Take the Most Interesting Path

I recently read an article explaining what Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert calls The Most Interesting Path Game:

“You go out of your hotel or your ship if you're staying shipboard, and you look to your left, look straight ahead, you look to your right, and you make - without your phone by the way - you make a conscientious decision in the moment of which path looks the most interesting.”

In the context of travel, this was described as a "simple, radical shift from purpose to presence."

“What you want is to get lost, like, that's what you really, really want. What you're doing is you're asking your curiosity to be engaged with the presence of the moment. So, this is the important thing. Don't go in the direction you think you should, that you have some sort of voice telling you should go. What you do is you're just like, what catches your eye?”

This encapsulates the essence of improvisation: being present, accepting what's offered, and following what sparks you in the moment.

But here's what struck me: Gilbert isn't describing a travel hack. She's describing a practice.

The Most Interesting Path Game works because it interrupts the autopilot we all run on — the voice that says this way is faster, that way is safer, you should probably head back. In improv, we call that voice the editor. And one of the first things we learn is that the editor is the enemy of discovery.

When Gilbert says "don't go in the direction you think you should" — that's an improv note. That's a director pulling you out of your head and back into the room.

Noticing is a skill.

Gilbert's game asks you to pay attention to what catches your eye — not what you've planned for, not what the guidebook ranked highest, not what's efficient. Just: what's interesting right now, to you, in this moment?

This is harder than it sounds. Most of us have been trained out of trusting our own noticing. We second-guess our instincts, defer to the crowd, reach for our phones to confirm that the thing we're drawn to is actually worth being drawn to.

Applied improvisation puts noticing back at the center of how we move through the world. Exercises like status walks, mirroring, and group awareness games train us to pick up on what's actually happening — not what we expected to happen. That training doesn't stay in the room. It follows you to the street corner in a foreign city where you're deciding which way to turn.

Getting lost is the point.

There's something Gilbert says that I keep coming back to: "What you want is to get lost."

That's counterintuitive for most people. Getting lost feels like failure — like poor planning, wasted time, something to be avoided. But in improvisation, getting lost is often where the most interesting material lives. The moment the scene goes somewhere you didn't expect is the moment something real can happen.

The same is true in facilitation. Some of the most powerful moments I've witnessed in a room have come when the unexpected broke through the plan and everyone had to figure out together what came next. Those moments require the same skill set as Gilbert's game: presence, curiosity, and the willingness to follow what's interesting rather than what's prescribed.

Try it — anywhere.

The Most Interesting Path Game doesn't require a passport. You can play it on your lunch break, in your own neighborhood, or in any situation where you've been defaulting to habit. Look around. Set the phone down. Ask yourself: what catches my eye?

Then go that way.

That's improv. That's also, it turns out, how Elizabeth Gilbert travels. And I'd argue it's one of the most practical tools we have for staying genuinely alive to whatever room — or street, or moment — we happen to find ourselves in.

Written with the assistance of AI.