Build on ease
If we want to avoid misery and burnout in our work, we can learn from accomplished artists.
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Some stars, I only knew about as a child because they appeared on Sesame Street or The Muppet Show.
Among the many things James Taylor can brag about is his 1980 performance of “Jellyman Kelly” with a gaggle of Sesame Street kids, plus Howard Johnson holding down the low end on tuba. Seems like the pinnacle of achievement to me (or at least, it did to three-year-old me).
What I want you to notice is the absolute effortlessness of Taylor’s performance:
The guitar playing is effortless. The singing is effortless. The interaction with the children is effortless. And doing the whole thing in one take for the camera comes off effortless.
Of course there was effort, somewhere along the way. But the effort doesn’t show. The effort was invested early on, and the result is a relaxed virtuosity, like the carefree mien of an heiress whose interest income is more than enough to let her have a comfortable lifestyle without dipping into the principal.
The lesson here isn’t just about music. We can learn from James Taylor and other accomplished artists whenever we hope to create something smooth and beautiful — or if we seek to perform any work without making it a slog of misery and eventual burnout.
Here’s another gem of JT’s to illustrate the point:
Ah, the seventies. See, they didn’t call it “easy listening” for nothing. Hearing James and Carly sing together feels just like hearing my mom and dad sing together. Although my parents are a lot less famous, and they’re still married to each other.
That guitar part is instantly identifiable as James Taylor, capoed and bright, complex and yet never overwrought. Well, maybe a little overwrought — he messes up a couple of times in this recording — but that sense of effortlessness abides even then.
For me, the sense that a musician is working hard comes close to ruining the music. (There is at least one notable exception.) I don’t want to feel you trying. I don’t want to see the seams. I don’t want to think about how tricky your part is.
I don’t want to be impressed. I want transcendence.
How does a musician do that? Well, since I spent many years teaching music, I can tell you. It doesn’t actually require being a virtuoso. It doesn’t even require years of experience.
To play effortlessly, you just have to play stuff that’s easy for you so that you can stay confident and physically relaxed as you play.
In this way, even a four-year-old beginner can sound effortless, as long as they’re playing something they can play effortlessly.
To play more complex things, you gradually build from there, staying free of tension all the while.
The problem is that people don’t want to do that. They don’t want to play stuff that’s within their reach. They want to be dazzling and impressive, and they will grit their teeth and grind relentlessly to try to do it. The result is like the evil stepsisters trying to squeeze their feet into Cinderella’s glass slipper. It’s labored. It’s forced. The magic doesn’t happen.
Oh, am I making it sound like I never did that myself? Of course I did. In my twenties, I tried to take up jazz piano. I didn’t listen to nearly enough jazz piano for this to be successful — my strength was as a pop singer/songwriter. Nevertheless, I spent money and time pushing grimly toward an unlikely outcome.
Meanwhile, in a twist worthy of an O. Henry story, my jazz piano teacher suddenly decided to try to make a name for herself as a pop singer/songwriter. I saw her perform at a festival once, playing acoustic guitar and singing earnest, mediocre original songs. I couldn’t understand why she was doing it. She wasn’t good at it, yet she had this other thing she was really good at. What was she trying to prove? Of course, she could have asked the same about me and my jazz piano.
I’ve spent a lot of my life pushing hard not just in music, but in other areas of life, too. I’m certainly willing to do the work, and it’s not always smooth. I’ve been huffing and puffing on this essay for over an hour already.
But I have given up the belief that the evidence of effort makes the thing better. I’ve let go of the idea that I will earn extra points by being the one who tries the hardest and cares the most. No, at least I’ve learned that I ought to put in enough effort for the effort to become invisible. That’s what’s truly impressive.
Going further, a more sustainable approach is to dial back the effort in the first place. Not to leave the work undone or sloppy, but to calibrate the effort to just what is needed and build in that sense of ease from the beginning, just like the young musicians I used to teach.
As I see it, you’ve got to pace yourself. You’ve got to pay attention to what will actually be valued, not just what feels noble or virtuous.
To do otherwise is a double whammy: You wear yourself out doing so much extra labor, and then the end result suffers from the weight of it. Ironically, you might end up worse off for all of your diligent striving, like an obsequious server who annoys a dining couple by constantly interrupting their conversation to ask if they need anything.
That’s why I care so much about helping people avoid putting in more effort than the work is worth to them. They don’t realize that they are not only acting against their own interests, but also those of the person they are hoping to serve well. By lightening things up, they not only make things more humane for themselves, they can also improve their results.
It’s not that we should avoid hard things. But we should be aware of when we’re doing hard things for the sake of it and understand when that pays off and when it doesn’t. Just because something is hard for you to do doesn’t make it intrinsically valuable to someone else. In fact, your extra effort might diminish the value of what you give (and your perceived value, too).
The real hard part is to figure out what is valuable about the work we do. And often, our greatest contributions are based on the things that come most easily to us — even the things we take for granted.
It feels like the easy way out simply to take what is already working and develop that. That’s the point. We should take the easy path, if we can find one that goes where we want to go.
We don’t need to layer things on top to increase the perceived difficulty of what we’re doing; we don’t need to find a different thing to do that challenges us more. That path is not necessarily the more worthy one. We can trust that sense of ease. If we do build layers upon that ease, let’s make them light, warm, and just as effortless.
Yup. Don’t push the river. It’s exhausting and it does not improve the flowing water’s song.
Like you once said to me, “what is the assignment?” No more, no less. I think of that often when I feel myself avoiding something because it feels too big.