How to Make Progress in Piano Playing and Startups
You might think you need advice but practice is what you really need.
— Hiten Shah (@hnshah) January 12, 2014
One of my New Year’s Resolutions is to become better at playing the piano. As I have started building a system to achieve this resolution, I have noticed that making progress on the piano consists of two primary activities: 1) focus on big pieces and 2) attention to scales and targeted short pieces to learn technique.
Focusing on big pieces is a lengthy process. Students majoring in piano master only a handful of big pieces each semester. They have to break the pieces down and spend concentrated effort and dedicated practice hours to get them right.
Shorter technique pieces help with overall talent improvement. In these efforts, the idea is not to master the short piece. The idea is to dedicate a pre-determined amount of time to the short piece and push as far as you can go with it in that time frame. How far along you get in the time frame is a measure of how talented you become. A popular goto source for these short pieces are Beethoven’s Bagatelles.
In startups, there are similar breakdowns of things that have to get done to make progress. The bulk of all early startup effort is in building a product and creating a repeatable business model and then a customer acquisition machine. Those are massive tasks.
Along the way though, there are a bunch of shorter tasks you have to do to keep the wheels spinning. Accounting, office organization, purchasing, travel, conferences, raising money, networking, setting up stuff, hiring, and more. It is all the miscellany. Miscellany is also important but should be confined to pre-determined short allotments of time. Do as good as you can in that time frame, but avoid getting so drawn into miscellany that you don’t focus on the large tasks.
The large tasks are what will make or break your startup.
What are your thoughts on balancing large and small tasks in growing a startup?