Practicing for a vision

Practice makes perfect. This one is the quintessential mantra that is so cliche that it can't be anything but true. Athletes, musicians, chefs, artists, and students all practice to gain proficiency, and as anyone who's ever been on a sports team or taken music lessons knows, it's not always a pretty process. As a singer in a college choir, I've had this experience time and time again. Every Tuesday night for two hours, I sat in the basement of our music building for rehearsal. There was always some paper to be written or problem set to be solved, yet there I was, tackling some obscure bit of German music that our quirky Welsh conductor had chosen. The first read-through has all 50 of us stumbling through the notes, more in a mumble than song. "He's done it again," I would always think, "What the heck is this?!"

But the vision always magically appears. As the quarter progressed, I would become more and more familiar with the individual notes, transitions, cadenzas, movements. The uncertainty was slowly replaced by confidence, then anticipation, then feeling. Inevitably, a favorite movement or phrase would emerge and lodge itself in my brain. I would, whether I admit it or not, hum it silently myself when I return from rehearsal, go to class, shower. The music, which had so shortly ago been random black dots on a page, took on a kind of life and personality with familiarity.

The magic continues on performance night. Something about being in the spotlight, joined by the non-human voices of the orchestra, facing a dark, waiting audience lends a kind of anxious energy to the music. Standing there, I would be grateful that hours of rehearsal had made it no longer necessary to concentrate on the notes; my mind was free to soak up the energy and let it reverberate through my voice.

Again and again, from the stage of our university church where we performed our quarterly concerts, to the stages of the Great People's Hall and "The Egg" in Beijing, I saw this process happen quietly, organically, this magic that emerges from chaos and doubt into a coherent, expressive whole. And when it happens, its enormity never fails to surprise and delight.

In the arts, it's easy to see the relationship between practice and vision. Practice allows you to gain mastery over the details that clog the mind and hold you back from experiencing the work as a whole. Only when the proficiency part of performance becomes automatic can the brain begin to understand the bigger picture, tease out nuiances, to offer an interpretation. But my recent thoughts on leadership makes me think that leading is not unlike mastering an art form.

Both begin from the ground up, whether it's with musical notes or organizational details. The learning process is alternately nerve-wrecking and mind-numbing, but successful people learn to charge on beyond the immediate. And they don't stop there. What separates a good musician from a great one is not proficiency; the few great ones practice because they have visions they want to carry out, but they understand this cannot be done without absolute proficiency. On top of that, a great musician needs a flair for performance and drama to communicate her vision to the audience. Similarly, a successful leader needs both the details (knowledge, skills, experience) to ground them as well as a vision for grander things to come. She also needs to convince others to join her vision. It's this talent for contradiction and multiplicity that marks success, in the arts or in organizational leadership.