How to move a cube

Sana and I were out to lunch the other day (literally eating lunch outside our home, not lost in la la land) and the topic of business came up, specifically how certain business “get it right” when it comes to being profitable.

You build community within your customer base; a sense of purpose in shopping at your store vs. the other guys’ store, etc.

To illustrate her point, Sana said, “How do you move a cube?”

“What kind of cube?” I asked.

“A cube of wood. How do you move it?”

“I guess you just push it,” was my sheepish reply.

“No, you round off the corners and make it into a ball.”

Brilliant! Why didn’t I think of that?

Because I’m a blockhead, that’s why. I always seem to choose the path of MOST resistance when an easier way is right in front of me – albeit with a little bit of effort involved.

There’s so much to unpack with that idea, but for the sake of keeping things simple, let’s just blame it on the ego.

The ego likes to say “Look at me, I’m getting all this work done,” when in fact you’re exerting effort unnecessarily. The same energy you’re using to push that block of marble could be used to shave off the edges into a ball. No, the ball doesn’t move initially, maybe not for a few days, weeks, months, even years.

But when you’ve done that work of removing as much resistance as possible, you can roll that sucker at will. In fact, once you get going, it’s practically unstoppable!

So you tell that ego – and your mother in law who keeps pestering you to “go get a real job” – to just be patient. You’re laying the groundwork for something amazing, and the results will eventually, and quite naturally, manifest. (For the record, that statement is purely allegorical. My own mother in law is a beautiful human being who has never said an unkind word to me about my own entrepreneurial endeavors through all their glories and failures.)

To illustrate, I’ll share some anecdotes about my own journey as a musician. The first few notes on any instrument are truly awful. And sounding like a beginner for the first few years is enough to try anyone’s patience.

Yes, I said a few years. That’s a tough sell in this era of instant gratification in which we live. But without those first years of chipping away at that block of marble we all begin with, it’s an endeavor that will end in failure every time.

Just about every interview I do for my Trumpet Dynamics podcast, I begin with the question of how they got started playing trumpet. The stories vary, but they all started with a big block of marble so to speak; and the interview is basically the process by which they’ve rounded out those edges to craft something that is both beautiful and efficient.

No musician has ever truly mastered their instrument, nor the art of music itself. If anything, the more we do it, the more we realize just how much we don’t know about it, how much we haven’t accomplished, how much we still need to practice.

But we can get to a place where it’s easier than it was the day before, or maybe a year before. Not just physically but mentally, emotionally and spiritually.