Then you’ve got the third strategy, which is Mencius. So he’s a later Confucian and he’s trying to go the in-between route. He’s saying, look, we’ve got these spontaneous tendencies inside of us, we basically have the potential for wu-wei inside of us, but we need to cultivate it in a gentle way. His metaphor is agriculture. So, kind of like a farmer cultivating these sprouts and helping them get stronger. So I think that his strategy really applies to things where we do have tendencies that are helping us out and going in the right way, but we do need to do some work to strengthen them or expand them in some way.

The example I use for things like that is empathy. We do have a kind of innate empathy that doesn’t need working on. We see the puppy in the window and we feel bad. We have isolated instances of empathy, but we’re not very good at extending them in a consistent manner. So, we see the puppy and feel bad, but we walk right by the homeless guy and don’t notice him. So the Mencian strategy, I think, really applies more in cases where whatever it is we’re trying to get spontaneous at, we have the kind of seeds or sprouts of that within us, but we need to do a little work to extend them.

Then, the last strategy is the Zhuangzi strategy, which is another Taoist. He’s arguing a little bit like Laozi in that the problem is trying. So, essentially, the Chinese keep swinging back and forth between trying and not-trying strategies, but all of them are slightly different. With Zhuangzi, his dominant metaphor is emptiness, so, you make your mind empty, and if you can do that, then you’re open to the situation and you let the situation dictate your movements. And when you can do that—another big metaphor is “losing the self”—there’s no more you; you’re just being motivated by what is going on around you. The Zhuangzian approach is very appropriate for performers and athletes. It seems really in improv, that the key would be to just be tenuous. Be empty, to use a Zhuangzian metaphor, and just let the people you’re working with and the way the scene is going decide what your next move is going to be.

Yeah that's one of the tenets of improvising, that it’s all about reacting. That's one of the lessons people take into the real world. You can't be planning your next move while someone else is talking, because your next move is completely contingent on their every word.

It seems to me the Zhuangzian strategy is the one that’s the most appropriate for those situations: kind of high-speed, either performance or athletics where you really need to be receptive to whatever is going on around you. At the end of the book I lay out these strategies and talk about what’s the cognitive science and evolutionary theory behind each of them, and why they would work in certain situations, or be appropriate in certain situations. I argue the reason why none of these four strategies ever “wins,” is that there is no one best strategy. Which one is helpful probably depends both on the situation and what spontaneous situation you’re trying to get yourself to do, and probably also personality differences.