Appreciate nerves, Don’t Resent Them

My father said to appreciate nerves, not resent them. He said my ambition would propel the business forward but my nerves would keep things in check.
Rachel Taylor, the co-editor of Another World magazine on the best business advice she’s ever received.

To Think or Not To Think→

Your reaction is all you get. No one is more than they are right now. In trying to be so is where we fuck up. We hear a line of dialogue, we have a reaction, we ignore or try to be better than our reaction, we think, we come up with a second or third option, but now we are no longer in the moment, we aren’t focused on listening or playing our character, we are in our head. We think we can’t come up with anything when actually we have come up with too much. What we should have done was the first thing that occurred to us.

 

Justin D. Torres on What New Teams Need

The teams that I’m on with Goats and Heartbeat are so ridiculously positive and crazy and fun that, it’s an odd sense of coming off stage and cheering for yourself and being your own fan, which is something I don’t see very much in other teams, coming off stage and being like ‘we did a good job’. I think that’s imperative to have a good team, it’s that you have to love yourselves even if, especially a new team you have to know that you’ll almost be invincible for a little bit, to feel like you can do anything and then you have to kinda have to, pull ’em back afterwards because the one thing that gets into a new team’s mind is just.. doubt. I think doubt creeps in. If it’s too early it will kill a team. Justin D. Torres on the latest Magnet Theater Podcast.

Relax. Don’t expect immediate results, and don’t get frustrated by it. So many people rush their improv experience, and try to get to it as quick as they can. Some people get it quicker than others. It took me a while to get game compared to other people. Once I got it, I couldn’t get rid of it.

I see a lot of people get on teams or whatever, and think ‘well, that’s it. I’ve got to get to this level. Now I’ve got to start telling these kind of jokes.’ Patience is key. Number one patience. Number two like I said about reading and ingesting as much information as you can, study all improv. Study with all teachers. Study as much as you can, so you can develop your own idea about what improv should be. Because until you’re comfortable with what you think improv is, you can’t do what you think other people is.
Billy Merritt on his advice for new improvisers. More in a great interview here.