Prep and therapeutic self-delusions for two recent "shows"

Last month, I had two chances to get on stage in front of a lot of people—significantly more people than ever before—and do something. They happened back-to-back: I spoke for 2 minutes at the company engineering all-hands (a few hundred people) on a Wednesday, and played a 4-minute violin piece at the company variety show (~1300 people) the next night. Surprisingly, I didn't get very nervous, and they went well. The audience ended up hardly registering.

I prepared a lot—a well-known tactic. On top of that, two mental models (aka therapeutic self-delusions) helped.


I. Prep

Engineering All-Hands

In total, I spent at least seven hours on the two-minute presentation (guesstimating):

• 2.5 hours on creating the content—outline, then slide deck
• 0.5 hour (2 separate 15-minute sessions) practicing in front of my manager 1:1 and getting feedback
• 1.5 hours in a required prep session for all speakers—did a dry run and listened to + gave feedback to all the other speakers
• 2.5 hours practicing / refining on my own

Two minutes is both very short, so there's not much to prepare; and also more work because you need to trim your message to fit and then practice to stay within time. Between speaking and playing the violin in front of people, I have much less experience speaking, so the actual act felt more foreign and required more physical practice: just standing and saying the words at the right speed that would keep me in time; saying the words enough to develop muscle memory for them, to know them enough to not have to think. At two minutes, I had to get exact phrases nailed down, otherwise, as I discovered in practice, I would fumble or grasp for a transition and lose precious seconds.

Overall, seven hours for two minutes seems a lot. This time was spread over a week and does not include informal time consumed by the prospect of the work to be done hanging over my thoughts (kindly put, "background processing"). I expect a more experienced speaker could get their personal prep time down quite a bit. My manager said he used to also take a lot of time to prep, and nowadays he can do a similar talk with half-a-day's notice.

On the other hand, in the back of my head I keep this second-hand story from AriG in mind. Someone once asked Chris Cox, now the Facebook CPO, how he was able to do such a great 30-minute talk. Chris responded to the effect: "Easy. Just practiced it fifteen times." This exact number might be wrong, but the idea is if you do the math, it comes out to hours and hours of practice. (30 minutes x 15 = 7.5 hours)

Variety Show

For the variety show, David—my pianist friend and teammate—and I had a short timeline (2.5 weeks), so we chose a piece well within our comfort zones. I had performed the piece in the past, and our parts were technically undemanding for each of us, which meant the thrust of our rehearsals was staying in sync and hashing out musical choices.

We had two rehearsals on the preceding weekends (in addition to an initial "jam/reading" session to get to know each other, before we had decided to play in the show), and two pure run-through dress rehearsals. Weekend Rehearsal #1 was the nitty-gritty, deconstruct-reconstruct: 2.5 / 3 hours long. We played through the piece slowly with the metronome a number of times, then increased the speed to our liking; then dug in section-by-section to talk about what we wanted to do musically, and practiced each section before putting them back together. The second rehearsal was 1.5 / 2 hours, and we used it to reinforce things we'd discussed the previous week. We captured maybe 70-80% of our artistic ideal from the week before, but due to time constraints, we thought this was fine—better to aim to be comfortable and loose, and keep some freshness for the performance. (The last half hour of each rehearsal was reading / jamming on other pieces, a fun way to end.)

There was one required dress rehearsal at the venue for all performers. David and I showed up Tuesday night at 6:30 and sat in the chilly, warehouse-like auditorium until about 8:00, when we were called up, and played through the piece once. The auditorium was brightly-lit with harsh white LEDs, so we could see the sea of empty chairs, and there were a handful of "audience members": the variety show organizers, other performers, and the stage staff. In retrospect, the dress rehearsal was much more uncomfortable and nerve-wracking for the above reasons. In the actual performance, the venue was better heated; we had learned the outline of the show and so knew roughly when we would be called up; we could relax backstage in an informal green room; and on stage, the auditorium was dimmed and the stage lights so bright I could hardly see anyone in the audience.

We also ran through the piece twice on Wednesday morning (the show was Thursday evening), at the office on the roof. It was windy and cold, but also novel. Even before that rehearsal, I ran the piece twice by myself in an empty conference room (with practice mute on). By the time we walked on stage, I'd played the piece in four to five different settings and had a good sense of where I might mess up if I did and what to watch out for and what to think about throughout. In the actual performance, my mind was mostly on the piece itself.


II. Mental models

The main mental preparation was actual preparation. When I walked on stage for both events, I honestly believed there was a very minimal chance that I'd mess something up. Yes, I could forget the script, or potentially miss that high note, but if I haven't missed that high note in 95% of recent attempts, why would I now? (My mind does still find a way to doubt.)

The above assumptions rest on the performance feeling as similar to practice as possible. So my main therapeutic self-delusion was aimed at framing performance as ordinary.

#1: Downplaying and putting it in context

The eng all-hands was easy to downplay mentally: I was in a string of two-minute speakers, and this is an event similar to something that happens every two weeks with the whole company, that I've witnessed from the audience. Also, there is no expectation that you're good at speaking. People understand each team has been called up to present, and you're doing the deed.

The variety show was different: there were only ~5 performances, and the event felt semi-professionally produced. It was set up as a late-night show ("Llama Night Live!"), with a host and pre-taped intro reel reminiscent of SNL.

I realized that the main problem in the past for me has been thinking of performance as an event that showcases your ability to everyone. This is the slice that they will see and thus interpret as what you are capable of. This turns on the pressure to not mess up, and encourages you to choose a program at the edge of your technique.

I've now come to view performance as similar to a wedding in a human life; a snapshot and moment to consider, but not a defining event. Also—something you want to feel fairly comfortable while doing. If you trip on your way down the aisle, that doesn't doom the marriage (one hopes). It's ideally entertaining (by some meaning of entertaining) for everyone involved, and the degree of entertainment doesn't hinge on technical features. The analogy isn't perfect though, because the performance is really about the audience having a good time, which brings us to #2.

#2: Watching other people fail

Some people say, "act comfortable, even if you're not." I find this hard because I'm not good at acting. Ideally, I want to actually be comfortable.

The biggest motivation to be comfortable was realizing that the audience is only going to be as comfortable as I am. I realized this while watching a few people before me on stage each day who looked a bit nervous—and that made me nervous. And I thought, goddamn, can't do that! My role is to help people have a good time! This mindset made being nervous just not acceptable.

III. Compounding

A quick final note. At first glance, it might seem extra stressful to have two presentations to prepare for back-to-back, but that wasn't the case.

Incidentally, David, pianist and teammate, also gave a two-minute talk at the same Eng All-Hands. He remarked after that it actually helped to have the shorter, somewhat smaller event first, right before the bigger one. Prepping for the talk and doing the talk helped ramp us up for the somewhat higher-stakes variety show. I felt the same way.


Hopefully this stuff sticks. TBD.

Your tone comes from your head

About a week ago, I had a minor breakthrough on violin: I shifted the pad of my right pinky to rest on top of the bow, rather than falling to the side, which forced me to hold the bow with the hair flatter on the strings. This felt different and required getting used to, but my sound was better. I also remembered that my teachers long ago had told me to hold the bow this way.

Three days ago, I had another minor breakthrough that built on top of this. I was trying to sustain the sound in a particular rising, angsty phrase of the Brahms sonata (no. 1), and I felt I was working pretty hard and still not getting the sustained sound I wanted. I thought about something I'd read recently, that you really want to be using gravity to draw the bow. I tried to achieve that feeling. It was easier to do at the upper half of the bow—I needed to keep my elbow higher. But I was losing that feeling as I got to the bottom half. I looked in the mirror and saw I had to curve my wrist more as I reached the bottom of the bow to maintain that feeling. Again, these were things my teachers had told me before, that I had not been able to put into practice until now.

I've been playing violin for twenty years now, without a teacher for the last five. I spent the first seven years with a teacher who only looking back I can see imparted poor fundamentals that led to years of shoulder pain and un-learning and re-learning that continues today. (Still, seven years of flawed learning was better than none, given that the damage was recoverable and that in the meantime I was able to participate in youth orchestras.) That after this long time, something clicks, is a surprise, and I mused on why? What should I take away? Here are my reflections.


Working to fix past mistakes takes time. Patience is key. Other people may be faster, and that's okay.

The most frustrating part of youth orchestra was that as I learned more about how to phrase music and how it should sound, I still was not able to play it, and I could see my peers progressing much faster.

After college, my life became focused on work, with music at the periphery. Within music circles, though, I had the same frustrations, and as work got busier, I started playing more often alone, practicing at home. Both were important: knowing I could be better, and plodding along for years.

The famous cellist Pablo Casals was asked, through his advanced years, his 80s-90s, why he still practiced so hard every day. He said, "Because I think I am making progress."

I think taking the time to play alone helped a lot. I became more okay with my pace of progress and happier with the task at hand. I was talking to my friend Kevin yesterday and realized this irony, which is I feel more anxiety about how much I am improving at my job versus at violin, even though I spend more time doing my job and arguably perform better among all software engineers as a whole than among all violinists as a whole.


To discover the change, I had to work from the goal, not from the mechanics. Yet mechanics are the foundation.

I ended up discovering a way to play that had the same mechanical description as things I've been told long ago, but what I was doing felt different than it had ever felt.

Part of my ability to make a change came from the years of practicing at a suboptimal position—even the experience of bowing in a suboptimal way taught me better how to hold the bow and "balance" it in my hand, a physical skill that is needed to hold it the more optimal way.


Doing it the right way is easier and less work. 

If I am struggling, I should seek to struggle less. Challenge one is just to recognize the struggle, because it's easy to accept my current method as long as it's been reasonably successful. Challenge two is to know what is necessary struggle versus wasted energy. The way to recognize that a better way is better is to experience and compare it to a less successful alternative for a meaningful amount of time.

Ironically, if I had started out holding my bow the better way and forgotten how I had learned that, I would have less appreciation for why to do it that way.

It's easy to think that doing it the right way is harder, but it's actually just getting there that is hard. You have to work hard to understand and get the skills to make it less hard.


Progress is driven by innate love and focused by external pressure.

Overall, this slow process of learning violin hasn't felt like work. I've found that if I practice once a day, I am happy. It is like meditation. If I don't practice for a while, I get unhappy. There's something about being totally focused, deep in work problem-solving mentally and physically. It feels like a workout afterwards.

Yet I have been practicing by myself the past few years without this dramatic of an improvement. Why did this happen now? I'm reminded of a line I read recently, applied to startups, but applicable to my violin playing right now—to some degree, I finally feel my ass is on the line. My friend Kevin and I auditioned and got accepted to play the whole Brahms Violin Sonata No. 1 in early October, which is a bit over 30 minutes of music straight. I've played in longer concerts in orchestra or chamber music groups, but never that long as a violin solo, where you have fewer bars of rest, in a setting where all attention is on you, where people will hear the bumps but also the fruits of thoughtful preparation and practiced stamina (in contrast to Revolution Cafe, where I have performed the full Brahms sonatas no. 2 and 3, where people are drinking and chatting).

Also, the first time I worked on this piece was in college, and I thought it was easy because the notes are easy compared to something like the Sibelius concerto. Revisiting it now, I realize how much more you can do with those simple notes, which makes the piece hard to play well. So it's this combination that has sharpened my focus. I'm not part of a teacher's violin studio that requires me to play in a recital anymore. I signed up to play and it's totally exposed, and a tougher situation than I've known. And it's something I want to, care to do well at, because I want people to also understand why this piece is so great, because I can finally see it myself.


Your tone comes from your head.

This final thought didn't come from me, but it helped precipitate the recent changes. Sometimes even an often-repeated idea comes to you at the right time to have meaning for you.

I follow a number of classical musicians, mostly string players, on Instagram. Among them is a violinist named Arnaud Sussman, who stands out in the amount and quality of his content. He seems to manage his account himself and regularly posts videos of himself practicing. He also does Q&As every so often. In his most recent Q&A, someone asked him, how do you achieve a good tone [on the violin]?

Arnaud's response was (paraphrased from what I remember): First, your tone comes from your head. When I was younger I spent a lot of time listening to old records: Oistrahk, Heifetz, Milstein, Perlman... [Additional advice on practicing.]

This is a surprising statement because the more obvious idea is that tone comes from your physical movement—how you draw the bow on the string and how you vibrate your left hand. I realized I spent a lot of time thinking about the mechanics, and would tend to think reactively: "How do I want to adjust the tone that's coming out right now?" instead of "What do I want the tone to be?" before the bow hits the string. What happens when you imagine it first, is you are forced to conceptualize what tone means, and you aren't tied to what your muscle memory produces.

As a tangential outcome of this thought, I started playing a listening game now when I'm in an Uber and the driver has some pop music on. I try to figure out all the different instrumental parts. Synthesized pop music tends to have many layered repeating parts, which makes this exercise easier than for orchestral works, and still what seems like a simple background has more and more parts for the ear to pick out as I listen—what sounded like three parts initially become seven and I'm left wondering what I missed. Try it yourself!



If you got this far—come hear the Brahms sonata that inspired this post! My friend Kevin and I will be playing it at Noe Valley Ministry as part of the SF Civic Chamber Series, on Saturday Oct 6 @ 3pm.

[Daily] Saturday 2018.05.05 - Musician-Athlete, Jazz-Engineer

Last night I saw Ray Chen play Brahms Violin Concerto with the SF Symphony. It's hard to say words about a fine performance (probably easier to find words for criticism) because there are only so many words in the English language for sound. This reminds me of something Anthony Bourdain said about food writing, that it eventually all sounds the same, like porn. [1] I can say generic things like "Ray played the shit out of the Brahms," or describe the impact on me: I felt joy to be alive to experience this. Part of the impression I left with is what I imagine you'd feel at a professional sports game like tennis. The simple act of standing on stage mechanically executing finely coordinated finger-and-arm movements with 99% accuracy for forty-five minutes is an athletic feat. Layer on top of that the need to focus on artistic expression, and on top of that the psychological pressure from being under the spotlight and from audience expectations. Witnessing this concerto played in such a setting with a breathtaking degree of skill and expression is to witness a height of human ability.

Before the concert, two friends and I were sitting in the lounge at Davies chatting, and we talked about the decline of classical music. Well, it's declining in the US, but has become very popular in Asia. We joked that it might be because Asian culture emphasizes skills tests (there is a game show in China called The Brain, which is like The Voice but for mental skills, where competitors do things like solve Rubik's cubes), and classical music is an elaborate skills test.

Though Asian culture favors mental tests over physical tests like sports, playing an instrument is to me much closer to sports than to a cerebral field like science or engineering. One thought that occurred to me last night was: I've read the Brahms concerto on violin, so I can physically play the same notes as Ray... but, what oceans between us! It's like me hitting a tennis ball versus Serena Williams hitting a ball. Yes, you can point out the fact she has a better racket—a tennis-racket Stradivarius, if you will—but truth is, she can beat you with any racket. 

Classical music as it's practiced today is focused on refining a set repertoire, whereas jazz is more like engineering, where you have some common foundation but then are never quite building the same thing, even though many jazz licks and engineering feats look similar if you squint. The goal, at least, is to build something new and improve upon the past, rather than reinterpreting a plan created centuries ago. I love classical music, but of the two mindsets I prefer the latter, and that's why I think if I were ever to become a full-time classical musician, I would get quite frustrated.

[1] The quote: “Writing incessantly about food is like writing porn. How many adjectives can there be before you repeat yourself?” [source: New Yorker]