does it help? I don’t think so. Touch your nose! Now do it again but this time “try” to touch it—did that improve the action? Hyp­no­tists ask you to “try” to open your closed eyes or your inter­locked fin­gers, because the harder you “try” the less abil­ity you have.’

‘But I don’t want to be mediocre!’

‘Try­ing makes you mediocre. It’s like run­ning up the down-escalator.’

No com­pre­hen­sion.

‘We only try when we don’t trust the forces within us. Each brain orga­nizes a uni­verse out of the electro-agnetic flux—no brain equals no universe—so if we have this mag­i­cal com­puter inside our skulls and yet feel that we can’t draw, or com­pose a tune, or write a story, or impro­vise, we must be under some prohibition.’

Not a glimmer.

‘Some­times being aver­age is the best pos­si­ble strategy.’

Out­rage.

‘Any­one can walk a plank, but if it stretched across an abyss, fear might glue us to [the plank, unable to walk]. Our best strat­egy might be to treat the abyss as some­thing ordinary…and to walk across in our aver­age manner.’

‘You mean if we were con­tent to be aver­age we’d be just as good as when we try harder?’

‘Yes, or bet­ter, because “being aver­age” allows auto­matic processes to take over, and there are parts of the brain that are infi­nitely more gifted than the social-self. Are there any ath­letes here?’

A few hands go up.

‘When was your fastest time?’

They tell me.

‘Were you try­ing your hardest?’

I get answers like, ‘Funny you should ask, because I really had no idea how fast I was going.’

Such answers are almost rou­tine (a world speed-skating cham­pion used almost exactly those words in Cal­gary recently).

Here’s a quote from Max­i­mum Per­for­mance by Lau­rence E. Moor­house and Leonard Gross (New York: Pocket Books, 1977):

I took every oppor­tu­nity I could to inter­view ath­letes who had just bro­ken a world’s record…I could pre­dict almost exactly what each of them would say. The sce­nario went like this.

‘I didn’t feel well that day. I was nau­se­ated and felt weak. As a mat­ter of fact, it crossed my mind to ask the coach to scratch me from the event…I don’t remem­ber any par­tic­u­lar moment dur­ing the event. It all seemed so easy. At the fin­ish, the way the crowd was cheer­ing told me I had done well, but I had the feel­ing that if I had only tried a litle harder I could have done much better.’

And yet it’s obvi­ous that ‘for­get­ting’ to try harder gave them their suc­cess. Try to make your arm immov­able, absolutely rigid, and it’ll be easy for me to move it—because half of its mus­cles will be assist­ing me. Allow only those mus­cles to oper­ate that are needed to resist the force and it will be a third stronger.

I might tell my stu­dents about the weightlifter who broke the world record because he didn’t real­ize that extra poundage had been added acci­den­tally. Or I might men­tion the elderly heart patient who lugged one end of a 1,600-pound steel pipe off of a trapped child. Inter­viewed on TV, he said, ‘Well, I saw what had hap­pened so I lifted it off with­out thinking.’

The con­scious­ness that we expe­ri­ence as ‘our­selves’ is a defence sys­tem against the intru­sions of other peo­ple (why else would so much of our inner dia­logue be con­cerned with manip­u­lat­ing their opin­ion of us?), but in life-or-death sit­u­a­tions our good angel shoves us aside, slams time into slow-motion and does its damnedest to res­cue us. If impro­vis­ers were con­tent to be ‘just aver­age’, and to ‘go with the flow’, this good angel could oper­ate even when there wasn’t a dire emer­gency, and we’d call this ‘being inspired’.…

If ‘try­ing harder’ meant stay­ing relaxed and happy while you spent more time with a prob­lem, then it could be rec­om­mended, but i usu­ally involves treat­ing the mind as if it were con­sti­pated and had to have ideas squeezed out of it.

Impro­vis­ers who are ‘deter­mined to do their best’ scan the ‘future’ for ‘bet­ter’ ideas, and cease to pay any atten­tion to each other.

pg 66–77

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