14

YOU CAN GET SOME SATISFACTION

My friends, novelists Jim and Karen Shepard, say that preparation is all about “rigor and optimism.” It is rigorous to do, but gives you optimism about your project or performance that is a direct result of the systematic work that went into it.

And just as methodical preparation instills confidence and makes you more effective, it can also provide a strong sense of satisfaction.

A funny thing happened to me after we developed and started teaching the preparation checklist at our consulting firm. I realized I could utilize many of its principles as guidelines in most aspects of my life. I realized that it brought rigor and optimism to almost anything I did.

The concepts of a preparation checklist—its methodical logic and flow—became a part of many challenges I undertook. And, just as this increased my performance at work, it increased my satisfaction away from work. My life’s interactions took on a new clarity and focus.

You can get so wrapped up in things that you lose effectiveness. And you can forget about the point of it all: satisfaction. During the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy, I heard an interview with an Olympic figure skater who said she had overprepared. You hear this often with regard to performance in sports or the arts. People say: “I’m not sharp” “I overprepared” “I thought too much.” Such words are usually uttered by people who don’t look at preparation as a satisfying process. They only look to it as a way to produce results.

After years of preparing to produce results, I have lately started to enjoy the process of preparation. This is something like the old lines “art for art’s sake” or “the journey is the destination.” Preparation for preparation’s sake; the method becomes as much, or almost as much, the point of it all as the result.

CRAZY FINGERS

          Ben Carson

Ben Carson, the famous pediatric neurosurgeon, is a good example of someone who takes deep satisfaction in the process of preparation. He loves his work—saving and transforming the lives of children. But I think his passion for his work also comes from his complete dependence on and enjoyment of methodical preparation. Ben gets his greatest satisfaction in life from helping people. But he also finds significant satisfaction in the sheer process of being a surgeon and administrator. Preparation for Ben borders on ritual: he goes through his day exuding tranquility because he is so focused on his daily method.

“I take great pleasure in preparation,” Ben said. “It gives me serenity. In my line of work I have a real responsibility to avail myself of as much information as I can and to learn from the things other physicians have done. I need checklists and structure to step from one patient to the other. If you are prepared, the likelihood of success is that much greater. And if you are well prepared and still unsuccessful, you can live better with yourself.”

Ben overcame severe economic disadvantage to achieve his success. He has an extraordinary mind and uncannily deft fingers: these were as much God-given skills as Joe Mauer’s vision or hand-eye coordination. But like Mauer, Ben harnesses his skills with an insistently methodical approach. Because of his impoverished background, he was driven to succeed partly because he always wanted to overcome the feeling that he was never as good as the other guy.

As a kid living in the inner city of Detroit, Ben seemed to be impeded from moving ahead in the world by the poverty that plagued his neighborhood. But his mother prepared him continually; she had him learn to play classical music and read great books. A funny thing happened one day when I was speaking with Ben in his office. The only interruption was a call from his wife. She told him that at that instant there was a piece of lovely music on the local classical music station and that he should turn it on. Ben folded his surgeon’s hands together and his fingers in that moment looked like those of a piano player.

“If I don’t feel prepared going into a surgery, then I don’t feel comfortable,” Ben said. “And if I don’t feel comfortable, I don’t do it. I have elected to not do surgeries when I didn’t feel completely prepared. My recognition is that preparation for anything—especially for surgery—came from the way my mother taught me to improve my reading skills. She would come home at night after working in the homes of wealthy people and try to get me to spend as much time reading as they did. We worked on spelling and syntax and grammar. Her method of teaching me really reinforced that you need a step-by-step approach to almost anything you do. And I realized that reading really prepares you for anything because it helps you use your imagination to create a picture of what you are reading or, in the case of preparation, what you are about to do.”

I don’t know a more driven man on this earth: Ben wants to heal the world. And every night he goes to bed picturing in his head how to do it the next day—running through his checklist for surgery, envisioning his patients and their families, visualizing and double-checking. And Ben’s serenity makes me guess that he sleeps well, too. Preparation gives him a satisfaction that approximates the joy he takes from healing and saving lives. And his joy is a contagious thing, as many of his patients testify.

THE PIANO MAN

          Leon Fleisher

Piano virtuoso Leon Fleisher illustrates the link between preparation and satisfaction as much as anyone I know. I first met Leon in the midst of a potentially crippling strike of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. It was prior to the opening of their new symphony hall, and I was asked to mediate between management and the players. Federal mediators and other civic leaders had failed to bring a resolution.

As I prepared and probed my way through the positions of the parties, I asked Leon to help educate me in the politics and practicalities of professional music because he was held in highest esteem by all sides. Leon helped me define the interests of management and of the musicians; he helped me understand the alternatives each side faced in their lives; he taught me how orchestras pick their teams and how management and boards do, too. I shared my proposed scripts with Leon to get his reaction and suggestions before I met with the union and management. When the strike was settled one morning at 5 A.M., the first person I decided to wake up with the news was Leon.

I think of the line by the poet Robert Browning—“a man’s reach should exceed his grasp…” I came to realize that Leon, in his music, was reaching for something few of us contemplate in our work. When he played the piano with those two God-given hands, Leon was reaching for a sort of heaven. Call it ecstasy, joy, or merely contentment; Leon likes to say that there is an “inevitability to a great piece of music.” He helped me understand that that “inevitability” might be what we call bliss.

So imagine depending on your work for that sort of thing. Pretty high stakes, but lots of satisfaction. And then imagine what Leon went through: he suffered the loss of the ability to play the piano with his right hand. Speaking of grasping, he could not even give a firm handshake. Forget about livelihood and fame and history. In 1964, an unidentifiable disease robbed Leon of his ability to reach for what he longed for whenever he sat down at his instrument. The child prodigy who studied with the maestro Artur Schnabel from age nine to nineteen could no longer play the piano.

“The piano for me is not an instrument but an extension of myself,” Leon said. “It is not a foreign object. The keys are continuation of the fingers.”

So part of his body had been ripped away. Leon could not turn to his awesome talent to get him through, so instead he turned to preparation. He redefined the objectives of his life, and he analyzed the precedents and alternatives that could see him through his struggle.

“I went from one therapy to another,” Leon said. “I decided to seek out every alternative that I could. There was also a body of work for left-handed playing, but I denied that for several years. That would have been an admission that I couldn’t play.”

Then one day Leon finally decided to continue his pursuit of innovative treatments while redefining his relationship with music. He analyzed his objectives and found that he could achieve in the role of teacher some of the satisfaction and joy that he saw his mentor Artur Schnabel feel as he taught a handful of gifted students in his tiny apartment with two pianos on Central Park West in New York. Leon also turned to conducting, which allowed him to share the movements of music with fine orchestras.

Leon used the precedent of his famous teacher and the alternative of conducting to restore his satisfying relationship with music. And he at last dedicated himself to playing compositions for the left hand. Though not as satisfying as using two, the left-handed playing brought Leon that longed-for bliss during what he calls, “certain phrases every now and then.” His process of repreparation as a musician drew on the same sort of checklist that he and I used to analyze the parties and potential for a settlement of the symphony strike.

Leon did get a reprieve. As a result of surgery for carpal tunnel syndrome (due to his clutching the baton while conducting), Leon regained the use of his right hand in late 1981. But the gods teased Leon a bit. I attended his great return to two hands—he played with two hands at the inaugural concert of the new symphony hall in an event that achieved front-page coverage from the New York Times. But well before the performance, he knew things still weren’t right. The keys weren’t an extension of the fingers of his right hand. He could manipulate them, move across them in a way his hand had not been able to do for years. But the piano wasn’t one with him. Leon was despondent. He accused himself of “deception.” He went on with the show as a good showman is called to do. But that night, in front of a concert hall filled with both classical music lovers and people longing to see the comeback kid, Leon felt no bliss. He felt disdain for himself.

“Then a funny thing happened once I acknowledged publicly that I wasn’t cured,” Leon said. “There had been ten big concerts scheduled. I expected them all to cancel, because they were premised on a falsehood of my playing with two hands. But only one canceled.” So Leon continued to perform with the left hand and continued in his roles as teacher and conductor.

Then one day in 1995 he got a call from one of the experts on the diverse medical team he had assembled as part of his preparation. Dr. Daniel Drachman of the Johns Hopkins Medical School recommended that Leon try a Botox-based therapy that the National Institutes of Health in Washington, D.C., was running as a trial.

The therapy started to work, and everyone suddenly realized that all those muscular and nerve and skeletal treatments were misguided. Leon suffered from a brain-based disorder called focal dystonia. And the neurological messages sent from his brain to cause his fingers to curl involuntarily could be short-circuited by the Botox to allow him to play without his fingers curling. He was not cured, but his condition was improved enough to begin playing again on occasion with two hands.

The show went on because of the new treatment and in spite of Leon’s sense of self-deception. And it goes on to this day, with Leon still conducting around the world and teaching a group of students at the Peabody Conservatory. His persistent preparation as a patient mirrored his preparation as a musician. Leon never gave in because he realized that preparation as a teacher or conductor could give him the satisfaction he needed to keep going. This newfound satisfaction gave him the strength he needed for his constant preparation as a patient.

In an era of emoting and gesticulating virtuosos, Leon remains pianissimo. I don’t know much about classical music, but I know fortissimo, “loud,” and I know pianissimo, or “softly.” Leon is a soft player. In fact, he stands out for his softness even to the top classical music critics. It is his signature as a piano player and conductor.

Leon set about changing career tracks, identifying new challenges, and seeking bliss in new ways. He prepared himself pianissimo but full bore. He dared to prepare for a new way of life and found his old satisfaction because of diligent preparation.

“The discipline of preparation enables you to deliver up to at least 80 percent of your best when under the pressure of performance,” Leon said.

Under pressure for so many years, Leon keeps delivering.

In December of 2007, Leon, along with Martin Scorsese, Diana Ross, and other luminaries, were named Kennedy Center Honorees. Earlier in that year, a documentary about Leon was nominated for an Academy Award. He walked down the red carpet alongside the stars. Called Two Hands, the movie is a testimony as much to Leon’s repreparation as to his talent.

Today, when Leon shakes your hand, he grasps it. He reaches out with gusto when he meets you, and as he holds your hand two of his fingers curl under. He is seventy-nine years old, still reaching for a new way of life while holding on to an old one. He is still preparing for the complete recovery of the use of his right hand even as he prepares his students and orchestras for music’s bliss. But more than ever he is a satisfied musician.

Something as simple as the preparation principles can help you achieve something as monumental as Leon’s comeback. Preparation was his antidote to despair. Leon has come to seek a new form of satisfaction. Being a prodigy or a maestro is now secondary to preparing other musicians and preparing himself to play in a new way.

         

The sheer act of preparing—for a speech, a presentation, a negotiation, or a team meeting—has brought me moments of amazing satisfaction, too. I am not a world-class musician who is blessed enough to find bliss in a string of sounds. But I share with Leon and many others the conviction that preparation is a craft. And I am a methodical preparer who at times blissfully loses himself in preparation. It is amazing what you can discover when you dare to prepare.