Mastery Earns You the Right to Improvise

A note to young leaders.

Good leaders know the script. Great leaders know when to depart from it.

There’s a scene in The Wolf of Wall Street you probably remember.

Matthew McConaughey, sitting across from a young Leonardo DiCaprio in an upscale New York restaurant, starts humming and thumping his chest in a strange, almost primal ritual.

It’s awkward, strange and very funny. Which is precisely why it’s so memorable.

Here’s the surprising thing – that scene was never in the script.

Between takes, McConaughey had a private ritual – thumping his chest and humming a low, rhythmic chant – as a way of calming his nerves, lowering his voice and getting out of his head. DiCaprio noticed him doing it and asked him to incorporate it into the scene.

McConaughey was prepared to give it a go and Scorsese had the good sense to keep it in the final cut.

McConaughey appears for barely 8 minutes in a 3-hour movie – yet that improvised moment has become the scene that everyone remembers.

A word of caution though. You earn the right to go off-script by first mastering the script. Mastery is what earns you the right to deviate.

Without the script, improvisation is a fool’s caper. With it, it’s genius.