Kind of Blue

Miles Davis was a visionary — perhaps the greatest jazz musician of them all. On March 2nd 1959, Miles walked into Columbia’s 30th Street Studio in New York City with his bandmates, and in just seven hours of recording they created Kind of Blue, regarded by many critics as the greatest jazz album of all time, and one of the most influential albums ever made.

Seven hours. That’s all it took. Just like the time you have tomorrow, in between when you clock in and clock out. It’s the opportunity you have every day this week. Seven hours is all it takes to create a masterpiece.

OK, it helped that before he started, he had some brilliant musical ideas and a tracklist. It helped that he had a band around him that included greats like John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley, and that he’d spent years learning from some of the greats that went before him. And it certainly helped that he was in one of the best environments for recording in the world.

But here’s the point: Miles had lined all this up. He’d gotten his ducks in a row, ready to go, so that when they arrived to make Kind of Blue, everyone knew what they needed to do. Because of his quality thinking and planning, the sessions flowed seamlessly to produce a masterpiece in seven short hours.

Great work takes momentum and what psychologists call ‘flow’. It feels effortless. But getting there takes thinking and planning, which is often anything but. It would have been hard for John Coltrane to play a solo with emotional resonance if he also had to think about ten other things at the same time and it would have been hard for Miles to realise his creative vision if he was still deciding on the timings for recording sessions or checking his email.

When we do the thinking first and line everything up, we give ourselves the chance to do something brilliant. And while we may not make a Kind of Blue every day of the week, it shows us what’s possible when we separate the thinking from the doing.