A friend shared a wonderful billboard message with me the other day: “If happiness is just around the corner, turn more often!” In a similar vein, I offer my own billboard slogan: “if inspiration is just around the corner, improvise more often!”

Nicolo Paganini, the 18th century violinist and composer, is considered by many to be the greatest violinist of all time. His mastery of the instrument was so astonishing, that those in attendance at his sold-out concerts often wondered whether he had made a pact with the devil! His gift was so gargantuan, and his comfort with the violin so complete, that a concert challenge that would have completely derailed most soloists, inspired Paganini to a whole new level of improvisation. He was playing in Italy with a full orchestra. The hall was packed and the violinist was at the top of his form—his tone was fantastic, his technique impeccable. The audience sat breathless as Nicolo’s fingers raced up and down the strings. His long hair flew as he dramatically bowed and dipped with the music. The concert built to an astonishing climax with notes reputedly played at 16 per second, and then the unthinkable occurred - one string of his violin snapped and hung limply from the instrument. Paganini frowned briefly, shook his head and continued to play, improvising beautifully on the remaining three. Then to everyone’s shock, a second string broke. And believe it or not, shortly thereafter, a third! Paganini stood there with three strings dangling from his Stradivarius! But instead of leaving the stage, he stood his ground, signaled to the conductor to continue and calmly completed his performance on the one remaining string. Instead of assuming that a violin solo played on one string was impossible, he ignored common sense, stepped into the unknown and people are still writing about this dazzling concertizing moment 150 years later.

So many of us have rules for ‘how things need to be’ that it becomes extremely tough to move our lives powerfully forward. We effectively pin ourselves to the ground with a set of internal regulations that we honor as gospel. We can’t start a family until our careers are solid and successful. We can’t get that job because our background doesn’t match the description. We can’t get the guy because he’s too handsome. We can’t get a Master’s degree because we never completed our Bachelor’s degree. We can’t raise our rates because people won’t pay a penny more. We can’t launch a business because we never have. And on and on. For better and for worse, the rules we set for ourselves seal our fate. People start families with lots of love and not much cash; people talk their way into jobs for which they are supremely unqualified and create enormous success; novices start businesses all the time. People even find their way into Masters’ programs without the requisite BA. Life is not played by the rules. There could never be enough rules to cover all of the possible permutations of events we are faced with. The sooner we let go of our expectation that things should go as expected, the sooner we release our own improvisational energy. And then, the sky is the limit. So what is improvisation? In its purest form, improvisation challenges how we think in an unexpected situation. How will we solve a problem when we don’t have the solution and there is no obvious answer? How quick can we be on our feet? How will we invite our minds to explore uncharted territory and what will we invent from that new place? Improvisation at work for example, shows up in the way creative managers reallocate resources after budget cuts or the way a clever CEO reconfigures the office space to force communication between feuding teams. At home we improvise when we turn Sunday’s leftovers into an elegant and unexpected feast, or the way we paw through old fabric and create the Halloween costume of the decade. Remember that fabulous scene in Apollo 13 when the ground team is given a box full of objects identical to those onboard the doomed capsule and tasked with saving the crew and the ship using the most unrelated and seemingly irrelevant materials? Talk about improv! From time to time we are all faced with the opportunity to do a ‘paganini improv.’ Stakes are high, the challenge seems overwhelming, logic does not offer a way out. The question we might ask ourselves next time is whether we choose to walk off the stage in defeat or hold our ground and improvise until lightning strikes and the solution or course of action becomes clear.