Good Work is All About Being in Rhythm

An ode to no interruptions.

You constantly hear it in post-game interviews, after someone like Lebron James barely misses any shots and goes for 35 points.

“I was just in rhythm.”

Lebron might follow this statement with something like:

“My teammates kept getting me the ball.”

What an amazing concept. A guy is feeling good, nice and loose, and everyone around him just keeps handing him the basketball.

For a basketball player, that ball is like his paintbrush, the court his easel. It’s his keyboard, the court his Word doc. His guitar, the court his… Ah, you get the point.

But not every basketball player is Lebron James. Some are guys who, on any given night, can light up the score board just the same. And what do they say in their postgame interviews?

“I was just in rhythm. My teammates kept getting me the ball.”

You see, you don’t need to be a superstar to produce great results. Sometimes you just need to feel a certain way, and for conditions to be right. You need to be in rhythm, a nice interrupted groove, where people get out of your way — or, alternatively, you get them out of the way — and do your thing.

I notice that a lot of times people — including myself — get far too mucked up in the process of doing things, instead of just doing them.

So much thought and effort goes into dissecting every little move, every little step, that it takes forever just to get anything done. And what you come out with isn’t even good.

I don’t think this is the right way to do things, at all. Imagine if basketball players came out to warm up before games and spent three hours looking over the mechanics of their jumpshots, just to make sure they’re shooting properly.

What a waste of time!

Sure, some of that does take place, but only if they’re in a slump. Only if they’re not playing well.

People get hung up on Malcolm Gladwell and the whole 10,000 hours thing, but the most important part of putting in 10,000, I think, is repetition.

It’s not about spending 10,000 hours in totality. That’s like a person going to the gym one day a month for 20 years and expecting to be in shape at the end of it.

No. It’s about spending 10,000 hours in a manner where it’s repeated, over and over and over again. It’s about spending a lot of time doing the same thing, in a nice comfortable rhythm.

I think about this a lot during the day, when I’m trying to get something done, but I’m inundated with email and twenty tabs open in my browser, tweets are coming at me, Facebook messages, pictures of people’s lunches to like on Instagram and all this other stuff.

How can I produce great work like this? Does Lebron tweet while he’s at the foul line? Hell no! He is singularly focused on winning the game.

Rhythm is important in all aspects of life, not just work. Think about your relationships with other people and the way you interact with the world.

When two people meet each other and fall in love, what do they usually say?

“We immediately had a connection. We were just in sync!”

When everything seem to be going right for you, what do you say?

“The chips just fell in place!”

But, when things are halted and stop flowing so well, you say:

“We hit a bump in the road.”

A bump is bad. A bump screws everything up. Imagine if your car just kept hitting bumps. You’d probably be like, “man, they need to fix these damn roads!”

Point is, to get where you need to go— for everything to exist harmoniously— you need to find a way to keep your wheels moving along uninterrupted.

You gotta be the basketball player out there before games, putting up 500 jumpshots, so that the first one he takes in the real game isn’t the first, and it’s smooth and perfect.

You gotta get into a rhythm. Then you have to stay there.