Why easy isn't always best
One of the most brilliant advertising campaigns in recent years featured a bright red “easy button” that, when pushed, made everything magically effortless. It’s an image that lingers—so much so that (as with everything that enters popular culture) there’s even a GIF for it. It remains in public consciousness because it speaks to something we all share: humans crave the easy path. In fact, science has shown that our brains are hard-wired to choose the path of least resistance. As Daniel Kahneman, in his best-selling book Thinking, Fast and Slow, writes,
“A general ‘law of least effort’ applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our natures.”
Piano playing isn’t immune to this. A quick internet search uncovers courses, apps, and thousands of YouTube tutorial videos all offering easy shortcuts to learning to play the piano. It can cause us to question why we choose to struggle, why we learn our music patiently and methodically. And sometimes the sustained commitment to a harder path proves to be too daunting and we quit.
But as Stephen Sondheim wrote so well in his song “Putting it Together,” art isn’t easy. Even the most talented and gifted—when they run to the edge of their natural abilities—learn that art is born from struggle. Yes, we’re given moments of inspiration, but if we want to bring these gifts from the Muse to life, we must provide our own perspiration.
We may be hard-wired for for laziness, but thankfully that’s only part of who we are. Our complex brains also crave the stimulation of complexity. If we haven’t been shielded from it all our lives, we learn early in life that we grow through struggle. When things are too easy for us, we don’t value them. We learn that the honest, dogged work of wrestling with something allows us to develop deep understanding of ideas and to see connections between different pieces of information. When things are too easy, we lack the depth that only difficult things provide—if we’re stubborn enough to not settle for easy.
The irony is that just because something isn’t easy doesn’t mean that it can’t become simple—not by hitting an easy button, but through embracing difficulty, wrestling with it and with ourselves. That’s when we find the true heart of every worthwhile human endeavor: the simplicity that lies at the heart of all complexity. We thrash through the thicket of the notes, wrestle with our own personal weaknesses, and then one day we are rewarded with the clarity and ease we sought all along. Perhaps no one stated it as well as the great Frédéric Chopin, who once observed,
“Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.”
And so, this year, I encourage you to embrace the difficult. Dare yourself to avoid the easy button and wrestle with musical questions and technical challenges until you find the simplicity that can only be reached through struggle. That’s where the thrill of creative fire lives—in the bit by bit, piece by piece work of bringing your vision of the music you’re blessed to play to life.