It was the mid-sixties, in a concert hall in Stockholm, Sweden. The young pianist was deep into one of the best nights of the tour. The band was locked in. The teenage drummer was on fire and the saxophone was flat-out screaming.
Then, during the trumpet player’s solo, the pianist landed on a chord so wrong that his mouth fell open. He was certain he’d just wrecked everything.
The trumpet player paused for a fraction of a second. Then he played a handful of notes that did something the pianist couldn’t explain. They made the wrong chord sound right. The solo kept climbing, the song bent in a new direction, and the audience never knew anything had happened.
The pianist was Herbie Hancock. The trumpet player was Miles Davis.
By Herbie’s own account, it took him years to understand what Miles did in that moment. Herbie had judged the chord the instant he played it. Miles never did. Miles simply heard it as something new that had happened, and he got to work building on it.
I’ve hit plenty of wrong chords myself, on the bandstand and everywhere else. If you’re not stumbling once in a while, you’re probably not pushing hard enough. The real question is, how do we recover?
Here are four practices I’ve found helpful for bouncing back:
1. Give the sting a full day.
Our instinct after a setback is to shove the feeling down and power through. The trouble is that buried pain has a way of popping back up at the worst possible moments. James Pennebaker, an American social psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, has studied this for decades. Starting with his first study in 1986, his research found that people who wrote honestly about their most painful experiences for 15 to 20 minutes a day, across just three or four days, showed measurable improvements in physical and mental health compared to those who kept things bottled up.
So let yourself feel the sting and experience the pain for a day. Sulk, vent, write it down, sit with the embarrassment. It’s cathartic. Let it all out so there’s nothing left to linger.
2. Look for the beautiful oops.
One of my favorite children’s books is Beautiful Oops! by Barney Saltzberg. In its pages, an accidental tear in the paper becomes the roaring mouth of an alligator, and a few strokes turn a spill into a goofy frog. The book teaches young readers that mistakes are raw material for something creative and new, and that we’re not bad for making them.
3. Discover the lesson.
Instead of the stumble diminishing our self-worth, look at it as curriculum. What’s the inherent lesson and how can it make us stronger moving forward?
4. What’s next?
Instead of ruminating over what happened, shift your focus onto what’s next. Not necessarily the grand, long-term plan but rather the very next step. If you’re trying to stay fit but have a weekend of debauchery, don’t worry about how to make the cover of a wellness magazine. Just think about what Monday will look like.
If we want to do meaningful work, we’re going to have to get used to playing a wrong chord every once in a while. Decades later, Herbie Hancock remembered his as a great lesson, his own beautiful oops.