The ego-driven desire for originality also afflicts many people in business meetings, who seem to care more about impressing others with their brilliance rather than collaborating with their team members to work toward a joint result. This “look-at-me” focus can also lead to silo-based behavior, with each person primarily concerning himself with his own perspectives and those of the group with which he identifies.
Clearly, the urge to impress others with our wonderfully original thoughts is one of those negative “things between” that get in the way of attaining a state of mastery. And, as Keith Johnstone makes clear in his book Impro for Storytellers, even performance improvisers can run afoul of this urge. As Johnstone observes:
"When [improvisers] are trying to think of clever things to say, they’ll pay scant attention to anyone else."
The compulsion to be original tends to keep people (whether performance improvisers or Daily Improvisers) turned inward toward their own thoughts rather than outward toward their environment. Instead of listening to and integrating the ideas and viewpoints of others, the self-referential improviser might plow ahead into an area that only the little playwright in her head finds interesting.
So what’s the remedy for the urge to always be original? Simply this, in the words of Patricia Ryan Madson: Be average! For more on this, refer to my earlier article on Robert Benchley: The “Average” Man.
Granted, there are times when truly original thinking is required – but, even then, such thinking doesn’t have to come from a single inspired individual but can emerge from a team’s collaborative effort. And even when true originality is called for – whether from an individual or from a team – the answer isn’t necessarily to wipe the mental slate clean and devise a wholly new play. As I’ll show next time, the placement of useful boundaries on our thinking can (paradoxically) help us think outside the box.
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