38 | work easy

work easy

💡 work easy

I launched the chordinnate album club just over a year ago with the idea that it would be nice to get together with other humans and discuss an album, much like you would meet to discuss a book. I would schedule and organize the virtual meeting space, but attendees would rotate picking the album and leading the discussions. Since that time, the club has been hosted by a variety of individuals - Nielly, Lavender Sound (Max Freedman), Shanté and Alex Lewis to name a few - and every meeting has been a great experience. It has also evolved. Alex Lewis introduced listening guides at some point last year, and this year we moved it over to Discord and added a pre-discussion listening session to the mix. I am better at generating ideas than following through on them, so the club’s evolution has been more of a testament to those who have signed up than club leadership!

This truth was on display again at the most recent meeting to discuss Pale Jay’s BEWILDERMENT. Shanté arrived with a mood board to share via Milanote, which included additional information on each track, alternate performances, and videos. It was awesome. In that mood board, Shanté highlighted a quote from Pale Jay in relation to the 8th track on the LP.

This was probably the song that came to me the easiest from the whole album. I had the instrumental almost finished and an emotional outburst that manifested itself in a sung freestyle over the backing track. Only two words of this initial take were changed afterwards and that was that. Sometimes it can be so easy...

I love this quote because it illustrates what can happen when the conditions are right. In sport, we often assume that it needs to be difficult. We talk about grinding and outworking the opponents. But, as Pale Jay noted, there are times when it can so easy. And that doesn’t make it bad. In fact, some of the best songs seem to arrive that way. They just show up, fully formed.

I turned on my tape deck, picked up my acoustic guitar, took a breath and played that from start to finish. And then sat back and went ‘Wow, what did I just do?’ And I listened to it. I didn’t change a word. Everything was just right there, off the top of my head. It’s a very sweet song. It’s got really good intentions.

Tom Petty on making of WILDFLOWERS

Less than a week after the club meeting, I went to my daughter’s 12u softball game. As per usual, the adults involved created conditions to make it difficult. They barked instructions from the sidelines and argued over rules in an attempt to find loopholes they could exploit to their team’s advantage. Teenage umpires had to absorb it all. Players got reprimanded for daring to be distracted by things that brought them momentary joy. Girls danced to the other team’s walkup songs only to be reminded to “focus.” To their credit, the kids dealt with it rather well. They supported each other and still found ways to have fun in an environment that seemed to have declared war on the very concept. After the game, they were praised for “fighting” and “battling,” with the adults doing the praising seemingly oblivious that it was only so goddamn difficult because of the environment they had created!

As a coach and parent, I can decide whether my job is to create conditions that make things arbitrarily hard for athletes or to create conditions that increase the odds of the sport equivalent of Pale Jay’s lyrical outburst. I can choose to focus on producing knowledge about, which is learning at the explicit, informational level, or focus on producing knowledge of, which is learning at the implicit, experiential level. I can create conditions that force athletes to grind it out and struggle to decipher in-depth explanations. Or I can create conditions that invite creativity and increase the likelihood that athletes stumble into solutions that I hadn’t even imagined.

Shanté’s inclusion of the quote from Pale Jay was a great reminder of what can happen when the conditions are right for such creativity. That means shifting from telling to teaching. From explanations to instructions. From commanding to coaching. From dictating desired outcomes to creating environments that invite those outcomes without ever stating them directly. And that effort on a coach’s part isn’t easy at all. But the payoff is potentially immense. In short, if I want athletes who can play freely and easily when the game starts, I might be best served by helping them experience that combo as often as possible.

Currently, the kids don’t have it easy. Look at the mess we are leaving them. Life is hard because of things largely outside of our control. But sport is mostly a reflection of the choices we make. So why make it harder than it needs to be? Grease over grind. Relax through over fight through. Play easy over work hard. Take a deep smile over take a deep breath. Create the conditions for fun and development, and get the f&%@ out of the way.

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🔬 research spotlight

As I was finishing up this issue, a colleague shared a summary of a new study on the effect of big rewards on learning. It felt relevant to the issue spotlight. The short version is that researchers found that learning can happen much faster than previously thought and with less variability among participants than previously witnessed (i.e., rather than huge differences in how long it took participants to learn a task, all participants learned at a similar, quick rate). But instead of plagiarizing the entire summary here, just go read it yourself. And to incentivize doing so with a big reward, I promise you that reading this will change your life in ways you could never anticipate!

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🎶 july album club

The chordinnate album club will meet on a TBD date in July to listen to a TBD album. To attend, click on the button below to sign up. Then look for an invite in your email. And if you know someone who might be interested, please send them the link!

An album club is just like a book club, but with a lower bar for participation. If you are interested, the chordinnate album club will run every other month throughout 2026 and will typically meet on a Thursday at some time between 6 and 8p EST.

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🖭 playlist / mixtape

For this playlist, I started with Pale Jay’s DON’T FORGET THAT I LOVE YOU and Tom Petty’s WILDFLOWERS, two examples of songs that came easily to the artist in a burst of creativity. I added other songs that have been reported to have arrived similarly, and finished it off with the instrumental to DON’T FORGET THAT I LOVE YOU. Enjoy it on Qobuz. And feel free to suggest additions if you know of tracks that reportedly arrived with similar ease!

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