“Scrambled eggs.
Oh my baby how I love your legs”
So went the initial lyrics to one of the most covered songs of all time – Paul McCartney’s Yesterday. Go on – sing those lyrics to the tune of the song. They fit perfectly.
This was part of Lennon and McCartney’s process – inventing a substitute working lyric to help them finalise the melody and chords before replacing it with the final lyric.
And as a songwriter and musician, I find that fascinating. Little glimpses into the process of these two master songwriters intrigue me.
What can I learn from it?
What part of their songwriting process might benefit mine?
Because everything that exists started with nothing. The songs we sing, the buildings we inhabit, the teams we support, the cars we drive. And so those who created these things must have had a process in order to move their ideas from beginning to completion.
Pep Guardiola and Thomas Tuchel are two of the best managers in world football. They met a few years ago in a bar in Munich and exchanged ideas on the game. What football coach the world over wouldn’t have paid good money to sit surreptitiously at the next table, listening in to these two masters share their thoughts with each other?
Or for any Gaelic Football fans out there, picture yourself sitting next to Jim Gavin and Jim McGuinness in a restaurant as they discussed honestly and openly how they created two of the great recent GAA teams and cultures.
But we all know the chances of those two men sitting down and having that type of conversation is unlikely. Many of us don’t share our process because we don’t want to help our competitors. Guardiola and Tuchel met in 2014, long before they became rivals.
But as a creator or leader, sharing your process is one of the more generous and worthwhile things you can do. It not only helps the person with whom you’re sharing, but it helps you, the sharer too.
Do you remember maths class in school? Where your final mark wasn’t just based on the answer you got, but also on the process you used to reach that answer. You shared your process with the examiner so that they could evaluate properly how well you understood the topic at hand.
And the thing about maths is that there is always a right answer. But for many of us, the things we are creating aren’t right or wrong, just better or worse. And so for us to improve it’s even more important to learn from the processes of others. Not to copy them piece for piece, but to take the parts which could help and make them our own.
We get by with a little help from our friends.