Finding Inspiration in Radical Acceptance

Why I adopted “Yes, And…” as an essential tenet.

One year ago, I was invited to participate in a creative summit, hosted by an advertising agency and centered around storytelling. As part of the process, I prepared a presentation which got me to finally commit to paper some ideas I’d been kicking around for quite some time. It’s a philosophy I’ve been pleased to explore, and something I plan to continue. Consider this the first in an as yet undefined series about my newfound approach to getting out of my own way. Hopefully you find it useful, as well.

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Do you have a personal mantra? An operating principle, perhaps, or a unifying theory of everything? It’s helpful, I find. For the longest time I possessed nothing of the sort and was perpetually floundering. But in recent years, I began to organize my creative endeavors, from writing to photography to painting to gardening, around a central premise. Some might call it wandering. Others might refer to it as “trusting the process.” But I tend to think of it as a form of deliberate spontaneity. The mantra I use to guide my thinking is a kind of cousin to the stoic theory of radical acceptance. But it comes from a surprising place, the world of improvisational theater. And it’s summed up in just two words: “Yes, and…”

Twenty-ish years ago, I was invited to photograph a friend of a friend. He was (and remains) the incredibly talented actor and improviser, Bill Chott.¹ As a thank you, Bill invited me to attend his improv class. I didn’t want to be rude so, despite having never acted, I went. And I loved it. So I kept going. And eventually it rewired my brain.

Before you roll your eyes, this isn’t an essay about improv. It’s about a life skill I learned from improv, about a fairly simple technique for staying open and moving forward. I remain uninterested in being a performer, but I’ll be forever grateful that brief experience taught me a new way to engage with the creative process. I don’t need to understand it in order to trust it. I just need to accept it and build on it.

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In improv, the performance is unplanned. It’s made up on the spot. That’s not to say the stage is chaos. A framework is established, rules of the game, and within this the story is discovered as the performance unfolds. Not discovered by the audience alone, mind you, but discovered by those on stage as well.

Stephen King explains a similar creative process in his book On Writing, describing it as setting loose an interesting character in an peculiar situation in order to see what happens.

“The writer’s original perception of a character may be as erroneous as the reader’s,” King writes. “I want to put characters in some sort of predicament and then watch them try to work themselves free. My job isn’t to help them work their way free, or manipulate them to safety… but to watch what happens and then write it down.”

“I am, after all, not just the novel’s creator but its first reader,” he continues. “And if I’m not able to guess with any accuracy how the damned thing is going to turn out, even with my inside knowledge of coming events, I can be pretty sure of keeping the reader in a state of page-turning anxiety. And why worry about the ending anyway? Why be such a control freak? Sooner or later every story comes out somewhere.”

If that’s not improvisation in action I don’t know what is. He sets the process in motion and watches what happens.

Pulling on a thread and following where it leads. I believe that’s where much creative greatness comes from. Interest. Surprise. Curiosity. The electricity that results is a function of improvisation’s spontaneous nature. When it works, it’s like magic.²

King’s approach alone should provide a clue for those of us making creative work in any discipline. For those of us who plan and plan again and iterate and try and fail and start over and plan more and… It works or it doesn’t. I’m not suggesting this method is wrong; there are plenty of examples proving it works (the Sistine Chapel seems to have been fairly well thought out, and George Seurat was known to be meticulous when it came to his pointillist masterpieces). I’m tapping into something that took me years to fully understand, which is that planning and refining are not the only way to make something great. In fact, people like me use planning and refining as an impediment to actually making and doing. I need look no further than the improv stage or Stephen King’s writing process to see how wonderful it can be to jump in and discover what happens.

In improv, there’s a principle called “follow your foot.” As you’re waiting in the wings, watching a performance unfold, you are inevitably inspired to step in — your foot knows the urge before you do. But you question it, unsure of what to say or do. Were every actor to remain paralyzed by doubt, no scene could ever progress. In order to function, it requires agreement among the participants that we shall be brave, we will feel the urge to step in and, even if we don’t know why, we’ll go for it. This is another way of saying “trust your instincts” (at least for now) and “don’t be an editor” (at least for now). Instead of perpetually watching and waiting for the sure thing, waiting for this, waiting for that, waiting… Just do it. Step in. Follow your foot.

In life, in art, in the making of things, waiting for a better idea, waiting for the perfect idea, ignoring the creative impulse, disregarding the spark of inspiration… All of it means you don’t ever actually do anything. It means you keep making plans but never make work.

In his BBC course on time management, author Oliver Burkeman explains why, for some people (like me), planning becomes an obstacle rather than a preparatory aid. “Plans are something we do to make ourselves feel better in the moment.” Boy, does that ring true. Planning, in my case, is often the enemy. I would argue, per Mr. Burkeman, it’s better to do a little something, to make some small amount of actual progress, than to make big plans you never get around to implementing.

An example he provides is for aspirational screenwriters. One approach to becoming a screenwriter is to make big plans — save money, move to Los Angeles, take the right classes, buy the right software, lay out the ideal plan for all the things you need to do… So what if the planning takes months or years or, unfortunately, an entire lifetime? A different approach is to spend 20 minutes today to start writing a screenplay. Then, in one sense, you’ve done it: you’re a screenwriter.

This way of thinking has a lot to do with overcoming the crippling power of perfectionism. There are plenty of sayings that reflect this idea — ”done is better than perfect,” for instance, or “perfect is the enemy of good” — all of them, taken seriously, do a fine job of the most important step in creation: getting off your butt and actually getting to work. It dovetails nicely with another guiding principle in my life, this one brought to me by the advertising geniuses in charge of the Nike account: “Just do it.”

“Just do it” fits well with “follow your foot.” Both, of course, are designed to keep the perfectionist from stalling. Are you noticing a theme? I wouldn’t argue that I’m a textbook perfectionist, but years of schooling taught me there was a right way to do things, and if we aren’t going to do it right we shouldn’t do it at all. Nonsense. Who’s to say what “right” is, particularly before you’ve done it?

Like an invasive weed taking over a garden, perfectionism can crowd out everything else. You need to know where to draw the line, what to be a perfectionist about and when to get out of the way. Some folks use their perfectionism, deliberately or subconsciously, as a way of stalling. Fear of failure, perhaps? Fear of rejection? Maybe just fear of not being good? Some form of fear, in my case, that’s for sure. Thanks to “Yes, and…” I decided being paralyzed by fear was significantly worse than doing something that wasn’t perfect. So even if the results aren’t great, or even good, I’m doing the work. I’m putting things out into the world instead of making plans. And I owe this big change to the power of two simple words: yes, and.

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1. If Bill looks familiar it might be from his moving performance on NBC’s “This Is Us.” Or perhaps his roles in movies “The Ringer,” “Galaxy Quest” and “Dude, Where’s My Car.” Maybe you grew up watching him as Mr. Laritate on Disney’s “Wizards of Waverly Place.” Real ones know he was a cast member of the infamously short-lived Dana Carvey Show, but I met him teaching improv, and learned the man is an absolute master of the art form.

2. Forgive me, too, actual improv experts, for all the ways I’m bound to butcher the nuances of your art form. I claim zero expertise in improv. What I’m trying to communicate is what I took from my experience with the improvisational process and how I’ve applied the tenets as I understand them to my own endeavors.