A little more than a year ago, I was convinced the F major chord on the guitar was impossible. It involves:
- ‘Barring’ across all the strings, while…
- pressing on the third fret of the A and D strings with your last two fingers
- Pressing on the second fret of the G string with your middle finger
If you want to expose exactly what is hard about getting the right amount of pressure on the guitar strings, the F chord is the way to do it.
I could barely play the chord after 10 seconds of setup. The idea that I would ever play it in rhythm as part of a song was simply ludicrous.
A year later, I can play the F chord reasonably well, but I haven’t gotten there by practicing the F chord. It’s happened through lots of other approaches, insight, and repetition, through which I’ve learned:
- Where on the fret to place the ‘barred’ finger (close to or on top of the fret itself)
- The position of my thumb (where it has to press the back of the guitar neck)
- The position of my arm, elbow and wrist
- The angle of that barred index finger (almost at 45 degrees, so that the bone is pressing, not the soft fleshy part)
- The positioning of that finger (high up enough so that the tip of the finger is off of the neck, so the thicker part of the finger is on the strings)
To play the F chord, I’ve needed to understand (at least) these five specific things, internalize them both conceptually and physically, and practice them, at speed, hundreds of times before making any real improvement. Without these insights, I would never have progressed.
But here’s the fun part: when I get all of that right, I expend radically LESS effort than I did at the outset, for much more result.
I see this pattern every time I learn something new: the thing that’s impossible at the outset isn’t hard just because I don’t have the muscles (strength in my left hand), it’s impossible because most of the effort I’m expending is not in service of the result I’m trying to achieve.
We see this in an extreme form in swimming: according to DARPA research, 97% of the effort of a beginner swimmer is not moving that person forward (3% is). For Olympic swimmers, the corresponding number is 10% — so, in addition to Michael Phelps being radically more fit than I will ever be, his starting point is that he is at least 333% more able to turn the effort he expends into forward motion.
The same pattern presents across all endeavors. Think of the skilled artist who draws one line, two, then three, and, somehow, on the fourth line, she’s captured an image, a feeling, or a sense of motion.
These insights feel familiar in some domains, less so in others.
We understand that a runner, a sprinter, a guitar player, a painter have distilled their craft down to its hyper-efficient essence. But do we apply that to ourselves when we think about the new task we’re taking on, however big or small?
I find that we spend much more time focused on what we need to DO, much less on the things that need to fall away. This translates to an unspoken notion that the way we’ll feel when we’re “crushing it” is that we’ll be splayed out at the end of the day, spent…when, really, we’ll have reached a point where we only expend effort on the things that move the needle, and we’ll have let go of all the rest.
Sure, AI is now part of this equation in the way it wasn’t before. But that’s not because it will do a bunch of tasks that we had to do manually.
It’s because the person who knows how to deploy AI will have even more leverage. She knows the essential tasks to be done, can drop all the rest, and she herself will take on the distilled essence that makes something great—those four lines that she and only she can draw.
