"Not Knowing": The Gold of the Superbowl, Comedy and Creativity

What is it that makes sports so compelling? We just saw it in the Superbowl: the script is written only in the moment. Truly anything can happen next. My heart jumped when Larry Fitzgerald cut through the middle of the field, another clutch catch in hand, scoring the come-from-behind Arizona touchdown with less than three minutes left in the game. But then just a few breathless plays later, there is Santonio Holmes nabbing the ball in the corner of the end zone, winning the game for the Steelers, with his toes, like a ballerina, miraculously staying in bounds.

The great joy in sports is not knowing what will happen next. And finding that sometimes miracles happen.

The same is the case with one of the most creative of the arts--improvisational comedy. Conan O'Brien, soon to take the great comedic reins of the Tonight Show, explains the reality of his late show to James Lipton as part of the "Inside the Actor's Studio" series (click pic for a taste) on Bravo last week: “We don’t really know what we’re doing. And I don’t mean that as a joke. I mean, the show is in flux. We are fudging with it up to the last second. Nobody really knows what they’re doing. There’s two ways to go with that information: One is to be afraid. The other is to be liberated. And I choose to be liberated.”

You are liberated as a creator when you can embrace "not knowing" what is coming next. Conan explains he got good at improvising by “learning to listen, learning to react, learning to let things happen.” When something goes wrong or not as planned, he says, “Improv teaches you not to fear those moments—that’s where the gold is.”

Just like today's Superbowl, the gold of creativity is when you give up trying to control what's next and learn to be alive to each coming moment of unpredictable possibility.