Improvised Lives Workshop
You can create magic in your life through improvisation
A set of doodle exercises and prompts to improvise and enrich your life
In this article, I will share with you a workshop I have recently delivered at University of East Anglia.
It is called “Improvised Lives Workshop”. It was focused on automated writing, drawing, imagining, ideating, and creating skills.
For each class, I invent a new quote. Here is a quote from me that summarises the premise of this class:
Creativity is no longer a luxury. It is a critical survival skill that we need to adapt to rapid changes, solve complex problems, imagine new possibilities, and navigate uncharted waters ahead of us. Dr Fahri Karakas
So, this workshop is focused on developing creativity through a series of improvisation skills.
Before I share with you the workshop, let me share the art description and synopsis of the class:
Art Description/Synopsis:
In this lecture, we learn and practice creativity through a workshop titled “Improvised Lives”.
Improvised lives are lives defined by a sense of adventure, curiosity, exploration, and spontaneity.
Improvised living requires a playful mode of continuous learning, intense curiosity, embracing chaos and uncertainty, thinking and problem solving beyond borders, experimenting and making mistakes, and acting as an entrepreneur.
In this workshop, you have opportunities to experiment with automated writing, doodling, drawing, ideating, imagining, and creating techniques.
In addition, we have about 20 mini-puzzles to solve. We cover a wide range of topics ranging from Oscars to celebrities, from vulnerability to humor, and from wellness to fashion.
Finally, we have a mini-workshop on future generations (Alpha generation in particular), explore the biggest challenge facing them (climate emergency), and discuss the number one mental problem plaguing youth of today (climate anxiety).
After we give a nod to Greta Thunberg, we turn to another futurist and visionary who has set one of the most challenging and ambitious goals for himself:
Elon Musk aspires to send 1 million people to Mars by 2050.
We finish the lecture with a mini-workshop on “Life and Employability on Mars”, where we learn surprising facts about this red planet, including the fact that creativity indeed will be a surviving skill on this planet.
Introducing the Workshop
Now, let us start the workshop.
I define improvised lives as lives defined by a sense of adventure, curiosity, exploration, and spontaneity.
How can we learn more from improvisation to increase the quality of our lives?
In this workshop, I offer a lot of strategies and examples of how to achieve this.
My workshops often follow a “TRUTH OR DARE” structure.
In the “Truth” section, I ask puzzles to workshop participants.
These are small puzzles about the latest trends, news, companies, leaders, or creatives around the world.
Whoever knows the answer to the puzzle wins a bar of dark chocolate.
In each workshop, I tend to give away about 20 chocolates to participants who know the answers.
The chocolates function as energizers as they set up the playing field.
They also enable participants to be more focused and attentive.
Everyone tries to guess the answers to the puzzles.
The human brain loves puzzles and surprises and surprises.
So, these puzzles and chocolates accelerate the flow of the workshop.
Instead of giving information away, I ask it through a puzzle.
A puzzle always works better since your brain loves tackling it and processes it with much more attention.
Even if you do not know the answer to the puzzle, you will simply pay more attention to the answer and appreciate the answer when you see it.
To see and solve the puzzles yourself, please download the workshop file below.
Please make sure that you fully download the PowerPoint file from SlideShare and view the file as a full-screen slide show.
You can then try to guess the answers to the puzzles, then the experience will be much more fun:)
In the “DARE” sections, participants do a lot of reflective and creative exercises.
As you go through the slides, please also try to do the exercises and watch the videos.
In this way, your workshop experience will be much more enjoyable and immersive.
I will share some of the posters and slogans from the workshop below.
Life is a Series of Experiments
You need to engage in a lot of experiments to learn, improve, and make progress.
You are the Hero of Your Own Life: Protect the Egg!
In some of my workshops, I want groups of participants to wrap up an egg using newspaper, paper napkins, a paper cup, sticky tape, and some cotton.
The goal is to prevent the egg from breaking.
We then apply a lot of pressure to the wrapped eggs.
We throw them in the wall and we throw them from the highest place to the ground.
It is great fun — and it is not as messy as you imagine.
If the egg is protected well, it will not break apart — despite all the pressures we apply upon it.
In this exercise, the egg represents your career dreams, your hopes, and your creativity.
It is not easy to protect the egg, but you need to protect it at all costs.
You need to protect it from jealous friends.
You need to protect it from horrible bosses.
You need to protect it from indifferent corporate types.
You need to protect it from failures and disappointments.
You need to protect it from criticisms, including your own.
Now, let me share a couple of exercises from this workshop.
The first one is about creating your own Netflix Show.
Exercise: Create your own Netflix Show
Imagine that Netflix hired you to create your own show.
Imagine that you have the necessary budget to go ahead.
What would you like to create?
On a blank page, please write and doodle as you wish.
Feel free to experiment with any formats (documentary, TV series, interviews, reality, quiz show, travel, lifestyle, food, fashion, mystery, science fiction, business, technology etc.)
Give a title to your show.
Think about your target segment: Who would love watching your show? Who would benefit from it most?
Think about how you would make it appealing and rich for your audience.
Create at least 20 ideas on how to make it work.
These types of imagination experiments are very valuable — they help you imagine and engineer new possibilities.
If you make a habit of creating fresh ideas a part of your daily life, you will create a fascinating amount of original ideas.
You will be better prepared for a future fuelled by imagination and innovation.
Exercise: The Matrix Challenge
This is a very fun exercise where you build connections between the rows and the columns below.
As we know, creativity is about connecting things together.
Even if these things are unrelated, you can force connections to come up with original ideas.
Originality comes from the volume of your ideas, so you need to come up with as many ideas and connections as possible.
When I did this exercise in class, some participants were able to come up with 15 -20 ideas in a very short amount of time.
If you spend enough time, you can fill all the boxes and create 3 ideas for each box; which makes 96 ideas.
Think about the power of being able to generate so many ideas every day.
You can dramatically increase the quality of your life if you train your brain as an idea generation machine.
Try to make it a habit to create 100 ideas every day — this is immensely powerful.
You can use improvisation to increase adventure and quality in your life.
Try to apply automated writing, drawing, doodling, story-telling, ideating, designing, creating, dancing, and singing in your life.
Education as usual is dead. Long live lifetime learning! You need to assume responsibility for your own learning.
Try to be a hunter and learner of the most interesting things. Cross boundaries — there are no borders.
Go out of your comfort zone. Learn outside your discipline. Think and act wider.
To solve the wicked problems of the 21st century, you need to think beyond borders and disciplines.
Invest in yourself and your learning every day. This is the biggest investment you can ever make.
You can get inspiration from 100 different people and 100 different fields.
And then imagine you are a farmer and you are growing 100 creative projects: Let 100 flowers bloom!
It is not easy to scare yourself and set yourself new challenges and adventures. But if you do it, you will be rewarded. You will be happier.
Show up for creative work and use random prompts or anchors to get going. Start small — small is beautiful.
The world needs interesting, unique, weird people — like you!
Be a polymath: An individual whose knowledge spans a significant number of subjects, known to draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems.
Be an autodidact: A self-taught person individual who initiates and manages his/her own learning and reads voraciously.
Exercise: Lighten Up!
We tend to take ourselves too seriously. In order to be creative, we need to stop doing this.
We can lighten up by using more humor and improvisation in our lives.
Here is your exercise:
Please reflect and come up with action points for each prompt below:
I use Brené Brown’s TED Talk and Netflix lecture to help workshop participants to think about vulnerability as a pathway to personal liberation and creativity:
Exercise: Scare Yourself!
I believe that we need to scare ourselves every day and try to make our lives a bit more adventurous than usual.
This means taking risk and setting sail to new possibilities.
Tim Ferriss recommends an exercise of gazing into the eyes of others — whether people you pass on the street or conversational partners — until they break contact.
Here is how he suggests we do it:
“1. Focus on one eye and be sure to blink occasionally so you don’t look like a psychopath or get your ass kicked.
2. In conversation, maintain eye contact when you are speaking or listening.
3. Practice with people bigger or more confident than yourself. If a passerby asks you what the hell you’re staring at, just smile and respond, “Sorry about that. I thought you were an old friend of mine.”
I think this sounds very risky and awkward, but this is the point.
We need to think of ways to scare ourselves and go outside our own comfort zones.
Please look at the poster below and identify some practical actions to go out of your comfort zone:
Do not be trapped by your ego — this will make you mediocre.
You cannot learn and grow if you try to be clever and correct all the time.
It is much better to take risks and be vulnerable and naïve.
Be hungry and be foolish, in the words of Steve Jobs.
Life is short and you are the hero. Make a difference.
Surprises, adventures, puzzles, exciting ventures, new projects, artistic pursuits are good for your health.
You need a bit more chaos, randomness, dance, singing, independent learning, writing, and creating in your life.
Improvisation is magic — it improves your life instantly.
We live in an imagination economy.
Ideas are the new currency.
Write, draw, reflect, capture your ideas every day.
We are not machines. We need adventures.
What will your next adventures be?
Where will you go next?
