Simon Element
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Can you teach an old dog new tricks? Atlantic staff writer Olga Khazan set out to change aspects of her personality she didn’t like by forcing herself outside of her comfort zone, and documented the progress she made in her new book, “Me, But Better: The Science and Promise of Personality Change” (Simon & Schuster/Simon Element).
Among the challenges that Khazan, a lifelong introvert, set for herself: Tackling her social anxiety by enrolling in an improv class. Yes, and … how did that go?
Read an excerpt below, and don’t miss Susan Spencer’s interview with Olga Khazan on “CBS Sunday Morning” July 20!
“Me, But Better” by Olga Khazan
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My journey into extroversion began solitarily, with me watching the improv show Middleditch & Schwartz on Netflix one night. The episode opened with two well-known actors, Thomas Middleditch and Ben Schwartz, spending an uncomfortably long time pulling a premise for their sketch out of a random audience member—a photography intern. Then, on a bare stage, Middleditch pretended to interview Schwartz for a photography job, making up absurd questions like “embody a gazelle.”
The audience laughed along gamely, but mostly, the scene reminded me that I needed to file my expense report. I felt uneasy for the actors, like at any moment the crowd could turn on them, leaving them groping for laughs in ghostly silence. I wondered why they couldn’t have just written out better scenes ahead of time. And even worse, I knew that soon, I would be in their exact same position, except without the advantage of being a famous comedian.
For my personality-change project, I had decided to focus on each of the five traits intensively for a few months at a time, and I tackled extroversion first. In recent years my life had descended into a rut that I didn’t particularly like, and extroversion seemed like the way out. Most days, I worked, made dinner, watched TV, and worked some more. Rich and I were planning to relocate, and it occurred to me that I would have both moved into and out of my house without having met any of my neighbors. A test in a self-help book reminded me that I have “high loneliness.”
My “very low” extroversion score was probably not surprising to people who know me: My friend Anastasia once sentenced me to attending a party on pain of ending our friendship. But my hard-core introversion could turn pernicious, shading at times into loneliness and isolation. I have a career in which work can expand to fill every crevice of the day, and sometimes I thought that was a good thing, because I didn’t have many hobbies or friends to otherwise occupy my time. (And say what you will about extroverts, but they have plenty of hobbies and friends.) I had always told myself I could focus on socializing after my life had stabilized, but the absence of social interaction was, itself, destabilizing.
Of all five traits, extroversion offers the simplest path to personality change: You just have to go out and talk to people. You don’t even have to be particularly good at it, or to proclaim yourself an “extrovert” while you do it. You just go, and extroversion will find you, like the entire wedding follows the first intrepid dancer.
Coincidentally, this is also the ethos behind improv comedy: You just have to say something. Anything! For the uninitiated, “improv” is short for “improvisational theater.” The idea is that two or more actors get up on stage without knowing what they’ll say or do. They get to the “scene” by accepting and building on a partner’s improvisations—a concept known as “yes, and.” When this is done well, improvisers say there is virtually no difference between improv and scripted theater—a claim about which opinions surely differ.
I knew I needed a commitment device for extroversion—something to force me out of my house and into gregariousness. I decided to try improv, which seemed like the full-immersion extrovert experience.
It also felt like full-immersion insanity. Rich saw me entering my credit-card information into the website of Dojo Comedy, a cozy-looking D.C. improv theater whose logo incorporates a pair of mustachioed Groucho Marx comedy glasses. “You doing improv is like Larry David doing ice hockey,” he said.
It’s true. My general vibe is less “yes, and” and more “well, actually.” I’ve never really liked improv as an art form. I don’t find it particularly funny—it’s more like an extended inside joke you’re never going to get. I thought Middleditch would warm me to improv, but it only turned me off more.
Before the first class a few weeks later, I donned a Groundlings-ready black T-shirt and jeans, hoping to draw as little attention to myself as possible. I tried to shake memories of being so timid in middle-school drama class that I only qualified to be the understudy for the smallest role—Bob Cratchit’s daughter. When I typed the address of the improv studio into my phone, I was relieved when the red snake of “heavier than usual traffic” indicated that I would have at least an hour to mentally prepare.
The improv class met in an old townhouse, in a room that was, for no discernible reason, filled with dozens of sculptures of elephants. Six of us novices sat in a circle on chairs that looked like they’d been salvaged from Victorian funerals.
The instructor, a short brunette with a brisk, friendly manner, opened by asking us about our past improv experience—none, in my case. One of the other women rattled off a long list of improv classes she had taken. What kind of crazy person does improv multiple times? I wondered. (Me, as it would turn out.)
Right after the instructor said, “Let’s get started,” I prayed for someone to grab an elephant and knock me unconscious. That didn’t happen, so instead I stood up to play warm-up games with a software engineer, two lawyers, and a guy who worked on the Hill. The games were meant to loosen us up for what was to come, which was “scene work,” or acting out unscripted mini plays with one another.
First, we learned the improv standard Zip Zap Zop, which involves whooshing beams of energy at one another and taking turns saying “Zip,” “Zap,” and—you guessed it— “Zop.” The point of the game is to stay unflustered enough to keep up the Zip-Zap-Zop sequence while still whooshing on to someone else in the circle.
I struggled for several reasons: Because of the pandemic, I hadn’t been in a room with other people for more than a year. On top of that, I have poor reflexes, and, because we wore masks, you had to determine whether someone was about to Zop you solely by the angle of their eyes.
If someone messed up the sequence—said “Zip” to another’s “Zip,” for instance—we would all stop, clap, and say, “yay!,” reinforcing the idea that it’s okay to screw up in improv. The spirit of all this was so different from my job, where you can get fired for screwing up, that it felt like some sort of rehab for perfectionists.
Then we moved on to juggling various invisible items between one another, including an invisible ball, which, humiliatingly, we had to refer to as “invisible ball!” I sensed that the others were as nervous as I was, but this being D.C., an air of try-hard overachievement subsumed everyone’s true emotions. People, myself included, will behave ridiculously if they feel they have no alternative. I imagined all my fellow ball-jugglers back at work the next day, writing emails in which they promised to circle back and touch base. I wondered whether they would think back to this moment of whimsy at their brown-bag lunches, as they gravely discussed the situation in Burkina Faso. Maybe it would make the situation in Burkina Faso seem less chaotic by comparison.
Soon it was time to call an invisible hawk to my arm. I noted with gratitude that at least the blinds were closed, so no one could see us from the street.
Excerpted from “Me, But Better.” Copyright © 2025, Olga Khazan. Reproduced by permission of Simon Element, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved.
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