My Summer at the Piano

“The best ideas are the ones that might turn out to be terrible ideas.” — Annie Clark

It took a summer at the piano to learn something crucial about business as I enter my MBA2 year: the difference between producing and creating.

I hadn’t really played the piano in years. But here it was, a sleek electric piano, one with keys that have the heft of the real thing. It was sitting in the center of my summer apartment’s living room, and I couldn’t not play it.

Recklessly through speakers, with full-throated vocals, on the weekends when my roommate wasn’t home. Through headphones with hummed melodies at night so as not to disturb the neighbors.

I remember, as a kid, slowly ticking off seconds from the kitchen timer my mom made me use to track my daily piano practice. Now I sought precious minutes before leaving for work or after finishing a project late in the evening. Almost every day I’d spend at least a half hour.

In recent years I’d written songs in a certain mold — sonically dense, layered with static and distortions, intentionally complex. I would begin with a chord progression on guitar and work with a friend to warp the structure until the song felt sufficiently textured. I started with real inspiration, but instead of following it to strange and unexpected places, I shaped that spark until my songs felt well crafted, conscious of certain traditions and influences.

Alone at the piano, I began creating something much simpler, more earnest. Perhaps it was my lack of skill or the inspiration of an unfamiliar musical layout, but I shed my impulse to shroud and obscure in favor of straightforward musical expression. I spent hours on the same small set of songs — not shepherding them toward a certain sound, but tweaking chords and structure to produce music closer to the thin, wild sound in my head.

Of course, these songs were not devoid of influences, but they held fewer obvious sonic touch points. Producing work in this manner was difficult. I felt I lacked a barometer to assess artistic success — without clear touch points, against what would I measure my songs? But it was also refreshing. Free from the need to circumscribe my music, I was creating some of my best music.

Also some of my worst. More often than not, my less constrained creative mindset took me to places that didn’t make sense or resulted in ideas that didn’t hang together. Operating without clear goals was liberating but also more difficult to produce a coherent result. This was borne out in the raw numbers of my work — in a previous summer, I might’ve produced seven or eight quality songs; by the end of this past summer, I had only two or three. These songs, however, represented my strongest, most honest work to date.

But my experience at the piano this summer reinforced a distinction I wish I’d internalized earlier — that between producing and creating.

Drawing connections between music and business is tricky for obvious reasons. But my experience at the piano this summer reinforced a distinction I wish I’d internalized earlier — that between producing and creating. While the two lie on a spectrum, creation is “the action … of bringing something into existence” (h/t Google dictionary) while production implies a more prescribed process. Creation is less reliable and riskier, but can result in a more unexpected idea or solution. Production gets you a similar result every time.

The majority of my MBA1 year was spent producing. I learned and applied OB concepts and strategy frameworks. I memorized and reproduced accounting formulas and ethics terminology. Much of this time spent producing was a good thing. I now have a deeper knowledge of cases and proven ideas to draw upon when solving future problems — this is often more efficient than deriving these insights on one’s own. In fact, some may argue that reinforcing the habit of consistently producing at a high level is the point (or at least a strong side effect) of business school.

But while business school gives us tools, it’s our choice when and how we decide to deploy these tools. Often choosing “to produce” instead of “to create,” especially in the business world where deadlines are tight and risk of failure is significant, is the right decision. But it can become easy to default to this option when sometimes what’s really needed is some truly fresh thinking.