Amy Poehler's Rules and The Art of War

I use Sun Tzu as an excuse to be a burrowing rabbit of a person. In The Art of War, Sun Tzu says that you should always leave yourself a means of escape. When you get into a fight, knowing you’ve got a means to escape gives you confidence. Charge forward, because you will be able to live another day.

A solid piece of advice.

A problem when taken to an extreme.

Because the only thing better than a reliable avenue for retreat is fifteen reliable avenues for retreat.

Pretty soon, a logical person gets to a place where they have more means of retreat than ways to proceed.

That logical person can feel like a badass. They can convince themself they’re just following their Sun Tzu. Sun Tzu was a badass. He advised leaving an avenue for escape. This logical person is leaving forty—maybe sixty—avenues for escape.

They’re a badass.

Me. I’m the badass. The logical person who is essentially using badassery as a consolation for thinking themselves out of taking action at all is me.

I have been confronting this weird thought process with help from Amy Poehler, that renowned mogul of the warrior ethos.

Hear me out, though, the advice is good.

Amy Poehler's Rules: Nobody Likes Being Only Halfway In

That’s the advice. Poehler did a master class, via the MasterClass company, on the Rules of Improv, as she defined them. Would recommend.

One of Amy Poehler's rules is “nobody likes being only halfway in.”

What she means is you have to commit to the bit. Whatever the “bit” is. In her life, that included, but was not limited to, skits on SNL. You can tell when people in skits are only halfway committed, and it ruins the fun. They seem embarrassed, and as people with a capacity for empathy we’re also uncomfortable.

Poehler went on to point out this principle applies as much to improv comedy as it does to any other situation in life.

Most of life is an improvisation, after all. And everything that you face in a day falls into one of two buckets: stuff that doesn’t matter that much, and stuff that does.

When stuff does matter, Warlord Amy Poehler would point out that there’s nothing worse than being only halfway in. It leaves you uncomfortable, and it leaves everyone else involved uncomfortable too.

That’s What Happens When Amy Poehler Edits Sun Tzu

I have a process for risky situations. I consider the angles. As many of them as I can imagine—and I have quite an imagination.

Then I maybe take one step forward. But the thing is, I’ve now done the opposite of what Sun Tzu advised: instead of leaving myself a retreat, so that I can go on the attack, I have committed myself to worrying about all the means of retreat, and I have put some of my energy into an attack. Since I’ve now spent that much energy figuring out what might go wrong, that’s the only logical thing to do.

It’s not a particularly productive thing to do, though. It’s a little slow, and it’s depressing.

Functionally, it’s the same as being only halfway in. Because I’m more committed to the retreats than the attacks. See how that works?

In Sun Tzu’s defence, he does caution in other passages about proceeding with an excess of caution, and that you do need to commit to your goals.

I needed to hear it from Warlord Amy Poehler this year, though.

What are you only halfway in on right now? Do you need to commit more of yourself to something?