Last week, I was in San Francisco and driving past the old SFUSD building. On its wall was a large portrait of the legendary Indian musician, Zakir Hussain.
He was my teacher and almost like my father figure. I spent three decades knowing him and learning from him. While he left us too soon, seeing his face brought back years of precious memories. I was quiet for a while, missing him.
Then I remembered something he used to tell me about playing tabla.
“Don’t be like a racehorse. Be like a tennis player. The horse has blinders on. It runs around the track. A tennis player has to respond to whatever comes across the net. He’s constantly improvising based on years of practice.”
That has stayed with me. Every tennis player has to accept that every shot will ask something slightly different of them. If you’re a world-class tennis player, you have to be present, constantly adjusting, sometimes attempting something you haven’t done before.
In improvisational music, you have to learn how to listen as much as how to play.
You can practice a composition until your hands know every stroke. But improvisation asks you to use what you’ve learned to play something you haven’t rehearsed.
You have to surprise yourself.
Standing beneath his portrait, I thought about how much of that lesson applies to the work we all do.
ONE INSIGHT
There’s one more deeper benefit of staying present and improvising. Researchers at UCSF studied Zakir himself improvising inside an fMRI scanner. They found reduced activity in a brain region associated with conscious self-monitoring.
The reverse feels true to me as well. When you’re busy monitoring every mistake and when those missteps become a judgment of who you are, you become reluctant to try anything you haven't already seen or done before.
Trying an unfamiliar approach means you take a risk of looking less capable than what everyone thinks.
Your career becomes a comfort chair. You don’t want to get up.
But a tennis player doesn’t have that luxury to stay embarrassed. After a bad shot, he has only seconds to get ready again and hope he can hit a good one. There’s no time to blame yourself for the last one or remind yourself that “you’re terrible at this.”
That’s the difference between self-awareness and self-criticism. One helps you see what needs changing. The other can keep you occupied with what the mistake says about you.
The former helps you focus on the future. The latter keeps your focus on the past.
We need to think differently about mastery. All that preparation is great only when it can give you the freedom to respond in a new way.
ONE TOOL
The most useful thing you can do with self-criticism is make it specific enough to act on.
“I’m bad at this” feels like a conclusion. But what exactly are you supposed to do with it?