You only need four things.

Be good at improvisation.
Be good at structure.
Be good at playing one against the other.
Be good at integrating and unifying them.

This applies to life, to creative work, to family dynamics, to solving problems.

You can improvise a salad the night before you go food shopping. You can improvise a dumb-ass excuse when your banker calls you about a missed payment. You can improvise the first draft of a song, a poem, a novel. Part of your brain is primed for making up stuff, adapting, changing, learning, and growing.

You can structure your days and weeks, with the help of a calendar, an agenda, a clock, and a reliable wi-fi connection. You can structure an east-to-west cross-country trip: New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio. What comes after Ohio? Look it up. Structure welcomes research. You can structure a bookshelf, and screw the driver! I mean, you need a screwdriver!

No two human beings are exactly alike in their abilities and preferences regarding improvisation and structure. And no two human beings are born the exact improvisers that they’ll be at death’s door. I’ve been practicing for decades. Let’s see what the Grim Reaper will make of my One-Man Show. To put it differently: find out who you are, then find out if you want to change a little or a lot or not at all. Health is a balance of improvisation and structure. Wanna feel good? Put the bullet list aside and accept uncertainty. Adapt, or the Reaper will push you to the front of the waiting line.

The cliché says that artists are improvisers, scientists are structurers. Nah. Science moves forward through intuitions, visions, unexplained insights, useful errors, happenstance, serendipity, and Τι στο διάολο (as Plato famously said). Art is perspective, geometry, chemistry, the skillful use of materials, the ability to understand Italian: chiaroscuro, sprezzatura, la terribilità. Paul Klee probably knew more mathematics than Albert Einstein.

Some of the time, your work is either-or. The depths of improvisation have less structural backbone than the skeleton of a worm. And certain structures are written in stone, including several numbered lists that haven’t changed in three thousand years. You want to start a new poem? Worm is better than stone. Wiggle and wriggle is the name of the game. You want to edit a poem? Put the worm aside (and give her a little thank-you kiss, see you later). Count the syllables, use a dictionary, delete a verse or ten, start over, la terribilità. One step forward, two steps backward.

Some of the time, your work is a bit of I. and a bit of S. (Don’t tell me that you don’t know what I’m talking about.) Make it up, revise it a minute later; make it up anew, revise it immediately. Me-and-you, give-and-take, bacon-and-eggs.

And you might one day, maybe, oh maybe, arrive at a state where there’s no distinction between your inner Paul Klee and your inner Albert Einstein. The improvised poem is structured by birth. The last-minute salad “makes sense.” The intuition is a FACT.

How to get there? Let’s quote Plato again: Μακάρι να ήξερα. Yep, macaque yak attack. Greek is the easiest language. If your structural engineer needs to understand what I mean, tell them not to worry—I don’t understand it either. But I think it’s called im-pro-vi-zay-shon.