What “less is more” really means

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

I believe that the most effective way to achieve massive change in any domain is by incremental improvement. By doing a little every day, you will do a lot in one week, as my grandmother says. There is a lot of wisdom in these words. I am currently in my seventh year of learning new musical instruments, using my own motto: 15 minutes per day. The results of consistent practice every day have been stunning. Other musicians have told me they use the same technique with equally powerful results. A common recommendation seems to be that you should practice for at least 15 minutes every day, never less than that, and if you are in the zone, you can keep going. I am currently conducting an experiment to see if I can go even lower, and learn to draw with only one minute (60 seconds) of practice per day for a year. I want to know what effect the upper time restriction has. Some days ago, I discovered something that will change my life, if it is true.

I am now 40 days into my little art project. The most difficult thing is to limit myself to just one minute. When the alarm goes off on my egg timer, I do not want to stop. I want to keep drawing and painting. This urge is clearly growing on me. In the first weeks it was just fun to do the “time trial”, but now it sometimes feels I would give anything for just one minute more of creativity. In the Japanese principle of Kaizen, they also refer to the one-minute concept. Because when you do something for a minute every day, you will get better at it, have more fun, and before you know it, it’ll be five minutes, 10 minutes, an hour and finally you might start paying your bills with your one-minute passion because it turned into a day job. I am at the point now where I probably should follow the Kaizen principle and increase the time. But I will not do it, at least not yet! As I told you in my previous blog post, I do one painting every month without the upper time limit, to document progress. The upper time limit is a voluntary suppression of creativity. When I reach each monthly milestone and allow myself to draw freely, I suspect the growing desire to increase the daily minute with result in a massive recoil in creativity. At least that is what happened when I reached the first milestone and I suspect that the recoil will increase for every milestone. It is also an ancient and well-known human principle: The more you supress something, the more powerful the recoil will be. In physics we call it the conservation of energy. What if we can use it to our advantage?

The upper time limit has another benefit. My mind enters a completely different state when I am trying to achieve as much creativity as possible before the timer runs out. This means that I reach a completely different, deeper state of focus. I believe I am starting to fall into a trance and learning how to hypnotise myself, something that my friends Alexandros Megas and Vincent Byrne talks about in their excellent Podcast “Your mind is trying to kill you”, which also happens to be where I got this idea. In my daily 15-minute routine, my mind often wanders off. Honestly, you should try this yourself. Test if you can immerse yourself in an activity for 15 minutes without letting a single irrelevant thought enter your head. It is difficult! Then repeat the test the next day with a one-minute timer. I think we both know which one will be easier. Assuming that the level of focus attained in the one-minute session is much higher than in the 15-minute session, the end result will be that you are getting more bang for your buck (i.e. invested time). By repeating these sessions daily, I will condition my mind to enter a trance-like state for one minute. What if we can learn this skill so that we can choose to stay in this state for longer periods of time?

I raise some important questions here. The only way to answer them is to keep the one-minute egg timer. These strategies I propose are not quick fixes. You must be in it for the long run, at least one year. For reference: I am in my seventh year now. As with any exponential growth, progress is hardly visible at first and then suddenly, the curve skyrockets. And paradoxically, this slow-moving consistency might be the fastest way to achieve growth humanly possible.