You Cannot Build on a String That Is Out of Tune

Tune first.

Before the practice.
Before the flourish.
Before the ambition.

An out-of-tune instrument
punishes every good thing you do on it.

You play the right notes.
They sound wrong.
You cannot tell
if the mistake is your hand
or the string.

So you fix the wrong thing.

You chase your fingers
when the fault was in the foundation,
set badly, minutes ago,
in the step you were too eager to skip.

Everything rests on the tuning.

The chord.
The harmony.
The hours you are about to spend.

Build them on a flat string
and the hours build the flaw in
as if it were the song.

This is not only about music.

Tune the definition before you argue about it.
Tune the requirement before you build the feature.
Tune the assumption before you stack a plan on top of it.

A small error at the base
becomes a large error at the top.

Not because it grew.
Because everything above it
trusted it was true.

The boring step is the foundation step.

Nobody applauds the tuning.
No one records it.
It happens in the quiet
before the real thing starts.

But skip it,
and the real thing
is quietly ruined from the first note.

So do the unglamorous check.

Is this in tune.
Is this actually true.
Is the ground I am about to build on
the ground I think it is.

The great players
are almost boring about the basics.

They tune.
They warm up.
They check the thing
that beginners are too excited to check.

That is not caution.

That is the respect
the top of the mountain
pays to the bottom.

Start in tune.

Everything after it
finally gets to be about the music.

– Serguey Asael Shinder