improvised blog

[Mike Weaver]

"One, one, one." Mother Teresa answered when asked how she helped so many people in Calcutta. "I begin, you begin, one, one, one."

I begin this blog one word at a time. I have nothing profound to say, no insightful comment, no incredible insight, and that is refreshing and freeing to me. The pressure to be creative is not there. Instead I live into the reality that Keith Johnstone would say to his actors, "Be boring! Be average!" So here I am, an average guy with an average blog with average insights and average perspective on life. And that's ok, because I'm connected with other average people in AIN and other places where together we merge our averageness to create beauty. In that sense average is a positive not a negative. My basic math knowledge tells me that two positives equal a positive. In America today we equate averageness to complacency and thus a poor way to live. We're driven by ambition, desire...to be somebody and do something bold and powerful. But, in the end we all must resign ourselves to the fact that nothing is ever created in a vacuum and by one person. Beautiful creations emerge through average people doing average things, one moment, one step, one word, one letter, one thought at a time. One, one, one...Can we slow down enough to be average?

[Sven Veine]

Loved it, Mike! :-)

[Leif Hansen]

Oh, keep saying Spark Robin, please (:
(M business is called Spark Northwest, hehe).

[Leif Hansen]

Oh man did that hit home Karen. You jerk (just kidding). Thank you.

[Robin McCulloch]

I am all over this. I loved the openning blog and the email. The stagnation that comes from not being able to start something because you already know it isn't going to be good enough is deadly. I watch my students at SC all the time worrying about jumping into scenes because they don't know where the scene's going or they don't have anything brilliant to bring in. And I tell them, you don't have to know where they're going, no one knows where they're going, you just have to see where you can get into them and they will go where they go. The ability to jump into something and add one new thing to it is the best contribution possible. We don't have to be the person with the new best idea, the great ending, the funniest twist...because I see people jump in all the time to make what seems to them to be an ordinary contribution that is percieved as the funniest or cleverist thing ever by those watching. But if they don't jump in that possibility doesn't exist. The combination of ordinary contributions can lead to the extraordanary. Your half an idea may spark the other half from someone else who will spark...

[Jerry Kail]

Very good observations and suggestions. They hit home with me. I think the urge to excel can easily get in the way of doing anything at all. I'm reminded of the (purposely misspelled) BIEGE principle: "The Better Is the Enemy of the Good Enough."

[Karen Dawson]

In my average way, I'm cutting and pasting one of my all time favourite emails that arrived from Michael Neill([e-mail]) When I read this email (it's a long one, be ready) it immediately reminded me of Keith Johnstone's work...and Mike's posting reminded me to dig it up. What do you think of it?

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HAVE AN AVERAGE DAY!
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"Happiness and a meaningful life come from making differences. But this is the most important rule to follow: always make the differences you can make, not the differences you would prefer to make but can't."

-Lyndon Duke

I was talking to my friend and mentor Steve Chandler once when he said to me "have an average day!" A bit taken aback, I asked him what he meant. After all, isn't the idea to have "great" days, or even "exceptional" ones?

He then told me the story of one of his mentors, a man named Lyndon Duke who studied something called "the linguistics of suicide". After receiving a doctorate from two separate universities, Duke began analyzing suicide notes to look for linguistic clues which could be used to predict and prevent suicidal behavior in teenagers.

What he learned was startling - that the enemy of happiness was what he called "the curse of exceptionality". In a world where everyone is trying to be exceptional, two things happen. The first is that nearly everyone fails, because by definition if too many people become exceptional, the exceptional becomes
commonplace. The second is that those few who do succeed feel even more isolated and estranged from their peers than before.

Consequently you have a few people feeling envied, misunderstood and alone and tens of thousands of others feeling like failures for not being "______ enough" - "good enough", "special enough", "rich enough" or even "happy enough."

When I was in the midst of the thickest cloud of my own suicidal thoughts at university, I remember wishing I could run away from my Presidential Scholarship and hide, perhaps changing my name to "Bob" and taking a job at pumping gas at a full-service
station somewhere in the midwest. Only in my fantasy, sooner or later people would start to notice that there was something special about me. They would begin driving miles out of their way to have their cars filled up by "Bob the service guy" and
exchange a few words with him, leaving the station oddly uplifted and with a renewed sense of optimism and purpose.

Before long, someone would discover how exceptional I was and I would have to run away from their expectations all over again. I was, to my way of thinking, doomed to succeed.

Delusions of grandeur? Quite possibly. Depressed, hopeless and miserable? Absolutely!

One of Lyndon Duke's major breakthroughs came when he was dealing with his own unhappiness and heard the sound of a neighbor singing while mowing his lawn. He realized then that's what was missing from his life - the simple pleasures of an average life.

The very next weekend, he went to visit his son who was struggling to excel in his first term at university. He sat him down and told him about his revised expectations for him:

"I expect you to be a straight "C" student, young man," Duke said. "I want you to complete your unremarkable academic career, meet an ordinary young woman and if you choose to, get married and live a completely average life!"

His son, of course, thought Dad had finally flipped, but did take the pressure off himself to be quite so "exceptional". A month later he phoned his father to apologize. He had gotten "A"s on all his exams, but it was OK because he had only done an "average" amount of studying.

And this is the paradoxical promise of the "average day" philosophy - the cumulative effect of a series of average days spent doing an average amount of what one loves and wants to do is actually quite extraordinary!

Let's put this thought together with another one of Duke's discoveries - that many of the young people he studied felt as though their lives had no meaning and made no difference to the world or anyone in it. As a practical philosopher, he realized that the meaning of our lives actually *comes* from the differences we make with them. And that those differences need
not be huge to be profound in their impact on both ourselves and others.

When we combine those two ideas we have what may well be the ultimate goal for a happy and productive life:

*To be an average, happy person making a bit of a positive difference and having a happy, average day.*

In doing this, you create the kind of "exceptionality" that can be shared by everyone.

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Today's experiment:
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1. Choose an area of your life you have been trying to excel in.

Examples:
Writing, Sales, Being a mom


2. What would constitute an average day in that area? Not*typical*, but average (as in neither exceptionally good nor exceptionally bad)?

Examples:

Writing - 90 minutes a day
Sales - Speaking with 5 new prospects
Being a mom - Spending at least half an hour before school and half an hour after school focused 100% on being with the kids


3. Project forward into the future - if you did nothing but repeat your "average day" 5 days a week, how much of a difference will you have made in 3 months? A year? 5 years? A lifetime?

Examples:

Writing 100 or so hours in a 3 month period would probably be enough to complete an entire book; 400 hours in a year would be 2 books, some poetry and a screenplay; Over 2000 hours over a 5 year period would make me prolific!

Speaking with 100+ people a month about the difference I can make for them would definitely lead to some sales; over 1200 difference making conversations a year would lead to numerous
sales (and an incredible amount of skill development); over 6000 difference-making conversations in a 5 year period would make me rich!

Spending at least an hour a day with my kids seven days a week is over 125 hours in 3 months; that's more than enough time to really get to know them and tune in to their wants and needs.
500+ focused hours of time spent with my children over the course of a year will create an incredible level of friendly intimacy and positive familiarity; if I make even a tiny difference in each one of nearly 3000 hours over a 5 year period, the impact on their lives and sense of meaning in mine will be anything but average!


4. Do 3 things today that make a small difference - they can be as simple as a kind word to a friend, a warm smile to a stranger or picking up your children's socks without secretly wanting to kill them. :-) Repeat daily for as often as you like.

Have fun, learn heaps, and have an average day!

With love,
Michael

[Leif Hansen]

How refreshing Mike, what a gift! I had not made the connection with the freedom of 'just starting' and 'being average' with blogging. I have this huge list of 'topics' I should (and want) to write about, and a huge pressure (with this particular crowd) to be original, etc...but you've helped liberate me. Rock on! (