Creativity Exercise
- Terry Withers
- Nov 11, 2025
- 6 min read
This post is about an improv game called Seven Things that is often used as a warm-up game, both for corporate workshops and for artists who are learning how to do improv. It is a really great creativity exercise.
I played this game a few weeks ago as part of my Improv With Professionals project. Sharyn Vross, the Director of Digital Marketing at SageSure was my guest and the sessions had so many interesting elements, I knew right away I would blog about it. (Eh, maybe I'm overstating, maybe I only suspected I would blog about it).
Here are my thoughts on the session, intermingled with videos and transcripts from the actual day. You’ll notice that the big lesson about creativity (from an improv perspective) is laced throughout: that everyone is equally creative but some people censor themselves more than others. Playing improv games, especially Seven Things, trains us to quiet that censor so that we all can share our creative ideas with each other.
The way Seven Things works is pretty simple. If you prefer to watch a video, here I am describing the instructions:
And here are the game’s rules written out:
Normally you have a circle of participants, because you normally have more than two people playing this game. One person will kick the game off by naming someone else in the circle and assigning them a category. Might sound something like, “Susan, can you name seven different types of house pets?”
So there the category is “House Pets,” but it just as easily could have been “Laundry Detergents,” “World Leaders,” “Pop Stars,” or, so on. Whoever is named will then list off seven things that fit within that category as quickly as they can. As they do so, everyone else in the circle will loudly count each item until we get to seven, at which point everyone will proclaim, in an excited and celebratory fashion, “These are seven things!”
Importantly, you don't have to be correct and you don't have to be clever. So, if I asked you for seven types of house pets and you said, “Phil, my husband,” that would count and everyone playing with you would loudly affirm that by saying, “One”.
And that is always true when playing this game, you can’t be wrong. You could say “A Macy's Gift Card,” and that would be a house pet for you. You could say “Karl Marx,” and that would also be counted as correct.
Since Sharyn and I were doing this by ourselves, we took turns giving each other categories and counting off for each. I went first, since that only seemed fair, and here was the result:
Let’s take a look at how I did with that first rendition.
CATEGORY: Places I have visited.
MY SEVEN THINGS:
Baltimore
DC.
New York City
Orlando
Tampa
Dallas
Houston
(And because I got so into it, I even tried to add an eighth thing) St. Louise
Eh, a pretty easy category resulted in a pretty standard list of American cities. I pretty much just listed off the last seven cities I had visited (or contemplated visiting) for work.
This is a good example of the improv axiom, REMEMBER, DON’T INVENT. It has a few different applications, but the main one is, when you’re in an improv scene and someone asks you what kind of car you drive, why not just say whatever type of car it is that you actually drive, rather than try to invent something spectacular? When you see someone freeze in an improv scene it is often because they are trying to invent something that meets their standards. The longer they take the higher those standards get until eventually nothing will do and presto, you have a deer in headlights.
Improv teaches us to move fast instead. By simply blurting out what you had for breakfast you’ve moved the scene forward AND there is a real chance that what you actually had for breakfast will be interesting to everyone else. We tend not to think our actual lives are of interest to an audience, because they are our lives after all, and we are very familiar with the details.
But that’s only us, no one else is as familiar with your life as you are.
Similarly, you may think an idea you have, especially if it feels like a common idea, is not creative. But that is your brain judging your own ideas. There is every reason to suspect that your everyday thoughts will seem impossibly creative to others.
That’s a big takeaway from this exercise I think. When engaged in a creative pursuit, don’t be scared to go with your first idea or with an idea that occurs to you but you worry is too commonplace. The improv mantra, REMEMBER, DON’T INVENT, advises us to have confidence in our everyday thoughts.
Then it was Sharyn’s turn. I gave her the category: Summer Favorite Library Books.
Long pause. Then she asked for a new category with the confession that she isn’t an avid reader.
First of all, I’m not sure this moment actually means Sharyn doesn’t read a lot. All it means is that when titles of books occurred to Sharyn, she discarded those titles as being “Not good enough.”
This is so common in improv and in every arena in which we are asked to perform, especially at work. We want to do well! Heck we want to do great!
Counterintuitively, that desire to do well ends up holding us back when it comes to creativity. There is another improv motto that addresses this trap: DON’T THINK.
This motto, the famous UCB Theatre saying, tells us not to evaluate our impulses, but to simply follow them instead. It may sound reckless, it may sound foolish, but there is great wisdom in going with your gut, as Malcolm Gladwell’s masterpiece BLINK can attest.
Now of course, there are a great many times when thinking is just what is in order. But not when it comes to creativity. Creativity requires us to be brave and to share our ideas.
This is why writer's rooms for popular comedy shows are chock full of improvisers. One writer suggests an idea to write about, everyone else agrees and adds their own ideas to it. Then they write it down on a post it note, repeat the process ninety nine more times AND only then do they get selective and choose one of their one hundred options to focus on.
Seven Things was designed to help us practice being creative. Since no answer is wrong when playing Seven Things, all you have to do is say seven words. They could be anything.
The challenge is that our minds make the game seem like more than that. Our minds tell us that the improv instructor who told us to say anything is wrong and that the game actually requires us to list off really smart, really impressive answers.
It isn’t true.
In order to demonstrate this, I asked Sharyn to give me a new category that she thought would be difficult for me. This was the result:
Let’s do a breakdown of this one too.
CATEGORY: Seven songs you can play on the piano.
MY SEVEN THINGS:
I wish I had a cat.
I lost my way.
How loud is this?
Three pianos playing.
I have two left hands.
I love music.
I am music.
And that's all it is. That's all creativity is in improv: a willingness to share your ideas, regardless of what your mind tells you about those ideas.
In full honesty, I felt a degree of terror playing Seven Things with Sharyn, because like any other human being I worry my ideas won’t be received well. I would feel more comfortable if I could polish my ideas, maybe peer review them, before sharing them publicly. But that is not how life or creativity works.
Instead you have to bravely trust in the value of your thoughts and share them as they occur. If you sat down and asked yourself, “Should I call my song ‘How loud is this?’ what are the chances you would arrive at the answer ‘Yes’?” Or what if you asked a friend?
But now that I have offered the name I am forced to think about it and guess what? I kind of love it! How much fun would a song that is uncertain of its own volume be?
Or how about the song “I am music”? Doesn’t that sound like a really joyful song?
Now that I had demonstrated that any answer works in Seven Things, Sharyn was ready to go again. Here was the result!
Let’s do a final review.
CATEGORY: Seven different types of entrances to homes.
SHARYN’S SEVEN THINGS:
Doors.
Garage doors.
A tunnel.
Spaceships.
Airplanes.
Caves.
And sand.
These were great answers and all correct. In fact, my favorite answers are probably the ones your brain would tell you are wrong. Most people don’t enter their homes through a cave or a spaceship, but what a creative possibility!
You know I hope you have found this blog post to be helpful and that you agree with me about what improv teaches us about creativity. But agree with me or not, the only way I know of to get more creative is to practice trusting your ideas.
Seven Things happens to be a great improv game to play by yourself. Get a stopwatch, ask ChatGPT for some categories and get going. See how fast you can come up with seven things!
This is a great warm up exercise,Terry.
I also love it when you have to list 7 things as a character.
7 things you find in an alley
As an ogre...As a Colonial musketman
Such fun!!!