There is a wonderful old story about Michelangelo being asked how he carved his “David.” Michelangelo’s response was, “all I did was get rid of everything that wasn’t David.”
I utilized a somewhat similar approach in my technique is a bass player. It’s really not all that hard to push your finger down on a string at a given location. The problem is, your fingers are already filled with skills for zipping up zippers, opening doors, and throwing baseballs. I discovered that it was a whole lot easier to just get rid of that prelearned excess motion than was to overcome it with heightened force.
If you’ll pardon a little bit of smugness, I was famous within the local musician culture for having astonishingly “fast fingers.” Most people try to overwhelm and overcome pre-existing muscle memory instead of just getting rid of it. It’s easy to assume that my ease of playing was talent, but in reality, what I had done was eliminate all excess motion. In the spirit of Michelangelo, I had just gotten rid of “everything that wasn’t B-flat.”
One of my favorite dance teachers likes to talk about “the essence of effortlessness.” While the majority of dance instructors offer workshops in various kinds of “content,” I consistently find that the best teachers always balance their “to do list” with a “to don’t list.” They understand the power of efficiency and “lessness.” They believe that if you pull all the added crud and soot off of a renaissance painting, the underlying genius will appear.
Unfortunately, all too often, people in the education / training business believe in the blank slate approach. They fail to see what students already have. The result is, stuff is piled onto the kid. They put in without pulling out. They add, but they do not subtract. This is inherently imbalanced. It’s like inhaling without exhaling.
Most educational programs are based on the idea that we are going to relentlessly place knowledge into the minds of students. There is very little effort devoted to removing excess knowledge from the minds of students, thereby revealing the gorgeous statue within. The money makes us do this. You can’t test a kid for what useless stuff you removed, ergo you can’t charge for the service. So you don’t do it.
Managers often do the same thing. Instead of stepping back and letting people figure it out, they send out endless memos, doubling everyone’s workload. I’ll say this, all this added busywork tends to enhance job security . . . unless of course all the accumulated added complexity puts the whole company out of business.
I met someone at a party recently and they were talking about cultural complexity. She said the reason civilizations eventually fall apart is because they respond to problems by creating ever greater complexity of organization. Eventually things become so complex that the complexity itself is the problem. They can no longer adjust and adapt to new problems, and the whole thing falls over from its own frozen weight.
Efficiency experts are nothing new, and people who show hoarders how to de-clutter their house are nothing new, so I guess I am in slight variation of that kind of service. Thought is great, education is great, knowledge is great, wisdom is great, experience is great,… but there are times when you should just do things with as little thought or action as possible. With our cultural vocabulary it’s hard to monetize simplicity, but, like Michelangelo, very often the statue (or the inherent ability of individuals) is already there, you just need to get rid of the excess stuff . . . and you’re done.
© Justin Locke
