Law Four

Always Make Your Performance Greater Than Your Applause

Increased performance is essential for lifetime growth. If you become more skillful and useful, you will receive greater applause from an expanding audience. This can be intoxicating, and the temptation will be to start organizing your life around other people’s recognition and praise—to keep repeating what got you the applause in the first place—rather than moving on to something new, better, and different. When this happens, the danger is that applause will become more important to you than your improved performance. The greatest performers in all fields are those who always strive to get better. No matter how much acclaim they receive, they keep working to improve their performance. Continually work to surpass everything you’ve done so far, and your performance will always be greater than your applause.

The future is always created through action, through performance. We can have an idea or a vision of a bigger future, but the idea and vision become real only when we take actions that are directly focused on achieving specific goals.

Applause resulting from performance is just a by-product. Obviously, it can be a very useful and valuable by-product, but it should never be the main focus. For a person to keep growing, the central focus always has to be the performance itself—never other people’s response to it. To contrast this with Law Three, unlike contribution, which is about the receiver (that is, there is no contribution if the receiver doesn’t perceive it as a contribution), performance is about the performer. It comes from within and is measured from within.

You have control over your performance. You never have control over other people’s responses, approval, or applause. The goal here is always to be getting better; to appreciate how far you’ve come, but also to keep striving to go further, always making your future bigger than your past. A bigger future demands greater performance on your part. A bigger future requires that your skill and mastery keep improving.

Growing through Performing

The process of improving performance is where growth happens. In striving to better our performance, we engage our passions and talents, and search for ways to stretch them to new levels. Many of the obstacles we come up against require us to grow in ways that impact much more than our performance in any one area. But the desire for a better performance is what gives us the focus and motivation to take on and conquer these challenges.

Todor Kobakov admits, with a smile, that he was “a very arrogant 16-year-old,” freshly arrived in Canada from Bulgaria, when he met his piano teacher, William Aide, at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music. The first day he met Professor Aide, Todor told him straight out that he wasn’t interested in playing the classical piano anymore. He had no plans to become a concert pianist and was instead interested in composition and jazz. Shortly after, his attitude changed, as Professor Aide quickly helped him to see how much enjoyment and possibility for new skill development there were in playing the piano.

In the first two years of study, Todor gradually learned from Professor Aide that musical performance was not just about the notes and technical skill, but that it was also, and most importantly, a personal representation of the character of the performer. He and his fellow students began to realize that what each of them was really working on was how to become a better person, not just a better pianist—that the two went hand-in-hand. In his efforts to continue improving, Todor became more conscious of qualities in his character. Through music, he discovered some things about himself that he wanted to change and also good qualities that he wanted to build on. This self-knowledge improved his ability to control his performances and to express himself through them in ways that told more unique and personal stories through the music.

When Todor and Professor Aide parted after four years, having developed a personal friendship along the way, his teacher said, “I think I’ve taught you how to improve yourself on your own from this point on.” By his late 20s, Todor was strikingly self-possessed and articulate, with a modest wisdom that belied his age. His experience of learning how to be a better classical pianist helped him to grow into a more mature and well-rounded person during his university years. Even more important, it left him with the ability to grow continually in his life through the act of pursuing better and better performances. He says he still likes to play certain pieces every few years that he hasn’t played in a long time, because the way he performs them differently now shows him how he has changed as a person.

It’s about the Experience

Though Todor receives applause for his performances, it means very little to him. In fact, he says in honesty, the applause sometimes makes him sad because it means that the performance is over. His attitude is that, as a musician, you don’t play with the intention of impressing the audience. Rather, what happens in a great performance is that the performer and the audience together celebrate the greatness of the music. The performer “applauds” the music through his or her performance, and the audience applauds more literally. His focus is always on the music.

This is true of other kinds of performance, too. When the performer is “onstage,” he or she is focused on creating an experience that combines many elements besides just the audience’s response. An audience that is paying attention will notice and appreciate the artistry that goes into orchestrating such an experience. It may not applaud literally, but these are often the kinds of performances that receive big tips, great performance reviews, letters of thanks, citations, and other kinds of recognition.

People who take pride in their performance and strive to create greater and greater experiences for their audiences can grow in any situation. It could be a fast-food order taker who is able to simultaneously, and seemingly effortlessly, ring in your order, placate your rambunctious kids, smile understandingly at you, and get everything you ordered balanced on the tray so that you can take it with your one free hand, in one seamless performance. Those kinds of everyday performances require that people be completely present and engaged in what they are doing, just as a performer is onstage. If they do it just for the enjoyment, energy, and challenge it gives them—what we often call “taking pride in one’s work”—then they will keep growing. If they do it for the external recognition, then chances are they will stop growing, either because the recognition is gone once the novelty wears off or because they only have to keep doing the same thing to get the same response, and there is no internal drive to improve.

Keeping the Performance Fresh

There’s a story, which may be apocryphal, that Dan likes to tell about Sir Laurence Olivier and what he allegedly did to try to keep each night’s performance of a play as fresh as the opening night’s. Apparently, Olivier had a ritual he would perform each night before a show. He would stand backstage, look through the peephole out into the audience, and say to himself, “This is not last night’s audience. This is not last night’s show. These are not last night’s actors. This is not last night’s play. These are not last night’s lines,” and so on. By doing this, he would make himself fully present for that night’s performance, even though he had played the role many times before.

The true sign of a talented performer is that he or she can perform the same material over and over and make it seem different every time. Each performance is created in the moment out of the elements that are there, including the performer’s state of mind, the characteristics and responsiveness of the audience, the venue, and any other factors present at the time of the performance. Therefore, each performance offers a unique learning experience to the performer and a chance to test his or her skills in this new situation. But it has to be viewed this way for the learning to occur.

Dan has this story of how he turned his attitude around to take advantage of what could have been a negative situation:

I do a lot of speaking engagements around the country. Usually, there is a minimum number of people or size of opportunity that the team will book me for. Occasionally, though, there are mishaps, and on one particular occasion I arrived expecting to speak to 300 people, and only 30 were in attendance.

Usually, I get a lot of energy from bigger audiences, so initially this was a bit of a disappointment. But then I started thinking about it in terms of a performance. I decided that what would make this opportunity really worthwhile for me and a better experience for the audience, too, would be if I could just go out there and give the performance of a lifetime and not think about the size of the audience: just focus on giving them the best possible experience. So I went out and gave my speech with that attitude, and I got a standing ovation—and increased my abilities that day.

As a means of facilitating growth, applause can be wonderfully useful. It opens doors to all kinds of opportunities, resources, and capabilities that can support performance at an even higher level. But as an end in itself, applause becomes a growth stopper. It stifles the imagination and undermines motivation. By always focusing on improving your performance and treating applause as a by-product that you accept with gratitude, you can ensure continued growth.

Where Do I Start?

  Create your own standards. Athletes have the advantage of having their performance measured, both in training and in competition, so they have a clear idea of what their personal best is. Canadian Olympian speed skater Clara Hughes described skating a personal best time in her home country during the Vancouver Olympics as “the race of my life,” despite the fact that on that day her time won her a bronze medal whereas she had won gold at the Turin games previously. By creating your own standards for your performance and tracking them yourself, you can celebrate your wins and measure your progress on your own terms, which helps you resist putting too much focus on external standards or recognition.

  Separate performance from contribution. Something that often creates confusion around this law is the use of the word “performance” in the workplace as in “performance review” in a way that makes it difficult to distinguish from contribution. A performance review is generally a measurement of your performance against external standards, like the requirements of your job, which are really your contribution in the form of results you create for your team or company. Here, we are differentiating performance to separate out how you go about getting those results (performance), which is entirely up to you, from the contribution those results make, which is judged by others. Many people find that they can keep doing the same thing over and over and make a valuable contribution because those results are needed. However, if you start to feel that your work is getting boring or stagnant, it may be time to look at the Laurence Olivier story at the beginning of this chapter and think about how you can keep your performance fresh and exciting by shifting your mindset.

  Treat applause as something to be grateful for, not an entitlement. Being grateful for applause insulates you from the temptation to start expecting recognition. When part of you is focused on expecting applause, that same part of you is not available to contribute to your performance.

  Try to just be present in the moment. One thing that can undermine performance is having part of your mind thinking about the end of the performance and the applause it brings before you’re actually there. In order to perform at your best, you need to have all your focus in the moment. If you do this, applause will take care of itself.