Mechanics First, then Mastery

Martin, me and Wim: Talkin' bout systems. London 1/15/2011

It’s Sunday morning and Linda and I are in an Airbus, 38,000 feet above Greenland, headed west at 600mph. Early this morning we hopped from London over to Paris and now are settled in for this 10+ hour flight from Paris back to Seattle. Nine time zones total. Linda sits sleeping next to me cocooned in a blanket and every window shade in our compartment is down in order to shut out the brilliant mid-morning light that will stay on our tail all the way across this long stretch of the northern hemisphere. We left Paris at 10am and will arrive in Seattle at noon.

The last writing that I dedicated to anyone was to Linda. It was Work the System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less when it was first published in the spring of 2008. But I feel inspired today and so dedicate this systems mindset post to my new friends, Wim den Herder and Martin Wachters who, Friday, on the spur of the moment, contacted me from  their hometown of Amsterdam,  flew into London on Saturday and then rode a bus for an hour and a half in order to have lunch.

Good guys, Wim and Martin:  They’re best friends, each unmarried, 27 and 38 years old. They’re accomplished musicians and sort-of-competitors in their business of operating separate music schools (Wim’s school focuses on guitar; Martin’s teaches guitar, piano and other instruments).

A while back Martin downloaded the PDF of Work, read it and then convinced Wim to download it too. Using it as a guide, they both made changes in their businesses.

In the Marylebone district of London, the three of us chatted in a pub over burgers and beer. Wim told me that when he was 15 years old,  he studied the tiniest minutia of a particularly complex guitar solo by British heavy metal band Judas Priest lead guitarist K.K.Downing. (The song is Ram it Down, circa 1988. The segment is located between 2:47 and 2:49). Wim says the reason he isolated and studied this section of the solo was because it’s a masterpiece of guitar work and he knew that by perfecting this small system, his overall playing would improve.  (Downing’s original solo segment is just 2 seconds long and in that segment he plays 32 separate notes.) If you’ve read my book, you know what Wim was doing:  Separating, observing and then perfecting a sub-system. Wim’s passion in making a particular sub-system perfect was a result of his “getting it” regarding system mechanics (at such a tender age!)

Yes, he perfected a 2 second sub-system of a guitar solo, but by accomplishing this, more importantly he improved an important sub-system of his own music-playing expertise.

Here’s Wim, an incredible guitarist, explaining and demonstrating what he does with systems and subsystems. Seriously: Take the time to watch this.

And for all you heavy metal fans, here’s Judas Priest in a rare quiet mood, performing the Joan Baez song, Diamonds and Rust….

Wim describes learning the 2 second piece as a major challenge of his professional life. In analyzing, practicing and perfecting the segment, he worked on it no less than one hour every day for nine months. And in the end, he got it right. He says studying and perfecting this tiny segment has improved every single note he plays, whatever the song or gig. And with emphasis, he adds that the epic exercise  and the lessons learned from it now benefit the business aspect of his guitar academy.

We must study the mechanical minutia of our tasks if we are to excel. This means observing: looking down and analyzing the sub-systems of our lives…to see our selves as mechanical devices that can be made to be super-efficient. The next step is to spend the majority of our time perfecting each of our sub-systems, one by one.

Here’s a happy thought: Study and then perfect your systems as a main focus and you’ll find yourself in select company and therefore flying faster and higher than a huge percentage of the competition. Make More. Work Less.

Lots of people work hard to become expert at what they do, but what great heights will be achieved by becoming expert at a flawed process?

Wim says he applied the same observational intensity to the administrative aspects of his business,  Guitar Academy, reducing 20 hours a week of necessary but boring paperwork, to six hours. He made this improvement over a period of one month. So now, each week, Wim has an additional 14 hours available to himself that he can spend  getting better with his guitar,  teaching more hours or just hanging out. In his own words, here is how he describes the transformation:

“The scheduling always took me 20 hours a week. After I read Work the System, I started to break the scheduling down by writing down everything I did to accomplish it. It took me 40 hours over two weeks to do this. Then I wrote a 30 page guide  for scheduling (protocols with all the steps). The 3rd week I followed my own procedure and I was down to 12 hours. Then I asked somebody else to do the scheduling, and he reduced it further, to 6-8 hours a week. In money: 20 hours of my time is €700 per week (calculated by the hour gauge of €35 for my guitar lessons). Now it is 8 hours of a students’ time, which is €80 per week, and I don’t have to work on this at all anymore!”

And this, from Martin:
“It was total chaos at first. I hired a “planning guy” which gave me time to work more on system improvement. I gave him working procedures and guided him and then, with the time saved, developed a proper contract for students, arranged for students to pay by automatic bank transfer, created a lesson- database instead of just a schedule and am currently designing a new website which will automate a lot of the tasks for my planning guy. I estimate that using the systems approach has reduced the time and energy spent on administrative tasks by 50%” (Martin tells me he has also been inspired – and has the time – to create an English language version of his current Dutch language website. It will be up soon)

The three of us agreed that unadulterated, non-emotional mechanics come first, whether it’s in the immediate task of playing a guitar or the wider more nebulous task of making a business work. Inspired, soaring flights into new realms of creativity will occur only after careful observation and mechanical mastery have been accomplished. It’s the same for professional basketball players, best-selling authors, master machinists, super-efficient office managers,  world-class chefs, elite surfers and the band Judas Priest.  In any endeavor, the most accomplished individuals have worked hard to make their sub-systems perfect, one-by-one.

Postscript: Check out Wim on guitar, playing Oscar Peterson. (Regarding the piece, Wim says: “That solo took me only 3 days to transcribe and play and that is not because I’m a genius, but because I worked on guitar-playing sub-systems for many years. :-)”

Photo (and Photoshop!) by Linda Carpenter