Lessons from Tribeca to Hollywood...

If there’s one thing my years in theater and improv have taught me, it’s that the magic rarely happens on the first try.

Whether you're stepping onto a stage to perform a scripted piece or you're "devising" work completely from scratch and piecing together raw ideas and source material like an investigative journalist, you quickly learn a foundational truth: You cannot get married to the first thing you produce.

This reminder hit me like a wave over the last couple of weeks, thanks to two incredible and completely different creative events.

First, I was at the Tribeca Film Festival listening to investigative journalist Ronan Farrow talk about his two upcoming HBO documentary series, The Palladino Files and Not a Very Good Murderer. During the panel discussion, they talked deeply about the brutal, necessary process of digging, shaping, and reshaping a story until the real truth emerges.

Then, I started thinking about Diana Varco, an incredibly talented artist I had the absolute pleasure of directing in her one-woman show, RISE, which is performing right now at the Hollywood Fringe Festival. Diana started writing this piece over three years ago. It has lived through so many different incarnations because, frankly, Diana is a completely different person now than she was when she typed the first word. Because she evolved, the piece had to evolve.

Both of these moments point back to the same headspace: The power of the iterative process.

Iterating means giving yourself the room to breathe, test, and ask, "What else?" It means refusing to present something once, call it a day, and walk away. The ability to iterate is hard work and it takes patience. It requires you to look at your creation objectively and make some tough calls.

To help you find that same expansive headspace in your own work and life, here are three tangible takeaways you can use to upgrade your own iterative process:

1. Don't be precious!

When we create a project, a presentation, or a business strategy, we tend to get deeply attached to our initial ideas. We treat them like precious gems. But sometimes, there is simply too much information, and the excess is drowning out your core message. You have to be willing to cut what isn’t serving the final goal. If a section, an idea, or a feature is blurring the focus, even if you absolutely love it, it has to go.

2. Run an "Audit" on Your Work

Instead of looking at your projects as "perfect" or "ruined," adopt an editor’s lens. Regularly pause and ask yourself three simple questions:

• What is working beautifully right now?

• Where are the gaps or cracks in the foundation?

• What is just taking up space and needs to be completely removed?

3. Let the Work Grow As You Grow

Just like Diana’s show, your projects are living things. If a strategy or a goal you set a year ago feels a little stiff or misaligned today, that’s not a failure, that’s a sign that you’ve evolved. Give yourself the creative permission to let the work change to reflect the wiser, more experienced person you are right now, and to meet the world exactly where it is.

The Takeaway: Don't rush to cross the finish line just to say you're done. Stay in the question. Stay curious. The beauty isn't just in what you make; it's in who you become while you're busy making it better.