The first rule they teach you in improvisational comedy is deceptively simple: whatever your scene partner offers you, accept it, and add to it.
Yes, and.
Your partner says "welcome aboard the submarine, Captain," and now you're on a submarine, and you're the captain. You don't get to say "this isn't a submarine, it's a Denny's." (Even if you are 
I've been doing improv for many years now i joined a group when i was 22. We were a puppet maker, a wanna be comedian and me a slam poet musician. The great thing was none of us knew what we were doing, we just found games and played.
Later i joined some real classes but im happy for my naive start. The thing nobody tells you when you start is that the classes aren't really about comedy. Comedy is the byproduct. What you're actually training is a posture toward the unexpected. You're rewiring the reflex that says no, that's not right, that's not what I had in mind into a reflex that says okay... given this, what can I bring?
And once that rewiring starts, you can't unsee it. You start noticing the ethos everywhere. Or more precisely... you start noticing its absence. I later taught improv classes. I called my class the ABC’s of improv. One of the first things i would say at in the first class was that people get stuck on the comedy or being funny side of improv, but that really improv should be taught in school, because improv is life. Get better at improv, get better at life. Improv is acceptance.
Life doesn't hand you a script. Neither do your kids, your marriage, your business, your trip up an elevator with strangers. Life is one long unscripted scene, and everyone you meet is a scene partner making offers: ideas, plans, asks, suggestions, demands, half-formed dreams, weird points overheard at dinner the next table over. There are, roughly, two ways to receive any offer. There's yes-and: I see what you're going for. I accept the reality you're proposing. Here's something to build on it. And there's the other thing. Call it the no energetic. The doubt-first, tear-down-first, "well actually" posture. The reflex that meets every idea with skepticism and a list of reasons it won't work. Why is there so much no energy in life??? no energetic: it's easier. Genuinely, mechanically easier. Tearing down an idea takes seconds and requires nothing of you. "That's dumb" is a complete sentence. Job done. Self safety maintained. It is simply more effort to see whats behind an idea, seeing the right intention inside a perhaps wrong plan and accepting another’s thoughts without knee jerk tear downs. Adding something that makes an idea grow or broaden, ... that takes work. That takes generosity, empathy. It takes losing aspects of any preconceived notions and opening self to wider possibilities, to unknowns and never thought about it like that but hmmmm pauses. It means actually being in the scene of this life, rather than only heckling from the seats.
No is cheap. Yes-and costs something. Which is exactly why yes-and is worth the effort of nurturing.
And so many people confuse no-ing with knowing. They think the skeptical posture makes them look smart. Sometimes it does. But nobody ever built anything out of pure skepticism. You can't stack noes into a house. I think many of us are familiar with our ideas being shit on and what effect that has on motivation. In essence, improv provides the life tools to not just shit on an idea first.
I've been on this chain a long time, and I love it here. And I've noticed something that I suspect might be baked into decentralization itself: there is a lot of no energy on Hive.
Somebody launches a project... no energy. Somebody proposes a direction... no energy. Somebody posts an idea that's maybe 60% baked, and instead of the community supplying the other 40%, we take turns explaining why the first 60% is wrong.
I get why. Decentralization means nobody's the boss, which means everybody's a critic and free to shit however they want to shit.
There's no director to say "great, run with it." Every idea has to survive a gauntlet. And some of that gauntlet is healthy! Crypto without skepticism is how people lose their savings. I'm not asking anyone to yes-and a scam. Holding a yes and energetic doesn’t mean you cant disagree. It just about accepting then adding to or adjusting. It’s acknowledging while shifting, it takes being on your toes and side stepping without deliberately tripping someone.
There's a difference between due diligence and a culture of demolition.
And the crazy bit i notice: almost everyone tearing down ideas on Hive wants Hive to succeed. We're all rooting for the same show. We all want to keep breathing on this planet but we brought chainsaws to our vacation in the rainforest.
Again, Yes-and doesn't mean agreeing with everything. In improv, you can disagree with your scene partner all day. What you can't do is deny the scene. Applied here: "yes, I see what you're building, and here's what could make it stronger" is still a yes.
So yeah, we can easily tear away at each other but where does it get us…. Maybe .05 cent Hive price 😜
Honestly? I don't know. Culture is heavy. You can't vote it in with a hardfork.
But improv taught me something else: you don't need the whole theater to say yes. You need one scene partner. Scenes are built two people at a time.
So maybe the question isn't can we change the culture of Hive. Maybe it's smaller and more possible than that.
Can we create little pockets where yes lives?
A comment section here, a community there, can we bit by bit develop habits of finding the good in an idea before finding the flaw.
Can we make somebody's half-baked offer better instead of a target for target practice 🎯
Because here's the thing I keep coming back to. The technology we're all standing on already knows the rule. A blockchain doesn't argue with the previous block. It accepts everything that came before, all of it, unconditionally, and adds one more block on top.
That's it. That's the whole protocol.
A blockchain is just a very long game of yes, and.
Maybe someday we Hive Users will catch up with that basic protocol rule of the chain.
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