don’t stop swinging
Christian Ray Flores here, Thinking about timeless music, chess masters, and why brilliant people stop making brilliant things.
Deb and I went to see 77-year-old Lionel Richie this week.
Expectations were low, quite frankly. Good friends were going and we thought we’d just hum familiar tunes while we hang out in a bougie sponsor box enjoying some good food. We expected to go home halfway through.
We stayed to the last song.
It was a barrage of timeless songs that thousands of people of all ages knew every word of. It was truly one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. Song after song — pure timeless brilliance, and many of them I didn’t remember were Lionel’s.
I sat there thinking — almost nobody gets to do that. Not for lack of the goods. I’ve spent twenty years around people loaded with the goods. So why don’t they?
I found the answer in chess, in the form of a fascinating study.
Researchers handed chess masters a puzzle with two ways out: a familiar solution that works fine, and a better one hiding a few squares away.
The masters opted for the familiar move, ignoring the better one. Masters — and their play dropped to the level of players three standard deviations below them. Amateurs, essentially.
This is where it gets really good. The researchers tracked their eyes. The masters insisted they were still hunting for something better, but their eyes never left the move they already knew.
They weren’t scared. They were so good that exploring new creative options was no longer natural for them. Their mastery was their trap.
You’re carrying more range, more judgment, more wisdom than you’ve ever had — and the best move you already know how to make is parked right on top of the better one you haven’t.
And it’s the exact move of your next breakthrough. You don’t have a wisdom problem. You have an at-bats problem. You stopped swinging because you got good.
The tragedy of it all is that you’re at your peak, and if you just took more swings the odds are ever in your favor.
Lionel took so many swings through the decades, including judging American Idol, which gave him a new chapter and generations of new fans. The man has become undeniable to millions where he could have comfortably coasted on the work he did in just one decade of his illustrious career.
Ready to take more swings? Join my next masterclass.
For my paid subscribers, early access to my podcast interview with Shae Bynes — author and entrepreneur who did the exact opposite: more swings after reaching mastery than before.
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