The plateau of fun

New improvisers start out having fun and improving day by day. But around that 2-year mark their learning starts to stagnate (this happens at Year 4, Year 6, Year 8,…). They are even convinced that they are worse than when they started, and more importantly, no longer fun.

*I* don’t believe you get worse. Apart from being rusty or getting stuck on bad habits, I don’t think one gets worse by doing more. What is true though, is about not having fun. And I think this comes from one’s expectation of themselves.

Your learning curve WILL slow down — if you stick to the same teachers, the same school, same people. But your expectation is that you keep on improving. And expectation is what robs you of your fun. Hence my formula:

Fun = Learning - Expectation

It’s natural AND unavoidable that you have increasing expectations. You have spent a lot of money for classes and you have to prove yourself why you are wasting so much time on this stupid artform. Thus, your expectation will catch up to your learning and at that point improv becomes zero fun.

So what do you do to keep having fun? Well, two ways:

1. Reset your learning curve. Find new teachers, new material, new ways to play. Find new epiphanies. Also, learn the stuff you do the worst. That’s where your learning curve will rise the fastest. Sometimes we pick classes to perfect our skill from 90 to 99. It’s faster to go from 0 to 90 — and way more fun.
2. Reset your expectations. Take some weight off yourself. Do stuff you are bad with zero expectations of doing it well. And also, take a break. Breaks are useful exactly for this reason: while your skills may get rusty, your expectation counter resets. You regain the fresh enthusiasm of a beginner.

At the end of the day, unless you are a professional, the only reason you do improv is to have fun. So ask yourself, when you’re losing that fun — why do you place such heavy expectations on yourself?

for the extra nerdy: the fun plot was generated by MATLAB
m = 0.5, k = 10, m2 = 0.5
ezplot(@(x) m2 * (floor(x) + (ceil(x)-floor(x)) .* (1-exp(-k*(x-floor(x)))))-m * x , 0, 10 )