Achieving More By Doing Less

It takes less effort to do things well and more effort to do them poorly...I haven't yet mastered this principle in life yet, but I subscribe to it whole-heartedly because of what I have discovered in music.

When I started out playing the piano, I would gasp when watching the speed and fluidity with which great pianists played. "If only I could do that," I thought.

I eagerly took the scales and arpeggios that were given to me by my piano teacher, turned on the metronome, and began to build the velocity that was implicitly promised by the Hannon and Czerny exercises I was assigned.

After a few months I noticed that, even with the correct fingering, after a certain tempo I could not go any faster without building up an increasing amount of tension in my hands--specifically my knuckles and wrists.

It wasn't until years later, after I was shown the structure of the tendons in the hand, that I learned that speed was not so much the result of effort, but a natural result of alignment between fingers, wrists, elbows, shoulders, and torso--all of the areas of physical rotation.

I learned that, as these components of my body moved in harmonious relationship together, there emerged a natural flow to my playing and that a lot less effort was required to produce exponential musical results.

Adding to this realization the principle of recovery, which states that for every action there must be an equal counter-action, such as a reverse rotation of the wrist to the left after an initial rotation to the right, and I began to uncover a great musical secret: it is easier to play correctly than it is to play incorrectly.

Over the past twenty years, I have tested out this concept in as many arenas as I could--cooking, walking, communication...it seems as though I have found a touchstone of any skill, known in some Zen traditions as "effortless effort."

Almost every day I find myself challenged to apply it to a new circumstance where effortless effort is called for: expressing more meaning with fewer words, re-engineering a mundane task from three steps down to two steps, or carefully reading the instructions and assembling the tools before assembling a piece of IKEA furniture.

Another potent musical example is finding the "sweet spot" in the recording studio--where the instrument, the acoustic sound environment, the microphone, the preamp, and the console settings are all working harmoniously together, allowing for the maximum musical punch with the least effort put on the performer and engineer.

Examples of effortless effort are endless.

I will end this post with the koan presented to me by a business mentor, John Eggan, who received it from one of his teachers:

"A student achieves less and less by doing more and more, while a master achieves more and more by doing less and less."