So, a little story first.
I started taking piano lessons around the time I embarked on my sabbatical. I stopped studying piano at 13 years of age and going back to it as an adult is something I always wanted to do, and now that I had all this time, I figured it was the perfect time.
And piano lessons taught me something fascinating.
I’m a hard worker. When the teacher tells me to work on a new technique or changing a bad habit, I take that seriously and practice with focus and dedication. (Something I never did as a kid, much to my mom’s chagrin.)
But here’s the thing… practicing hard was not enough.
And super annoyingly, practicing too hard had the opposite effect that I wanted.
It seemed like, past a certain point, practicing with all my might made me sound WORSE.
Why did more effort not yield better results? I’d sometimes cry after lessons. Not because my teacher made me feel bad but because I was so frustrated to not be able to break through.
And here’s the really weird thing.
Sometimes, I’d get so frustrated that I’d throw up my hands and abandon practice for a while, right? I’d say “fuck piano!” and just skip practice.
Then lesson time would roll around again, and I’d feel nervous that my teacher would admonish me. (Although she’s really nice and would never be mean to me… good asian child “get an A from teacher” syndrome never goes away!)
And you know what would happen?
After days of zero practice, I’d suddenly, mysteriously sound soooo much better than I did at my hardest working moments. And the techniques that I was tearing my hair out over would… roll off my fingers effortlessly.
What the actual fuck? This happened again and again.
And finally my teacher explained it to me:
When we’re too obsessed with getting something right, all the tension and effortfulness actually twists up our brains, and therefore muscles. And we end up sounding even worse than our baseline.
Giving our brains and muscles time to rest, and “forgetting about it” for a little while… allows our unconscious mind to actually integrate what we are learning.
And here’s an even crazier thing. I’d often tense up in front of my teacher when playing a difficult part because I wanted to “get it right”, and I’d sound terrible. I needed to relax to sound better, but no matter how many times she told me to relax, I couldn’t get myself to.
And we’d discover together that the only way I could get myself to relax enough… was to pretend that I’m drunk. (Yes, this is a real piano strategy I’d cultivated for myself.)
If I pretended I was drunk and sloppy and I’m just playing like whateverrrrr wheeeee… somehow, magically — or infuriatingly — I’d suddenly sound 100 times better. What the hell?
This taught me a crucial lesson.
Getting far, far away from the zone of “i’m putting in my 100% because I really this”…
… and saying instead “fuck it” and “i don’t care if it all goes to hell” and literally just abandoning it all for a while…
… made all these unconscious connections happen automatically that massively sped up my learning and added so much beauty and depth to my performance.
And this is exactly what I’ve done with my work for the past half year.
It’s not just that I am more relaxed and refreshed now. It’s like…. It feels like my mind got a whole OPERATING SYSTEM UPGRADE.
Like going from iOS 2 to iOS 20.
After 6-7 months of NOT even thinking about work, so many thorny creative + business problems that I’d been trying to solve for years… magically solved.
Brilliant next-level ideas… downloaded.
My ability to SEE things… massively upgraded. it’s like I moved up from the top of my neighborhood hill to the peak of Mt. Everest.
This is the power of unconscious processing that happens when you give yourself some “fuck it” space.
To be sure, I don’t have a full picture of how this is true yet.
Because I’m not fully out of my sabbatical period.
But I feel it.
I am already starting to feel glimpses and trickles of it.
The trick is, when the time comes to “abandon practice,” that you have to FULLY let go.
When I say “fuck it,” I mean “FUCK IT.”
And this is not to be confused with being generally indifferent, or avoiding challenges.
The two ends of the paradox are: give it your all, and then let go just as completely
Do your drills, and then forget about it and go take a long nap.
I want to be clear: being able to take months off from work is a great luxury and privilege. I feel enormously lucky and grateful to have had it, and am well aware that not every deserving person gets it.
But I share this because I see so many people not even allowing themselves small amounts of rest and unplugging.
Or feeling terrified that, once they let go of the tight grip on their work, it’s all gonna come tumbling down. Or, even if they do take a break, feeling paranoid about “losing momentum” the entire time and not fully being able to let their minds rest.
I get it. it took ME time and practice to TRUST the rest, too.
I’m still working on it, actually. (It’s hard to 100% decondition a mind that’s been programmed by capitalism for decades!)
But hopefully this message serves as an extra reminder that — if you are resonating with this — it is safe for you to soften into your next operating system upgrade.
And know that you can trust the infinite wisdom and massive operating power of your unconscious mind.
Whether it’s 6 months of 6 weeks or even just 6 minutes…
… you deserve to say “fuck it” and rest.