Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives

This is an interesting book about how perfection can be damaging sometimes. It’s a collection of stories about how “messes” – or, imperfections – contributed to some system to make it better.

In some senses, it reminded me of A Perfect Mess or Antifragile, but with a more evolutionary bent. How does accommodating for messes make us better?

One of the examples is The Köln Concert by Keith Jarret. This is a piano concert (and live recording) from the mid-70s. The story is fascinating – the impresario couldn’t find a decent piano, and Jarret originally refused to play. He finally conceded, and had to play on a bad instrument. The result is legendary. The book describes how having to compensate for the crappy piano transformed Jarret’s music into something entirely different.

Fundamentally, the book is about adaption and how it causes us to approach problems differently. I’ve read the same in books about practice – true masters of some skill will sometimes practice that skill with a self-imposed handicap. They’ll do this to compensate for the loss, and to understand what the loss means, and sometimes they develop a compensatory skill which allows them to be better when free of the handicap.

Good book. Always interesting. Enjoyed picking it up every day.