Effortless Mastery
Playing music should be as simple and natural as drawing a breath, yet most musicians are hindered by self-consciousness, apprehension, self-doubt, and stress. Before we can truly express our inner self, we must first learn to be at peace and overcome the distractions that can make performance difficult. Kenny's remarkable work deals directly with these hindrances, and presents ways to let our natural creative powers flow freely with minimal stress and effort. Includes inspiring recordings of meditations designed to initiate positive thought. This book has become a favorite of many musicians who credit it with changing their lives! Many are so impressed that they buy copies for their musician friends as gifts. Easy, effortless reading paperback. Effortless Mastery is a book that the world really needs. It was not written by a philosopher or an academic. Kenny Werner, is one of my favorite pianists I've ever had the pleasure of working with, and in my opinion one of the best pianists living on the planet. Kenny teaches that 'The joy of practicing is concentration. The joy of playing is liberation.' Effortless Mastery teaches the seeker how to achieve both at the highest levels. It also shows how to practice effectively, promoting real growth and how to play and perform free from fear and self-judgment. I highly recommend this book." ---Quincy Jones"
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10recommend
16mentions
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2012–2022years
81% recommend19% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The Jazz Theory book - Mark Levine
High Performance Browser Networking - edit: Ilya Grigorik
Effortless Mastery - Kenny werner
- Wow, never expected The Jazz Theory Book or Effortless Mastery to show up on HN. I'll add The Jazz Piano Book by Mark Levine and Jamey Abersold vol. 1 How To Play Jazz and Improvise
- I recommend Effortless Mastery to help with performance anxiety. It really resonated with me.
- I'm a jazz musician, and often used to do a lot of negative self-talk while playing in public. Like "Oh no, omg that was terrible, oh yuk, oh geez I can't play at all, oh that sounds awful!" etc. I read this book Effortless Mastery that mainly said, never criticize yourself on a gig—do that when you practise but never ever on gigs. So I stopped, and ever since have just had fun. The change was amazing.
I'm not sure but I think that affected my life in other areas too. Although I read a lot of self-help, psychology, new agey, etc books in my 20s, no one thing helped as much as that. I guess it's part of learning to love yourself. I was trained as a kid and young adult to treat others well, but never to treat myself well! The idea of yourself being one of these people you should treat well, never appeared. You can be so mean to yourself, say truly horrible things you'd never say to a friend or loved one, and hardly notice, if it's something you've always done. And I was bullied a lot at home and school, so treating me badly was something it was easy to also do myself, until I learned just to stop, to never do it. Then when you are kind to yourself, it's natural to be kind to others.
Some books I remember helping with this: New Guide to Rational Living by Albert Ellis (on becoming aware of your habitual thoughts and self-talk, and changing them for the better where necessary), Wayne Dyer's first two books Your Erroneous Zones and Pulling Your Own Strings (similar to Ellis), Louise Hay on loving yourself, SARK's first 8 books, everything by Robert Fulghum, A Life of One's Own and An Experiment in Leisure by Joanna Field/Marion Milner (psychological self-explorations). Emerson's essays. Also keeping a diary was very useful for seeing patterns, e.g. I'd describe some emotion for what seemed the first time, then see I'd described the same thing 10 times before!
- I experience this 100% with writing music. I suspect most of it is around the need for your creation to be good, versus allowing it to be child-like play. If you're able to suspend the need to be good for a moment, you can start to experience again the joy of playing, inventing, letting go. Kenny Werner's book Effortless Mastery is a great reference for this.
- Steal Like An Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative is a great book on similar themes. (The sequel Show Your Work! is also good) Also Creating a Life Worth Living had a huge impact on me - it's full of interviews with creative types of all kinds, and talks about how many different ways/styles of structuring your time and life there are, and how to find one that works for you.
When I was a jazz musician in my early 20s, I did a lot of negative self-talk on gigs. "Oh, that was awful! Oh yuk, Argghh that sux. Nooo...Terrible" etc. It made me sound terrible. Self-torture. Then I read a book Effortless Mastery, from which I learnt Never criticize yourself on gigs. The time for that is when you practise. And since then I never do that. I just enjoy myself and play. It really changed my life. And also learning about loving yourself - realizing that it's all too easy to be careful about treating other people well, always being kind, while being extremely mean to yourself. Louise Hay's How to Love Yourself is the book on that subject, I think.
