If you've ever learned an instrument, or know someone who has, there is a common desire to play FAST.
It looks impressive.
It sounds cool. (when done right)
And playing fast for some weird reason is a stand-in for how good we perceive a musician. Youtube is full of people trying to show off their speed skills. I'm sure we've all heard "Flight of the Bumblebee" or "Through the Fire and Flames" at some point in our youtube life.
So every wannabe virtuoso musician that wants to be like their idols and play at insane musical speed does the same mistake that almost every musician has done:
They learn a song and immediately start trying to play it really fast.
And no matter how fast they get, something about the song will never seem right.
It just doesn't feel as good as the original. It always sounds off. Have you ever heard an amateur trying to play fast?
It's painful.
Notes are missed, out of tune, and it sounds like 100 cats having their tails stepped on all at once.
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And if the musician lacks self-awareness, in his head he is just loving playing "Sounds of Silence" at 5 times the original tempo... but everyone else around him is looking up how to safely burn a guitar.
But if the musician realizes that his finger sprinting licks are coming up short, he might go to someone who knows a little more and ask what's going wrong.
"HOW CAN I PLAY FASTER?"
Any musician who knows what he's talking about will impart the same advice:
"If you want to go fast, you gotta start slow"When you are playing at your fastest, all of your efforts are being put into going fast. Notes are flying by, and there is no real way to notice exactly what's wrong with your playing.
If your technique is inefficient, there is a point where you just can't physically play any faster, because at slow speeds that strain in your finger is manageable, but as you try to go faster with that same strain in your fingers, you hit a wall.
Any weaknesses in your technique are doubled (if not more) as you are playing twice as many notes per second. But your ability to actually do anything about fixing those weaknesses is hamstrung.
So trying to force yourself to play faster, counterintuitively makes it harder to play faster.
When you play a song at HALF the speed that you are comfortable, you are no longer putting energy into SPEED. You have all the time in the world to notice little tiny imperfections in your playing. You have time to think about what you are doing, to find better or more efficient ways of playing. Where you might be straining your fingers, you can work on playing WITHOUT those pains, and once you learn how to do that PERFECTLY...Then you can speed it up.... but only a little at a time!
With each increase of speed, comes new challenges, but you take the time to fix them before moving onto a new speed, and before you know it, you're able to handle playing both slow and fast.
Applying music theory to business
I realize now that this skill applies to anything in your life. And that includes business.
If you are a wedding photographer, if you don't take the time to learn how to set up a perfect photo slowly, you will never be able to take the perfect photo quickly when under pressure during a wedding.
If you're an accountant, if you are inefficient with how you file tax returns, rushing through the giant workload in tax season means you're going to make a lot of mistakes.
If your job includes public speaking, you don't get better by just talking more. You get better by breaking down what you are going to say and think about how you can say things more clearly and concisely. The same applies to how you run the finances of your business, your employee training, your marketing strategy.... everything.
There are times where you need to just produce. I understand that. It's probably not a great idea for an accountant in tax season to try to learn new software or process.
But once you are out of a stressful busy season, if you never slow down your process and pay attention to how you can make things better, you might THINK your business is running at its full potential. But it's probably not.
The problem every business owner faces is the same as the amateur musician:
We all put a lot of pressure on ourselves to do things quicker, cheaper, or to skip out on the "not important stuff" We want to be in a better place to provide for our family, employees and community NOW.
But if we are serious about our motivations and goals, we need to slow things down.
You will be tested
If you want to do better work and attract higher ticket clients, you will be tested.
The test comes when you are asked to change how you do things. "You're too expensive, can you lower your price?". Or "I need to start this week" or "Do we have to do everything in the package? What if I only want to do part of it?"
If you give in to pressure to accept these conditions for a short term gain, you will get the job.
But once you fill all your time with these sorts of jobs, you will eventually hit a wall where you can't grow your business anymore. There are no more margins to play with. People are doing what you do at a higher level then you can achieve.
Pricing yourself out of the market.
So by perfecting things, you extend the upper limit on big you can grow.
But there is another limit: How small of a client can you serve? As you perfect things, and get better at your job, you obviously should raise your prices.
This means there will be fewer clients that can afford to buy from you and more people you have to say no to.
That's okay!
In my marketing company, I ran into this problem. Even to do a small campaign cost a lot from me, because I was not very efficient, and the only clients who could afford me, were big ones.
But to a large client, I was the amateur guitarist trying to be fast.
Type caption (optional)And this is probably how your brain feels trying to keep up at the top of your ability!
So I was stuck in the middle, being both too expensive, and not quite good enough.
I spent the year looking for ways to get more efficient. Not only to increase the amount of value I could give to bigger clients but to allow me to serve smaller clients, without ending up working for less than minimum wage.
I started slowly by going through every service, project and system we did as a company and finding ways to improve, and then "went fast" by getting more clients now that we were able to service more clients with the same amount of work.
So if you are finding that your business is hitting a wall, or you want to prevent yourself from hitting one in the future, add into your regular schedule a system for breaking down your processes, and find out how you can make things faster, more efficient, or more valuable to your clients.
