The Next Note
In the mid-1960s, Herbie Hancock was playing piano with the Miles Davis Quintet at a concert hall in Stockholm, Sweden. As the band approached a climactic moment of Miles’ song So What, Hancock writes in Herbie Hancock: Possibilities, “just as Miles is about to really let loose, he takes a breath. And right then I play a chord that is just sowrong. I don’t even know where it came from—it’s the wrong chord, in the wrong place, and now it’s hanging out there like a piece of rotten fruit. I think, Oh, shit.” In his early twenties at the time, Hancock worried the mistake could cost him his place in the band. “Miles pauses for a fraction of a second,” he writes, “and then he plays some notes that somehow, miraculously, make my chord sound right…unleashing a solo that took the song in a new direction.” “That taught me a very big lesson about not only music but about life,” Hancock later said. “You have to be able to take bad situations and make something constructive happen with them—that’s what I learned from that situation with Miles.” Or as Miles Davis himself liked to say: “if you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note you play that determines if it’s good or bad.”
The note, situation, experience, or response after a bad or wrong note, situation, experience, or response—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
Shake Off A Bad Take
At 16, Anne Hathaway landed her first role on the TV show Get Real. After a bad take one day, she went to her trailer and, not wanting to ruin her character’s makeup, folded a tissue and held it just below her eyes to catch her tears. Some twenty years later, Hathaway took that crying experience and made something constructive happen with: on set of the miniseries WeCrashed, she pitched director Drew Crevello the idea for her character Rebekah Neumann, the wife of WeWork founder Adam Neumann, to fold a tissue in half and cry into it. After Hathaway told this story, she said, “I think that one of the main ways I’m different as an actor than the way I started is I have learned how to shake off a bad take. My whole existence as an actor is not defined by a good take or a bad take anymore. I have gotten comfortable with, ‘Okay, that was a terrible, loud, wrong choice. Let’s learn something from it and try to find something else.’”
What If I Made This The Best Thing That’s Ever Happened To Me?
After winning back-to-back gold medals at the 2006 and 2010 Winter Olympics, Shaun White was the favorite to win gold at the 2014 games in Sochi. But…White didn’t even podium. After the disappointing performance, he said, “it sounds ridiculous talking about it now, but I was at my house on the beach in Malibu. I’m sitting there crying, trying my hardest to feel so sad for myself that I didn’t win.” As he was sitting there crying, the thought occurred to him, “What if I made this the best thing that’s ever happened to me?” Thinking about what it would take to turn the low point of his career into the best thing that ever happened to him, White began to dissect what went wrong in Sochi. He quickly realized it had nothing to do with his ability on the snow. The qualifying runs took place four and a half hours before the Olympic finals. In those qualifiers, White scored a 95.75, the highest score of the night. “I had the winning cards,” as he put it. “I just couldn’t put them down when it mattered most.” “So it wasn’t a physical problem,” he said. “It was mental.” Before he dropped into the halfpipe for his final run, Shaun said he had this unusual, overwhelming sense that he was going to lose, that he wasn’t going to be able to put down his winning cards. “My mind was just not in a good place,” he said. To try to figure out what was disrupting his mindset during competition, “I picked apart my personal life away from the snow…I picked apart things that were upsetting me: how I was portrayed online and in ads. Do I like who I’m working with? When was the last time I spoke to my brother? When was the last time I hung out with my friends? When was the last time I worked out? Those are the things I started to change in my life. It had nothing to do with snowboarding.” He started working out, “not for the physical benefits, but because I know after a good workout, I’m happier.” He deleted most of the photos on his instagram, “because I didn’t like all the old photos of me with the long hair.” He reconnected with his brother. He prioritized spending time with his friends. “I made all these changes that made me a more complete, happier person,” Shaun explained, “And then once I went back to snowboarding, I was just a happier guy on the snowboard.” Fast forward to the 2018 Olympics, “it was a deja vu of the moment at the previous Olympics in Sochi,” Shaun said. Just like in Sochi, at the 2018 games in PyeongChang, it came down to Shaun’s final run. “But this time, at the top of the pipe, I had the complete opposite feeling. I had this overwhelming confidence that I was about to win.” Indeed, on the final run, Shaun put down one of the best runs of his life, scoring a 97.75 to reclaim the gold. “And when I look back, I’m so proud of that gold medal, not necessarily because of the medal, but because of the human I became to get it. You know, a more well-rounded person. A happier person.” A person who made a low moment the best thing that had ever happened to him.
Your Mindset After Something Bad Happens
Late in the 2016 NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship, Villanova blew a 10-point lead. With 4.7 seconds left, UNC hit a 3-pointer to tie the game. Villanova’s head coach, Jay Wright, called a timeout, and as his players walked to the huddle, they were all saying the same word: Attitude. “When I looked into the eyes of our players,” Wright writes in his book Attitude, “I saw no anger or regret. No one bemoaned [the UNC player’s] ‘lucky shot,’ or that any of our guys had failed to stop him from grabbing the pass that led to that shot, or anything else.” Instead, “they were all saying, ‘Attitude. Attitude. This is what we do. Attitude. This is what we do.’” With this mindset, the players returned to the court. Villanova’s Kris Jenkins inbounded the ball to Ryan “Arch” Arcidiacono. Arch dribbled up the left side of the court, crossed half court, cut right towards the 3-point arc, where he underhanded a pass to Jenkins, who caught the ball with 1.3 seconds left, and, in perfect rhythm, jumped then released the ball with 0.6 seconds, and hit a buzzer-beater to win the 2016 NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship. “It’s the most important aspect of our program,” Coach Wright writes. “When we break a huddle, we say ‘1, 2, 3, Attitude.’” The test of Attitude, Wright taught his players, is: “Where is your mindset after something bad happens to you?”
You Hardly Even Notice When I Try To Show You This Song
After staying up all night writing a song, the musician Jack Johnson was excited to play the song for his wife. When she woke up, in their kitchen, Jack strummed an acoustic guitar and sang the new song. “And she kind of didn’t seem to care,” he said. She turned around and started making pancakes. “I was kind of frustrated,” Jack said, “and I still had the guitar in my hands, and I was like, [he sings], ‘Baby, You hardly even notice / when I try to show you this song / it’s meant to keep ya from doing what you’re supposed to,’ and she turned around and said, ‘Ooo, I like that one though.’” And that one became his popular song, Banana Pancakes.
It’s All Material
The writer Jorge Luis Borges said, “A writer—and, I believe, generally all persons—must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose…All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.” The wrong notes, the bad takes, the low moments, something bad happens, your wife doesn’t like your new song—it’s all about what happens next. It can all be material.