Escape From Excellence

I recently picked up a copy of This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin at the Harvard Bookstore. I was disappointed. Levitin points out that in study after study of musicians, athletes, and other peak performers, it takes 10,00 hours to reach virtuosity, what he also calls mastery. That’s three hours per day for a decade. Or eight hours per day for a shorter time. Apparently if you do that, you will develop virtuoso level skills, you will master your craft. So this means that everyone who has worked full time for four years is a master? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Sorry, this 10,00 hour investment is only good enough to achieve excellence. But excellence is not virtuosity. Mastery is virtuosity, and mastery is about a lot more than skill. Virtuosity without mastery is callow, adolescent, and ugly. It leads to tasteless, ghettoized excess. Just ask Yngwie Malmsteen.

I attended the New England Conservatory for a few years. The freshman class was made up of blindingly good kids who wowed everyone back home. The senior class was even better. The problem was that most of the young ones, including me, sounded like skilled typists or impersonators. Few became real artists, and those that did are really something. Don Byron was a classmate. John Medeski came a bit later. There were others. But most wallowed in focusing on skill development or in emulating masters. These young people were certainly excellent, and to be admired for their effort, commitment, etc. But mastery? Not usually. Mastery is qualititatively different than excellence. It is different in kind, not in degree. Excellence takes 10,000 hours (at least), but mastery can occur in a moment. Any time spent chasing excellence after the Falling Point keeps us away from reaching mastery. It only increases costs and undermines performance. Mastery requires outting al that skill in the service of your Dynamic Essence.

Don’t confuse excellence with virtuosity. Virtuosity takes mastery, and that’s a whole ‘nother world.

When you are nothing like the master, he or she will welcome you as their equal.

I recently read in a letter to the editor in the 6/08 issue of Guitar Player Magazine where someone said that listening to guitarist Allan Holdsworth, failed to inspire him to go home and play like hearing other great players, but instead made him want to quit playing altogether. Holdworth is considered by many to be the greatest living guitarist. He’s sort of from another planet, and acknowkedged masters confess the greatest admiration for him. He is so far beyond the rest of us that, if someone is wrestling with the excellence trap, hearing him can be the last straw.

The proper response to an exposure to true mastery is not to give up and accept mediocrity. But nor is it to emulate the  the master. This will only make you an imitator, a novelty who is merely fun at parties, no matter how impressive your skills nor how powerful your commitment. It will also amuse or sadden the master if they hear or see you in action. There’s a time to put emulation aside. Rather, the best response is to step back and ask yourself, what will my own mastery look like? What is my Dynamic Essence? And then let it take you wherever it may. A personal anecdote: I heard Holdsworth in ‘81. At first, I gave up. But then I said, “No more 12 hour days practicing. I’m going to find my voice. I won’t play another note unless it really comes from me. No fear, no ego, come what may.” I remember it vividly. I became a composer, songwriter and producer. It’s what I do best, musically. I also focused on acoustic guitar for the next 20 years. I’m back to electric now, with a vengeance! I still practice, for the sheer discipline and workout it provides.  And I still improvise because I enjoy it. It’s like playing chess. I’m fairly excellent actually. But I’m not a master at it. I found my voice in songwriting and producing. I’ve never been happier. And I’m better at it than anything else I do in music. This taught me a lesson greater than all the lformal essons I ever took.

If you experience a full on exposure to mastery, don’t give up, and don’t lose yourself. First work to become excellent, and then leave excellence behind. When you are nothing like the master, he or she will welcome you as their equal.

OK, we all know by now that the US economy has evolved over the past few hundred years from agriculture, to manufacturing, to technology, and now to creativity. Apparently, even in this tech-driven era, so much technology work and innovation can be outsourced or replicated globally, that our sustainable core competitive advantage, our national Dynamic Essence, is being labeled “creativity.”

Creativity is challenging because, like math, many people think it’s a specialized skill or, worse, a talent we’re either born with or we’re not. Many people hear, “Creativity Economy,” and think, “Uh-oh, I’m in trouble. That’s not me.” Often their bosses don’t help much, simply saying, “OK people, get creative! Let’s see those ideas!” But while some people are born with an extraordinary capacity for non-linear thinking, most people can learn to be creative. And jazz masters, those masters of our own national home-grown music, can teach us a lot. In fact, if sustainable U.S. prosperity requires us to be creative, then our own jazz musicians are the first place we should look for guidance. Here’s why:

Jazz musicians improvise. They compose on the spot (innovation), play what they hear as soon as they hear it (agility), respond to thier immediate situation (market conditions), listen to what it going on around them (culture and competition), find and express thier own unique voice (branding), do it in a team setting, i.e. a band (organization), and must reach and move a listener (customer). They are walking creativity, always channeling what’s inside into something new. What they do is both extremely creative, and also not unlike what people working to succeed in a creativity economy must do. (By the way, blues, country and rock musician’s also often improvise, but they are less defined by it, and they do it in a less complex context. So let’s stick with the jazz example.).

Here’s how: The best jazz musicians, the real masters, first achieve excellence. Then they escape from excellence. (more…)

Here’s a simple fact: Most people don’t have a clue about what their Dynamic Essence is. For all the development programs, competency modeling, 360 feedback, action planning, performance reviews, and more, they remain in the dark about the real deal, their real core, their best asset. This is because, as we have said elsewhere, business leaders have not known about the difference between excellence and mastery, and have never had a path made just for them to escape excellence and reach mastery. The tools they have had only create and measure excellence, and so ultimately serve the Excellence Trap.

To escape from excellence, it is crucial to discover, release, express, and sustain your Dynamic Essence. Consider:

Dynamic essence is the ultimate driver of performance. It is the ultimate driver of innovation, of alignment, of productivity. And to not leverage and apply it is exactly what makes sustainable peak performance, innovation, alignment, and productivity so difficult.

Dynamic Essence is the ultimate source of competitive advantage. It is the ultimate differentiator. Experience, skills, benefits, etc. are old news. Instead, the masterful application of Dynamic Essence is where it’s at.

Dynamic Essence is the ultimate test of strategy. Any decision or action that goes against or fails to leverage the dynamic essence of a leader (or team, business, or brand) is a lost opportunity. It perpetuates the excellence trap and reduces results to an increment, not an explosion.

 Leaders who leverage Dynamic Essence at all times are in Mastery. They define peak performance for the rest of us.

We’ve heard many definitions of the role of a leader, from maximize shareholder value to groom a successor. We have a definition of Leadership Mastery that we believe will prove revolutionary…

The single most important job of a leader is this: “Discover, release, express, and sustain the Dynamic Essence of your business. This includes yourself, your teams, associates, partners, brands, and markets.” This is the role of the CEO. This is leadership defined, at every level. And you read it first right here.

I could tell countless stories about successful, capable, excellent business leaders who go through their day subtly, quietly, and subconsciously driven by these popular killers of Dynamic Essence:

- Fear: what if things turn out badly?

- Ego: how can I look good?

- The Five Failed Strategies of Excellence: Denial, Toughness, Resignation, Escapism and Balance

- Reliance upon the Virtues of Excellence after having crossed the Falling Point

No successful person wants to admit that fear, ego, etc. play a role in their lives. Isn’t that only for jerks? NO! Fear, ego, the five failed strategies, and over-reliance upon what made us excellent in the first place define the human condition for everybody who has not shifted from excellence to mastery. It is all of us.

The only escape is to discover, release, express, and sustain your Dynamic Essence, and that of your teams, business, partners, brands, and markets. Period.

I’ll say it again. The single most important job of a leader is this: ”Discover, release, express, and sustain the Dynamic Essence of your business. This includes you, your teams, associates, partners, brands, and markets.”

Dynamic Essence is a core concept here at the Escape from Excellence blog. It holds the key to getting past Excellence and reaching Leadership Mastery.

Brands have an essence. Plants have an essence. Aristotle taught us that everything has an essence. Essence is like your DNA, it is uniquely yours. It is the core of you. But we talk about essence as dynamic because, whatever lies at the core of you, your team, your business, your brands, and your markets, it is all about energy and action. It can’t sit still. It must do what it does. It’s nature is to act, do, create. Every major wisdom tradition (spirituality, psychology, science), all over the world and throughout history, has spoken about the creative-action-energy aspect of your essence, each in their own way. Bank on it, they are onto something you need to know about!

Dynamic Essence is the core, identifying, most basic, truth about you.  It is what you bring to everything. So anything that works to undermine it also undermines you, and this can be almost anything. Masters know this. So they devote their entire life, in every moment, to discovering, releasing, expressing, and sustaining this core . Everything else is secondary, because everything necessary to be masterful comes from this. The alternatives are failure, mediocrity, and a life inside the Excellence Trap. So masterful leaders don’t focus on this only while on vacation, or during quiet times, or on alternate Thursdays between six and eight. They do it always. Always. In good times and bad, in simple moments and in times of deep crisis and decision. And they do it no matter what else is going on, or who else is in the room.