In my recent conversation with banjo player Bennett Sullivan, he told me about a night on Broadway that he’ll never forget.
He was in his twenties, playing in the pit for Bright Star, the Steve Martin production.
It was his job to kick off the next song. The click track was running in his ear, his moment was about to arrive...
And then his mind went somewhere it wasn’t supposed to go.
“I got in my head about it,” he said. “I was like, oh god. Don’t mess up. Don’t mess up.”
You can predict what happened next.
“I felt like the world was crumbling around me,” he said. “I thought that I had ruined the show.”
He spent the rest of the performance convinced he had wrecked the whole thing, replaying the flub in his mind, bracing for the fallout.
The two realities
After the show, Bennett went to find the singer he had been accompanying so he could apologize for his blunder.
“I was like, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” he said. “And she was like, no. It’s all good.”
It didn’t stop there. People were coming up during the autograph line, and what were they saying?
“They were like, that was the best version of that song we’ve ever heard.”
It was a powerful lesson.
“The audience is hearing something completely different,” Bennett said. “Their experience is completely different than what your experience is. And I’ve learned that.”
You might not have played banjo in a Broadway show, but you can probably relate.
A time where things went awry when you were on a “stage” of some kind, and you were certain that everyone had noticed. Only to discover later on that they hadn’t.
You might’ve thought they were just being kind, but the research here suggests otherwise. Because it shows that what you perceive when you perform and what your audience perceives are two very different things.
In one study, ten advanced pianists recorded themselves playing through a piece. Those recordings contained 380 wrong, missing, or added notes.
Then the recordings were evaluated by trained pianists who had the score sitting right in front of them. And they were asked to catch every mistake they heard.
How many did they catch? The single best listener amongst them caught just 22 percent. And the worse caught only 7 percent.
Trained musicians, actively hunting for mistakes missed the overwhelming majority of the very errors that would feel like the end of the world to the person playing them. And if that’s how a trained expert hears it, just imagine the average listener.
In another famous experiment, psychologists had people put on an embarrassing t-shirt and walk into a room full of others. Then they asked them to guess how many people had noticed. The subjects figured the number would be at least half.
It was actually closer to a quarter. This is so common it has a name: the spotlight effect.
We vastly overestimate how much people are paying attention to us. You feel like you’re on center stage under a spotlight.
But the truth is everyone else is mostly thinking about their own stuff.
Put those two findings together and Bennett’s night makes perfect sense. The audience wasn’t watching him as closely as he assumed, and the mistake he was so sure they’d all heard was one most of them never registered.
His disaster never made it outside of his own skull.
Your inner critic is not reality. Remember that the next time you’re inclined to listen to it.
WHAT’S YOUR PRESSURE PROFILE?
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References
On how few mistakes listeners actually catch: Bruno Repp, “The art of inaccuracy: Why pianists’ errors are hard to hear” (Music Perception, 1996).
On the spotlight effect: Gilovich, Medvec & Savitsky, “The spotlight effect in social judgment” (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000).
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That was awesome. Thanks.