A recent article by the entrepreneur website Inc.com highlighted Edward Van Halen’s ability to turn less into much, much more.
Here’s an excerpt from the article The Mindset (and Science) Behind Eddie Van Halen’s Remarkable Success: How Less Becomes More written by Inc.com’s Jeff Haden:
Buried in Alex Van Halen’s new book Brothers (he spends a lot more time psychoanalyzing David Lee Roth) is a passage that at least in part explains how the late Eddie Van Halen became a guitar virtuoso.
As Alex writes:
For Ed and me, as foreigners working without the benefit of much money, we were used to working our asses off and constantly coming up with workarounds to compensate for missing resources. One of the reasons Ed was always playing a “Frankenstein” guitar that he’d hammered together is that we were used to everything being like that. That’s all we ever had: second (stuff) that we made the best of.
“The main reason why I squeeze so many … call them tricks, call them techniques, out of the guitar was out of necessity because I couldn’t afford the pedals,” Ed said at the Smithsonian. “I couldn’t afford a fuzz box and all the toys that everybody else had, so I did everything I could to get the sounds out of the guitar with my fingers.”
Less is more
Start a business, and it’s easy to assume you’re doing well when you have plenty of resources. In the short term, cash flow issues can be ignored. Inefficiency can go unaddressed. Payroll can be covered by cash reserves.
In fact, more money—or more time, automation, connections, and other seeming advantages—can actually make long-term success harder to achieve. It’s relatively easy to throw money at problems, but doing so ensures you’ll purchase solutions everyone else can also buy.
Everyone else puts together ever more complicated pedal boards? Eddie couldn’t buy pedal boards. As a result, he embraced Cornell professor and social psychologist Robert Sternberg’s investment theory of creativity: the idea that creativity starts with deciding you’re willing to go against the crowd.
Try something truly new, and plenty of people will doubt you. For example, the Airbnb founders felt people would be willing to rent rooms in their homes to strangers. Plenty of people said they were crazy. Further, the Uber founders felt people would be willing to use their own cars to drive people to their destinations. Plenty of people said they were crazy.
How creative constraints work
Eddie didn’t invent tapping—”hammering” the fretboard with his picking hand and fretting hand. But he did become the master who sparked a wave of imitators. As Alex writes, quoting Eddie:
Tapping is like having a sixth finger on your left hand. Instead of picking, you’re hitting a note on the fretboard. I was just sitting in my room at home, drinking a beer, and I remembered seeing other players using the technique for one quick note in a solo.
I thought, “Well nobody is really capitalizing on that idea.” So I started (messing) around and realized the potential.
Constraints force you to try things others won’t or, at the very least, haven’t. Being creative requires you to be seen as a little or a lot different, and not always in a good way—at least for a time.
Or maybe for a long time.
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