The Rhythm of Life: Rhythmic sensitivity in music, life, and business.
When I was a student at Rutgers University in the early 2000’s, my drum instructor was the great Ralph Peterson Jr. And in one of our lessons he said to me that the art of playing perfectly in time had less to do with playing perfect quantized time, and more to do with being sensitive enough to catch when the tempo starts to slip and adjusting accordingly. And from that one simple statement, I was liberated from years of having felt handcuffed by the thought of what I’d have to do if and when I ever find myself in a situation where I suddenly couldn’t trust my internal alert system to keep me on the straight and narrow. So allow me to explain how I not only solved this problem for myself, but what the larger implications can be when we extrapolate this idea into the realm of life and leadership.
The act of being sensitive enough to catch shifts in anything has to do with our familiarity of the thing we’re observing. So when I started observing how my body and mind felt about the steadiness of my ideas when practicing them in two bpm increments, I learned to identify the subtle differentiating signs of what it feels like to play tempos that are really close together. So when I take the metronome away, all I’m doing is approximating my memory of what it feels like to play ideas at a given tempo. Therefore, like any relationship, there will always be an uneasy period of having to reestablish rapport with your internal alert system (for tempo stability) when your relationship to a metronome has become estranged.
Now the life lesson here has to do with the value of consistency and measurement of progress. As they say, “winners are trackers.” For example, a friend of mine told me that his dad circumvented a major heart attack not too long ago when he admitted himself into the hospital after noticing that his body felt different on a run that he normally does. And because his routines in life were pretty consistent, he deduced that what he felt was worth investigating. And to his surprise it certainly was! For had he not done so, my buddy might be without a father today. And as for a leadership perspective, the question becomes “how familiar are you with the routines of your organization?” Are their tasks all over the place, or are they pretty streamlined to where everyone is basically handling tasks that are in line with their job/task description and strength zone? After all, the hallmark of any good leader is one where they’re able to feel the micro shifts in efficiency and morale before the people in their charge, so as to adjust accordingly.
Suggested Takeaways…
a) When practicing with a metronome, focus on assessing your ability to detect micro shifts in your rhythmic timing as opposed to proving that you can play an idea in time. Now granted, this might sound like double talk, but the benefits of shifting your focus like this is WAY more useful.
b) The value of being sensitive to anything is that it allows you to predict how a butterfly effect might play out before anyone else.
c) Everything we do communicates something about us. And the majority of what we use to filter the messages that come our way are related to rhythmic timing (i.e. investing, cooking/baking, sex, speech patterns, crawling/walking/running, submission of deadlines, etc.)