Less Is More

There is a phrase my muso mates and I come back to again and again: less is more. In my gigging days, while I always quietly wanted a solo, the prospect of it also brought notable waves of anxiety. In those moments, I’d always play in a way that tried to fill every gap, almost like trying to prove I belonged by playing more notes. What’s interesting to me is that the players I most admire do the opposite. They leave space and listen.

Less is more…

I have spent a lot of my life at a keyboard, playing and singing blues, country, ballads, and the like. It took me years to feel what that phrase really means. “Less is more” is not about playing little. It is about playing the choice notes. What I’ve learnt about myself is the ‘must play everything’ reaction fills the silence out of fear. Response listens first, then chooses the notes that belong.

"'Less is more' is not about playing little. It is about playing the choice notes."

Rick Rubin, in The Creative Act, widens that idea in a way that covers a whole life. “To create,” he writes, “is to bring something into existence that wasn’t there before.” He does not mean only songs and paintings. He means the reality we each generate, moment by moment. “Through a series of electrical and chemical reactions, we generate a reality internally… we read words, hear voices, and form interpretations. Then, in an instant, we produce a response. All of this in a world of our own creation.”

I think if we can read that as a leader, it stops being poetry and becomes a mirror.

One tool I use in my executive coaching work, the Leadership Circle Profile, maps this territory extremely well. It divides our leadership into two structures. Sticking with the musical theme, reactive tendencies are the notes we play out of fear: controlling, complying, protecting. It’s the attempt to quickly fill every silence so we feel safe, stable and secure. Creative competencies are the motifs of response: leading from purpose, relating with authenticity, staying aware enough to choose. Same event, two entirely different ‘soloing’ styles, depending on which narrative is running the show.

"Every meeting, every hard conversation, every silence is a note."

One of Rubin’s lines that drew me in when I first began reading, “attuned choice by attuned choice, your entire life is a form of self-expression,” is an absolute banger and, for my money, one of the best descriptions of creative leadership I’ve come across. It suggests that a leader is composing all day. Every meeting, every hard conversation, every silence is a note. The question is not whether we are creating. Rubin insists we always are. The question is whether we are creating in life-giving ways or out of fear.

The reactive player defends the first take, filling space to feel safe. The creative leader does the harder thing, staying open enough to hear what the moment is actually asking for. Rubin calls it paying attention. “A practice of paying attention. Refining our sensitivity to tune in to the more subtle notes.”

That phrase lands for any musician. The subtle notes are where the feel lives. In leadership they may be the silent conversation we are having to ourselves, the quieter team member at the table, the shift in someone’s tone, the thing not being said. Miss them and we may be playing too much and too loud.

Less is more is never about restraint for its own sake. It was always about making enough room to hear what the song needs next, and then playing your best response.