Lessons From my Improv Group (with 20/20 Hindsight)

Ah, the beauty of hindsight! It is so easy to look back at what you have done and say, “D’oh!” I would do that differently now…

This past weekend I attended a meeting of the National Speakers Association Philadelphia Chapter where we learned all about publicity and PR. The speaker, Jill Lublin, told us to come up with our own “personal story,” as interestingly enough, that is the kind of stuff that can hook the press in.

This got me thinking about what my story is (to be fair, we all have many stories, so I was mostly thinking of my speaking business story). How did I get here? What has happened in my life that had brought me to this point.

A few minutes later I had my first draft of what I thought might be an interesting personal story. Take a look:

Immediately after college, I turned my back on a four year Ivy league computer engineering degree to start my own improv comedy group that would one day be a huge Philadelphia institution. That failed. But, I had fun, learned a lot of things along the way about business and life, and wouldn’t be where I am today without it. Would I do it again? Yup. Would I do some things differently? Absolutely.

That’s not the greatest press hook ever written, but it’s a start.

But the point of this post is not “how to craft a brilliant personal story.” The point is that coming up with that story and the last two questions really got me thinking: what would I do differently if I could do it (go back and start my own improv group) all over again?

Probably a lot. For now, I will share three critically important ones with you. I think you might be able to take something away from them for yourself…

(On a random side note, I have a big pet peeve when successful people are asked “what would you do differently” and they say, “nothing. All my mistakes were important to getting me here.” Well, duh! We’re not stupid, we understand that all people are the results of their experiences and that every failure is an opportunity to learn and that there is not point dwelling on past mistakes. But since the question asker doesn’t have a time machine that you can step into and actually change the past, stop worrying about the hypothetical butterfly affect and be intelligent enough to understand that the spirit of the question is “what can we learn from your mistakes.” Dumbasses.)

But I digress..here are three things I would do differently if I got to do it all over again:

Set the Quality Bar Higher

I have written about this before, and it bears repeating. Looking back, I would have been way more focused on improving the quality (mine and the rest of my group) of the improv performance.

I am pretty sure I and my fellow performers were good. But “good enough” rarely is.

Though it might have made things a tad less fun in rehearsals, I would have been more of a hard-ass about getting the highest quality performance out of every performer, every time. In the long run, that would have made a huge difference.

Question: Are you setting your own “quality bar” high enough?

Set the “Dream Bar” a Bit Lower

Don’t get me wrong = I’m a “motivational” type guy, so I am all about the big dreams. If i had to go back and do it all over again, I would still have big long term dreams, but rather than obsessing about those I would keep those in mind while focusing on smaller short term dreams.

Rather than worrying about getting my own theater space where we could perform 5 nights a week, I would simply focus on selling out a fifty person theater once a week. Instead of daydreaming about getting on national TV, I would work hard on filling the dream of getting good local press.

This “dream shrinking” would do two things: 1) it would make the tasks seem much more manageable and achievable, and hence less overwhelming, and 2) since they would be easier to achieve, they would create tremendous positive momentum.

Not having done that effectively, it became easy to get discouraged, which is not a good thing.

Question: Are you setting your “dream bar” at a point where you can avoid overwhelm and build positive momentum?

Analyzed Less, Acted More

You can judge for yourself whether you think I am smart, but I at least like to think of myself as an intellectual. What that means is that I love to think about stuff, and analyze it, read about it, and understand it.

For a while during my time running my improv group, I spent lots of time learning about business plans, marketing theories, copy writing, etc. I would spend hours trying to figure out how to write a great as that would drive people to our doors, and what exactly our market segment was, and how to write a great headline for our website.

What’s wrong with those things? Nothing. Those are all good things to do. In retrospect however, if I had taken 90% of the time I spent doing that stuff and instead just printed up some simple but nice looking flyers and stood on the street corner (or hired someone to stand on the corner) handing them out, I am pretty confident we would have gotten better results.

Thinking is awesome (pretty much all my posts are about this in one way or another). Taking action without some thought is sheer idiocy. However, over-thinking and over-analyzing are almost as bad as not thinking at all. Ten out ten times, the person who takes action will beat the person who sits there and does nothing but think and analyze.

Question: Are you trapping with yourself with “analysis paralysis” when a little action is all you need?

There you have it. Three little things that I would do differently if I had to do it all over again:

1. Set the Quality Bar Higher
2. Set the “Dream Bar” a Bit Lower
3. Analyzed Less, Acted More

I encourage you to take a look at what you are trying to do with your life right now and see if these three things could apply to you. If at all possible, I would love it if you could learn from my experience…

***
Are you planning an event and looking for a great speaker to add humor and energy? Then visit Avish’s Motivational Humorist page now!
 

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By Avish Parashar. As the world's only Motivational Improviser, Avish uses techniques from the world of improv comedy to engage, entertain, and educate audiences on ideas around change, creativity, and motivation. Connect with Avish on Google+

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