You sit with your eyes closed and turn your attention inward. You focus your attention on an immediate experience, perhaps your breath or a mantra. You become more self-aware as a breathing body. When the mind or feelings arise, you practice them with curiosity, openness, and acceptance. Then you refocus your attention on the present. Every moment is a new experience. You enter an intense state of rest and alertness.
What does this have to do with producing successful records?According to Rick Rubin, a lot.
Rick Rubin has produced award-winning and platinum albums. Some of the albums he produced are considered classics, such as the thrash-metal band Slayer’s Reign in Blood or the early hip-hop albums of the Beastie Boys, Run-DMC and LL Cool J. He has produced rejuvenating comeback albums through Johnny Cash, Black Sabbath and Dixie Chicks. He initiated genre collaborations, such as the rap-rock hybrid “Walk This Way” through Run-DMC and Aerosmith, and Johnny Cash’s canopy of a Nine Inch Nails song. According to Eminem, who worked with Rubin on The Marshall Mathers LP 2, Rubin has an amazing ability “to tap into other musical genres and dominate them all. “
But what’s really impressive is how you get other people’s most productive paintings. As James Hetfield of Metallica said, when they looked for other people to “really listen to Metallica,” they brought in Rick Rubin to produce. The full perspective of others is a must for all managers and leaders. How does Rubin do this so constantly and with so many people?Applying his experience as a meditation practitioner in his life.
When other people meditate, they pay attention in a special way: “By design, at the right time and without judgment,” according to Jon Kabat-Zinn, a founding fellow at the Cambridge Zen Center and author of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. Practicing this kind of attention helped Rubin become a better listener.
“A lot of other people don’t pay attention,” Rubin told me. If you pay attention conscientiously, other people have what they need. “Rubin leads artists to open up about their deep motivations. “I’m going to spend time with an artist and I’m going to pay very conscientious attention to what he tells me and I’m going to have him talk about his true goals, his highest goals,” she said. “We’re going to get back to the center of why they started doing what they do in the first place. “
Meditation is helping other people settle for the full diversity of their experiences, intelligent and bad, kind and dark. Rubin applies this stance without prejudice to help the artists he works with open up their creativity. “One of the most important things I look at What you have to do is create an environment where the artist feels pretty comfortable being naked,” he said. Other people do that, when other people really open up.
Based on his conversations with the artist, Rubin discovers how to maintain his strengths and minimize his weaknesses. This is how he can paint with such a wide diversity of artists. For example, it encourages some artists to write while driving because the attention they devote to driving prevents them from asking themselves. For an artist who struggled with lyrics, he invented a game with magnetic poetry to help him access his instinct about what songs meant to him.
Sometimes simply turning the context of the paintings, for example through recording into a space other than a recording studio, as the Red Hot Chili Peppers did when they recorded Blood Sugar Sex Magik, helps get artists out of their automatic behavior and allows for anything new. get there. ” Sometimes it’s about making it more convenient. The distraction of less convenience can bring a very clever idea,” he said. One thing he enjoys doing is having meetings walking on the beach. meeting,” he said. Walk-ins tend to be much, much more productive than meetings in an office. “
This summarized “knowledge” to which Rubin refers is well documented in educational studies on meditation. “Meditation creates a state of balance, peace, calm, and openness that allows you to be an open canvas and a calm, unbiased canvas,” Vered Hankinan assistant professor of studies at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School told me. Medicine, which conducts clinical studies on meditation. “It’s a starting point to know. ” By calming the chatter in the mind, “every once in a while, you have a moment of connection, a moment of understanding, a moment of real feeling as if it comes from some other component of yours that you may not have access to. “If you weren’t there, you wouldn’t be in this connected space,” he said.
Rubin recognizes that ego can make it harder for other successful people to do smart work. When artists succeed, they are less likely to hear the truth. “The same goes for other people who run successful businesses,” Rubin said. “They have a lot of other people around them telling them how wonderful everything is and that it doesn’t lead to more wonderful work. If everyone around you tells you that everything you do is wonderful, if there is no editorial information, you leave yourself a little lost.
Ultimately, Rubin’s focus is leadership through example. He’s helping artists create Grammy Award-winning and platinum-selling albums because he’s helping to create a more meditative state in others, even if they themselves don’t practice meditation, a procedure Hankin calls dyadic meditation. “There’s nothing bigger than someone who is really with you and gives you into some kind of dyadic meditative state,” he said. When you are with someone who cares intentionally, who is grounded and conscious, then you become more grounded and aware. Research shows that we capture the intellectual state of others we are close to. Even if they can’t verbalize it, artists probably capture Rubin’s concentration and openness. The meditative state of “wakefulness,” as described, is contagious.
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