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There is a myth amongst musicians, especially pianists: ‘Over-practice’. That widespread believe means that when you practice a piece of music then there is a point from which onwards your performance is actually getting worse. According to this, one must then stop practicing this piece for a couple of weeks because the performance degradation is believed to be inevitable.

Every professional performing artist knows that this myth is not true, but like with most myths, it is based on a nucleus that indeed is true. The phenomenon of ‘over-practice’ is based on how our brain learns physical movement sequences, and I have touched on this very briefly in part 2 of this series.

When we learn complex activities, like riding a bicycle or playing an instrument, we begin with conscious and often very clumsy movements. We do much more than we actually need to do, we un-balance and over-compensate all the time. Our brain will then immediately start to combine and simplify these movements, eliminate anything that it deems unnecessary, and smooth things out. The majority of those movements becomes subconscious – we no longer even think about what we need to do, it just gets executed automatically. For riding a bicycle – unless we want to participate in the Tour de France – that works perfectly well.

The level of precision that is required to survive in the jungle is not very high, speed and reaction time are much more important. And that is what our brain is optimised for.

The level of precision required for performing artists, on the other hand, is extremely high. When we practice any new piece, we pay a lot of attention to every little detail, and the Relentless Pursuit of Perfection drives us to be as precise as we possibly can. We learn the piece, we get more and more familiar with it, our attention shifts away from the individual movements and towards the music, and this is where our brain steps in and starts optimising those movements – not for optimal performance and precision, of course, but for optimal efficiency. Which then starts degrading our performance, because efficiency and precision contradict each other!

So why is this relevant in a business context? It turns out that our brain does not only tend to optimise physical movements. This behaviour extends to anything we do, as an individual and in a business function. Our products, services and processes are optimised for efficiency. We do not aim at the best possible outcome but at the best balance between minimum effort and acceptable outcome.

The infamous 80% rule is a manifest of our love for efficiency. When I work with project or development teams, a common observation is that initial energy and commitment to achieve something truly outstanding, leading to ideation sessions that come up with great ideas that outline with a lot of attention to detail how and why a very specific (== precise) solution will lead to that awesome product and experience. This is then followed by a phase where prioritisation and cost/benefit analysis is performed, and the outcome usually is an 80% solution that is missing most or all of those truly differentiating functions – because it is so much more (cost) efficient.

There is one more important factor at play in this context: it feels good to be efficient. Efficiency is so important in the jungle that our brain makes sure our consciousness loves the feeling of being efficient. I am not a neuroscientist but I suspect it might be inevitable for any conscious being to develop a mechanism where the subconscious parts of our brain implant positive emotions into our consciousness for vitally important functions in order to ensure we do what our subconsciousness knows we must do. Thus, it feels good to have a good meal. It feels good to be with the person we love. It feels good to have a good nights sleep. And it feels good to be efficient.

One thing you learn very quickly as a performing artist is that you will not survive on stage if you aim for efficiency. 80% is simply not good enough. You need to aim for precision in order to achieve excellence and make a lasting impression.

The same is true in a business context. However, technology provides us with options that we do not have as an artist: we can now use automation, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence to achieve those 80%. Generative AI even makes this possible for software develpment teams.

The true differentiator for a great service or solution then is this: do we stop at 80% (and be as efficient as possible), or do we dedicate the resources we saved through intelligent automation to those remaining 20% that truly make a difference? Do we save headcount in our service desk, or do we free up human capacity to deal with the most complex issues and truly make a difference?

That is the fundamental lesson: Precision and Efficiency contradict each other! As a performing artist, that is a reality that we simply have to live with. In a business context, technology has now evolved to a state where we can make a choice to leave this restriction behind, to let efficiency and precision complement each other, and transform our products and services to truly make a difference.

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Before I go any further, let me clarify: I am not talking about Prioritisation! Setting priorities is about doing the right things, or at least the most important or most impactful things. Focus is about how we do what we do, not what we do.

My lightbulb moment with regards to focus came when I studied the Prelude op. 32 no. 13 by Rachmaninov. This is essentially a piano concerto without an orchestra, quite long, very complex. And I found I was unable to play through the last two pages of it. Although I thought I had the piece perfectly memorized and very well rehearsed, every time I tried to perform it, I would make mistakes and forget my lines during these final two pages. And no amout of practice would improve the situation.

My teacher smiled and asked me to play these two pages really slowly. Well, that should be easy, right? Slower means more time and reduced stress, right? I tried with half the original tempo – and made the same mistakes. I tried even slower, and the slower I got, the more mistakes I made. My teacher smiled again and asked me to find a tempo that was slow enough so I could play without making any mistakes. More importantly, the task was to be able to do everything, every little detail, with full conciousness, without the slightest hesitation, without any moment of unawareness of what needs to happen next.

This task of achieving full conciousness turned out to be the key factor, and it is applicable to anything we do – although, of course, the technique of slow motion does not work physically e.g. for dancers or many instruments other than the piano (in which case we need to resort to practicing in our mind, which works equally well).

One thing that happens when we slow down is that automations break down. Our brain is wired to package and automate things we do repeatedly, so e.g. when we learn to drive, the many things we need to do at the same time that overwhelm us in the beginning happen more and more subconciously, freeing up mental capacity for other things. But in slow motion, our brain stops executing automated routines.

And that leads to the next thing that happens: we start to realize just how many things we are actually doing. Every little detail becomes a concious task. This will at first be too much to process, but if we slow down even more, we are capable of reaching a state where we are conciously performing every single detail flawlessly and without the slightest insecurity or hesitation.

At that point, a third and most important thing happens: our mind becomes fully and exclusively focused on performing the task at hand. The intensity of our focus increases to a level where no other thoughts and no outside influences are able to invade our conciousness.

But the real magic happens when we find this level of focus and practice just a few times without ever loosing it: we realize that our mind is capable of maintaining this level of focus and conciousness at any speed. Practicing in slow motion is just a method to learn how to reach this state.

With my Prelude, I eventually arrived at a tempo that was no more than 2% of the original. That tempo allowed me to focus 100% of my attention on playing the piece. I was able to play the two pages perfectly, three times in a row. By the forth time, I found that I was able to maintain that same level of focus while playing almost at the original tempo. And very soon I was able to play the two pages perfectly, at performance tempo, with full focus.

There are a two lessons here that I since try to apply in my business life as well. The first would be to remain concious of every detail of what I am doing. Whether I am in an internal meeting, with a customer, or on stage at a public event: everything we do has an impact on the people we interact with. Being concious of everything we actually do greatly increases our ability to influence the outcome of any interaction. How we sit or stand, our body language, all these small movements we make, where we look, how we modulate our voice, the exact language we are using, all of this can make a difference, and if we do all of this conciously we have a much greater and more positive impact.

The second lesson is: focus on what you do in any given moment, and on nothing else. There is no benefit to worrying about the next thing you need to do, or be distracted by anything that happens simultaneously. Of course that does not mean to ignore the people you interact with: these people are a core part of what you are doing. But the smell of coffee in the room, the doorbell in your home office, the smartphone displaying a notification, are all not part of that task. If any of this invades our conciousness then we are not truly focused. And if we aren’t, there is no way we can be at our absolute best!

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Every company I am talking to is aiming for excellence. We want to be special, we want to WOW our customers, partners, and employees. But how do we get there? There are many aspects to achieving excellence. In this series of articles I would like to focus on the most important ones for me as a pianist, aspects that I also find relevant in a business context. The first one: Always aim for Perfection!

As a professional performing artist, one of the most important lessons for me to that regard came from an Irish Dancing teacher. We were practicing a particular tricky sequence of steps, and he asked me to show them to him, so I stepped up to my starting position. Before I could even start, he interrupted me, saying “Stop! You are not performing!” My reply was “Yes of course, I am just focusing on my feet for now.” His reply: “What’s the point of practicing if you do not aim for perfection? You can practice what you need to do with your feet, but as soon as you add the rest of your body this will become worthless. Always practice what you want to perform, as a whole, with every little detail!”

This lesson has fundamentally transformed my dancing as well as many other aspects in my life. It is also quite true when practicing the piano. I have spent more hours in my childhood than I care to remember practicing difficult pieces playing slowly, or playing just one hand, or just a certain excerpt of the score. That was what my teachers drilled into me from the beginning: do little steps, never try for the end result because that is not achievable. Aim for ‘good enough’, not for ‘exceptionally good’.

The reality is: this is a recipe for failure.

When playing slowly, we use different movements of our fingers and our arms. We have a tendency to put together enormously complex movement sequences for our fingers that work perfectly well in slow tempos but then keep us from ever reaching the tempo we want for a performance.

When playing just a part of the score, e.g. one hand only, we do things that will no longer work once we add the rest of the score. We miss out on details and problems that only come to light when practicing the complete piece.

When playing just the notes, without trying to perform the music, we may practice our memorization techniques, but this will fail as soon as our mind gets focused on the music during a performance.

All of this is true for any performing art, and it is equally true for our performance in a business role, or as a company.

When preparing for a session on the big stage for an event, I might sit at my desk, look at my slides and go through my content silently in my head. As soon as I step on stage, there is the audience, the room, the light, the microphone, the slide controller in my hand, the confidence monitor down on the floor in front of the stage. And as I get distracted by all this, my performance falls apart. So again, what I need to practice is the entire performance. Hence, I set up a stage at home, I plan every aspect of my performance, my movements, my voice, my gestures, my timing, and by practicing all of this together it will feel natural once I actually do step on stage.

As a company, when we implement a new tool or a new process, the phrase I am hearing most often is ‘this first version will not cover all the use cases, we are focusing just on the most important ones for now’. The resulting implementation will most likely cover those most important use cases, but it might very well fail as soon as you try to extend it to cover the rest. The data structure you set up might no longer work. The performance might suffer once you add more users to the system. The interfaces might work for one department but not for another. The reporting requirements of another department might require breakdown data that does not exist in your first version. Some of this could potentially be added or corrected in our next version of the tool or process, but it will come at a much higher effort, and there will always be these roadblocks that cannot be removed and that will ultimately prevent us from implementing our initial vision.

One common objection against aiming for perfection in this scenario is complexity and timing: “If we try to implement the tool for every use case then we will never finish.” Again, the opposite is true: if we implement a tool just for our core use cases and then try to extend it, we will never finish.

One secret in practicing the piano is making decisions and trying if they work in the context of a performance, aiming for perfection. We will fail massively in our first few attempts, but we will quickly learn if our approach has the potential to succeed in a performance, and if it doesn’t, we’ll go with a different approach. This includes another important lesson: we need to love our failures. We love them because we can learn from them. The only way to avoid a mistake during performance is to make if often enough during practice.

In a business context, this is called Agile Development. Aim for the end result, fail fast, learn from it and start over. It is a proven method for development, but it only works if we truly aim for the end result, not for an initial ‘phase one’ core little part of it.

Now, you might wonder: what if something unexpected happens during the performance, if something is different on stage? Won’t this break your performance? It might, but practicing for perfection will also prepare us to be able to react to disturbances. It will free our mind and give us the mental capacity to deal with the unexpected. And here is another secret to perfection: we never practice just one version of our performance. There will always be multiple options that we can choose from.

The bottom line is: the maximum we can expect to achieve is what we aim for. If we aim for ‘good enough’, that is what we get. If we aim for a tool, or process, or report that works for just these core use cases, that is what the result will be. A path built on ‘good enough’ steps will never lead us to perfection.

Dream big. Fail fast. Aim for perfection. You will be surprised what you can achieve!