Cliff jumping

One of my favourite scenes in Back to the Future is the bit where Marty McFly jumps off the building rather than be shot by Biff. Oh no, our hero is dead – but wait, what's that? He's flying! The DeLorean was waiting below, caught Marty on its hood, and flies up to deliver a triumphant gull-wing door to Biff's face. To me, that's the quintessential action hero trait; to throw yourself into an impossible situation knowing your hero skills will bail you out. Of course, it doesn't always work like that.

I once did improv comedy, and that was the best part. Anyone can make up things on the spot, but you only got a really great scene when you took a crazy risk that would make the entire audience breathe in as they think "holy hell, this is going to be a disaster", and then laugh in surprise and relief as the rest of your crew come in to bail you out. You jumped off the cliff, everyone thought you were dead, but you miraculously survived. I'd had that audience experience before, but the feeling as a performer doing a successful cliff jump is really something else.

Of course, there's nothing miraculous about it. Good improv performers train in how to make those leaps and how to bail out their fellow performers to the point where it's a very reliable process. The danger is an illusion; in a sense, it's more about trust than risk. You trust that people are there to catch you. You build that trust over the course of working with and training with other performers until you know what you can get away with. However, that appearance of danger still feels real. Real enough to impress the audience, and real enough that a common mistake among newer performers is playing it safe because they don't trust their skills enough.

It is easy to make that mistake outside of improv as well. You can spend a career – in some cases a lifetime – building your skills, and still treat risks as conservatively as a novice. I've seen very capable people beg off taking the obviously better hard road because there's a marginally workable easy road. This isn't laziness, either; in many cases the easy road takes more work, even if the difficulty is lower. It's really a kind of risk aversion, or more accurately a lack of trust in their own abilities. And the result isn't failure, it's mediocrity.

This is part of the reason underconfidence can be worse than overconfidence; taking on too much might mean you fail and have to correct your behaviour, but taking on too little means you never have a chance to really succeed. And how would you even know?

I believe the antidote is to learn to love the feeling of cliff jumping, of knowing that you're taking a big risk and that what you're doing feels suicidal and certainly looks suicidal from the outside. But you know something everyone else doesn't: beneath you is a DeLorean, and you're going to fly up and surprise the shit out of them.