Intentionality and Happy Accidents
Putting your mind in your muscles while embracing chaos
The pursuit of mastery, it seems, requires both the narrow focus of intentionality and the wide-open embrace of happy accidents. A mind that can see the specifics in the here and now while simultaneously scanning the horizon of infinite possibility. Straddling the middle ground between order and chaos. Practicing with a deliberate intent, whilst being open to the random happenstance that takes us to the next level. Following a path with concentrated intentionality, while being curious about unexpected forks in the road.
While thinking along these lines I happened upon the perfect Zen saying, shared by
:“Enlightenment is an accident. Practice makes you accident-prone.”
A Zen saying
The experience of a long-awaited breakthrough during skills practice is like a sudden enlightenment. We clumsily repeat our sequence of actions over and over with full intentionality but alas we can’t get it right. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, a happy accident. Our golf swing, our drum pattern, or our swim stroke feels just right - and with a sudden awakening, we’ve found the sweet spot. We’ve discovered the inner potential to perform an action just as we imagined we could. But the first happy accident is temporary, just a glimpse of the possible. We knew the secret of the universe, only to forget it - we felt the ephemeral enlightenment just for a moment and now it is gone. But knowing it is attainable, we’ve seen the evidence, and if we keep up the practice it starts to show up more frequently. Our nervous system has experienced getting it right, it knows how it feels and our goal towards which we direct or intentionality is much clearer. The practice has made us more ‘happy accident’ prone.
You could stop reading right now and use this idea to inspire you to get back to practicing!
Practicing with intentionality is hard work. Intentionality is the direction of our mental state towards objects or outcomes. When practising a skill, this involves the focus of our consciousness towards our activity, with a very specific purpose in mind. Where our consciousness goes, our energy goes. It is a costly endeavour in terms of our cognitive and physical energy.
Happy accidents happen on their own, often from making a mistake or when a new pattern or connection is suddenly brought to our attention from out of nowhere. We notice it, and it can break our focused intentionality, but it’s the very thing we need for a breakthrough.
Intentionality and happy accidents both require faith. Faith that our intentional practice will pay off in tiny incremental improvements, and faith that our curiosity in a happy accident will lead to some kind of breakthrough. Both are required for the creative process of mastery. Faith is beyond mere belief, it is more of a knowing. And the more we repeat the process of practising with intentionality with an openness to happy accidents, the stronger that knowing will become - the more faith we have that our endeavours will open up new skills, capabilities, and awareness.
“For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.”
Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Discovering intentionality
When I was in my 20s, my guitar practice was mostly noodling. I would sit on the sofa watching TV and noodle around with riffs and patterns that were already in my fingers. Usually, this would be in a state of exhaustion after a day’s work, accompanied by a few cans of Stella Artois or a bottle of red wine, or at the weekends in a hungover state followed by a boozy Friday night. I didn’t see myself as an excessive drinker, just fairly normal for my peer group in 1990s England. Looking back to my 20s it feels like such a waste of time and potential, but it’s hard for young people finding their way in life - it’s all part of personal growth.
It wasn’t until I was in my late 20s that I discovered a sense of intentionality towards practice. I had formed a function band with my bassist friend, a Soul / Motown revue band that we named Soultown. It was a ‘Turning Pro’ moment, to borrow Steven Pressfield’s term for the mindset shift one discovers when transitioning from amateur to professional. There was much more intentionality towards my practice, much more attunement to feedback and refinement through self-reflection. My practice had purpose, partly driven by the desire to create something that people would enjoy and appreciate, and also driven by the fear of making mistakes in front of live audiences. It was a gear shift in my learning and my awareness of music and the dynamics of playing with others, trying to get tight as a cohesive unit. We practised diligently as a group and my practicing at home was with full intentionality. There was a significant difference between noodling on the guitar with a can of beer in front of the TV, and mindfully practising with intent.
Arnold Schwarzenegger often speaks of the mind-muscle connection. The ‘perfect pump’ comes from an in-the-moment presence of mind, mindfulness over every part of the movement being performed, lifting with full intentionality, sensing how your body is reacting to the task, and noticing your thoughts with an undistracted self-awareness throughout the workout just as one would when practising meditation. Schwarzenegger asserts that one rep with full mindfulness was worth ten without. This is a self-awareness and attunement to the mind-body connection that improves performance and avoids injury. The opposite would be a distracted workout akin to my guitar noodling while supping beer and watching TV.
Intentionality, along with Instruction, Practice, Surrender, and playing The Edge, is one of the five keys to mastery identified by George Leonard, Aikido instructor and author of the 1992 book ‘Mastery’. Leonard alludes to intentionality as a meticulously honed mental discipline which plays a demonstrably significant role in the pursuit of mastery. This combination of character, willpower, and focused visualisation provides a cognitive framework upon which competence is built. He and others describe how athletes routinely attribute their success to the vividness of their mental rehearsals, essentially pre-wiring their nervous systems for optimal performance. This intentionality points to mastery as an attitude, rather than a measure for expertise. A transformation from the imagined to the real is what the process of mastery is all about, hence the importance of intentionality. Intentionality fuels the master’s journey. Every master is a master of vision.
See my recent summary of George Leonard’s book, Mastery:
What does intentionality feel like during practice?
I am mindful of the purpose of my practice and I’m not on autopilot.
I am intentional towards the mistakes I’m making. Listing to them and deliberately reflecting on them rather than reacting emotionally.
I am in the mindset for sustained practice, for accepting and persisting through the boredom, focused on the practice, not on other things.
I intentionally bring my mind to the moment, noticing when it veers off to past regrets and glories, or an imagined future. I can’t always control where my mind goes, but I can pay attention to it and bring it back to where I want it.
I’m noticing sensations etc. Listening to immediate feedback.
My focused attention is on the immediate step, my short-term goal, not on future steps or an imagined eventual outcome. I can dream about my aspirations at other times.
My assertion through this ‘Ordinary Mastery’ project is that this attitude is available to all of us most ‘ordinary’ people. It’s a matter of mindset, using our imagination, our ability to visualise, putting ourselves in the right state, and forging a character or identity that’s mindful and intentional. Intentionality is a practice in itself, something we pay deliberate attention to, developing the metacognition of self-observation, and self-awareness where we are more mindful of our mindset, making adjustments to our environment and our inner disposition to whatever we are working on in the given moment.
An openness to happy accidents
Happy accidents seem the polar opposite to intentionality but these forces are not just necessarily opposing, but mutually perpetuating and interdependent. It’s the yin-yang of practice. Yang could be related to the productivity of structured intentional practice, while yin embodies the qualities of receptivity and creativity that would be attuned to happy accidents. The symbol is a visual representation of the concept that within the black area of yin, there is a white seed of yang, and within yang, there is a seed of yin, reflecting the idea that nothing is purely yin or purely yang and that each aspect contains the potential for its opposite. Chaos and Order. The chaotic seed of yin within the ordered yang of intentionality is the happy accident that leads to the spontaneous joy of a breakthrough.
Just as yin and yang are interrelated and coexist, concentrated focus and happy accidents can complement each other in the creative process, leading to a dynamic balance. Somehow we have to find that balance - being simultaneously open and closed. If we’re not attuned to the synchronicity of happy accidents, we will miss opportunities that would serve us. If we are too intentional and too focused, we may be unreceptive to happenstance. But if we follow every emergent thread of creative divergence we risk being distracted from our goal. We find this principle of polarity in all facets of life, everything is a continuum within which we must find our own equilibrium, the comfortable chair in which Goldilocks may eat her perfect porridge. Our job is to straddle the yin and the yang, be both right-brained and left-brained to borrow from the oversimplified and admittedly erroneous model of the mind.
“This porridge is too salty, this porridge is too sweet, this porridge is just right”
Goldilocks
Perhaps we could think of happy accidents in terms of evolutionary mutations. During our practice sessions, just as with the principles of Darwin's evolution, we encounter chance variations or mutations. While practising the drums, an inadvertent drop of the drumstick at an unexpected moment may introduce a delightful syncopation. Noticing this, we strive to intentionally replicate it, leading to a completely new rhythm.
Keep an eye out for these variations and happy accidents. Renowned drummer Bernard Purdie, recognised as the world’s most recorded drummer, playfully stumbles upon the pleasing "air" in his hi-hat in the beautiful clip below (0:58 & 1:18 seconds), these only come from time spent sitting at the kit. We never know when the next breakthrough will come. This is where faith in intentional practice is rewarded with revelation.
A new pattern of neural firing has emerged while practising that grabs your mind’s attention circuits - your body feels the pattern, it is salient to your mind because it is close to what you were seeking intentionally - you feel the tingle of your reward mechanism kicking in and magically your brain knows how to lock it in, to slightly deepen the groove you wanted. As you come back to intentional practice you find yourself in that satisfying groove more frequently.
Happy accidents are the benevolent demons, the black dots of yin, in the creative process. They take our work in unexpected directions, but we have to be working in the first place for their benevolence to bear fruit. We create our own luck by showing up in the first place. As Picasso said, “To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing”, we must up pick the pencil or the drumstick through which the demons may do their accident-prone work.
In life and work
This project is named “Ordinary Mastery’ because I see the value in developing the attitude of mastery and applying it to our ordinary lives of obligations and commitments, not just as the achievement of extraordinary results or becoming a master in a specific field. So how does the spectrum of intentionality and happy accidents apply to our ordinary lives?
Work is where we are more likely to find intentionality, the ever-present language of targets, productivity, performance and results-driven thinking. However, what we experience at work might often be performative intentionality rather than deeply imbued intentionality - we need to be seen saying and doing the right things at work. Work is often the domain of linear thinking. A world of cause and effect, inputs and outputs, and focused attention where playfulness is frowned upon and the kind of experimentation that might create breakthroughs is perceived as too risky. With the rise of remote and hybrid working, there are arguably less chance encounters around the water cooler that would give rise to the intersection of ideas that give rise to bursts of spontaneous insight and creativity.
In life outside of work, except for the intentional pursuit of our hobbies, we are more likely to be in an unintentional mode and more open to happenstance - bumping into an old friend in the high street, a random deviation while out on a walk, stumbling upon something new online, going with the playful flow of existence. Intentionality is hard work so we’ll drop our guard when we’re at home, but this might not necessarily be to our benefit. When we eat without intentionality we risk grazing on junk food. Like many people, much of my eating has a mindless aspect to it. I’ll walk past the fridge and out of habit I’ve opened it, seeking that momentary sensation of eating something. Most of my grazing choices are healthy ones, but the mindless habituation of constantly seeking sensation bothers me. So I’ve brought a deliberate intentionality to eating, trying to avoid the random troughing. Not always with success, but certainly with more awareness. How many of us eat on autopilot with no intentionality whatsoever, whilst longing for the toned body that continues to elude us?
"We all eat and it would be a sad waste of opportunity to eat badly”
Anne Thomas
Our internet habits and device usage most likely lack intentionality as we become victims to the infinite scroll and algorithms designed to optimise their limbic hijacking potential. Our relationships most likely also suffer from a lack of intentionality, where we risk falling into patterns of neglect, social dramas and victim consciousness. Without intentionality in the ‘ordinary’ aspects of our lives, we risk drifting and meandering, dislocated from a sense of purpose.
As a concluding thought, I would like to assert that most of us would benefit from flipping our intentionality stances around work and life, to create the kinds of cultures at work where we are more exploratory and open to happy accidents, whilst bringing more intentionality to our life outside of work.
We experience happy accidents when we say ‘YES’ to life, following a hunch and seeing where it leads, meeting that stranger, going to that event, playing with that new idea, exploring that business opportunity, engaging with that random Substack article and leaving a comment. Happy accidents often come as gifts, disguised as rejection or a setback, but we need to be receptive to the gift if we are to find its leverage.
Being accident-prone
I didn’t quite know where this article was going when I started - it began as a piece about intentionality, but along the way, the angle on happy accidents showed up. And then finally I had a little creative leap when contrasting life and work. Only by setting out on the journey of writing this piece would I have been open to the happy accidents that presented themselves at just the right time. In this regard, happy accidents are an emergent property of contemplation.
This thought echos a recent post on the creative process where we need to listen to where our work wants to go:
Intentionality is hard work. It is an active attitude rather than a passive one, requiring cognitive effort. The brain likes to conserve energy so our bandwidth for intentionality is limited. There are likely certain times of the day, such as early in the morning, when our internal neurochemical conditions are more suited to practising with intentionality. We could deliberately schedule our exploratory noodling for later in the day when we have less energy for intentional practice.
A practice is, in itself, repeatedly doing what you're committed to, with intentionality - doing it for the sake of the practice rather than for the outcomes, surrendering to the process, loving the plateau - and graciously welcoming the happy accident breakthroughs if and when they come.
Intentionality is dealing with the known, a known goal, a known direction. Happy accidents emerge from the unknown. And there’s an interplay between the two, after the happy accident creates a new known phenomenon, that phenomenon then becomes an object of our intention, as we explore and exploit it.
Between the concentrated focus of intentionality and the wide-open acceptance of happy accidents, we need to find a contemplative state which connects the two stances, straddling the yin and the yang with a love of the mystery of learning, the magic of how it all comes together as a catalyst for our transformative growth.
Surprising and delightful to hear what I wrote landed as you were writing this article, John. Love the serendipity and shout out. Thanks, my friend.
I was reminded of the process of natural selection as I read about the accidental steps towards mastery...