Playing with an orchestra parallels teamwork or business in many ways: Arsha Kaviani | Mindset Matters
Today’s guest: Arsha Kaviani
Arsha is one of the most uniquely versatile pianists and music composers, and also an absolutely astonishing, mindful human being. My friend, and also, first non-business executive at Mindset Matters.
And while you’re reading this and probably thinking: “Who again? A pianist? I subscribed to read some entrepreneurial wisdom, bro” I would highly advise you to read this episode till the end.
I believe you’ll be genuinely surprised how music creation parallels business in its core, and how much meaning it can add up to your daily entrepreneurial hussle.
I remember I was.
Don’t be fooled by the label "musician" — "Arsha explains how you can apply the music creation process to coming up with business ideas. He also explains techniques he uses when he gets stuck in the creative process. Something I'm sure we can all relate to as entrepreneurs.
He leans toward business concepts centered around music.
On a personal level, his life story resonates with me deeply. While no one has yet turned it into a screenplay, book, or movie, I invite you to dive into Arsha’s mindset a bit.
Hi there! I'm Dima, entrepreneur with investor background. Co-founder and former CEO @ Reface. Ukrainian. Scout @ a16z. Investor.
I launched the Mindset Matters to share thoughts and lessons I've gathered from conversations with serial entrepreneurs, top-notch VCs, builders, and doers I admire and respect. About more than just work.
Bi-weekly . Well, monthly. Free. In your inbox and here, on Substack.
Arsha’s absolute strength is in how gracefully he combines the use of his imagination and technique in creating new experiences of world-known masterpieces, and his own works.
In his career Arsha has given critically acclaimed performances with international orchestras including Tonhalle Zurich, The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and Orchestre Symphonie de Bretagne, and performed solo recitals in prestigious venues ranging from London to Tokyo.
You can also listen to his album “Accents & Echoes” online, and I highly encourage you to do so.
We met thanks to our common friend, Max Buchan (founder @ cybersecurity startup Valarian), and since then, we couldn’t stop talking about everything and all at once. I was surprised how naturally Arsha’s shared fresh yet so relatable insights about life's meaning, finding one's passion, getting yourself into the creative process or even navigating through a crisis.
Without further ado: here is a conversation with Arsha, unfiltered.
You have found your signature approach to creating music works - interpretation. What advice would you give to young artists, talented creatives to help them find their unique path? Do you think this advice could apply to business founders?
The best place to start as a creative or a founder — whether you're painting, photographing, or building a B2B SaaS company — is by first shadowing your influences, those you admire, and the greats who came before you (not necessarily limited to your field of practice). Finding a mentor and really understanding their mindset, workflow, and processes can be incredibly valuable. Only by accumulating all of these influences and deeply understanding the processes can you then find parallels between them and your unique experiences, worldview, and the problems you wish to solve.
Ultimately, simplicity and the reduction of these influences, ideas, and processes to their most essential components is the goal. As Picasso famously said, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” Similarly, Ernest Hemingway’s "iceberg theory" applies here: the most foundational elements of a skill or creation are often hidden beneath the surface, built on a massive foundation of experience and mapped to one’s personal life and narrative. This is what allows for truly unique works of art—or, in the business and tech world, solving unique problems in a unique way with distinct execution.
What do you think prevents people from finding their unique style, unique niche or building new venture?
The challenge I see in the creative arts today is that many people want to achieve an overnight "zero-to-one" reinvention of the wheel without first understanding and internalizing the very language they’re trying to reinvent from a first-principles perspective.
An example I often give is that many performers in classical music, though highly skilled technically, still don’t understand the foundational principles of music, harmony, and structure. It’s like someone memorizing all the mouth movements and phonetic inflections of Shakespeare's Hamlet, but not actually speaking or understanding English, or the historical context in which the language was written.
It’s interesting that derivation and imitation are often frowned upon in modern composition schools, even though one of the most revered composers in Western music history, J.S. Bach had a lifelong habit of copying by hand the music of his peers and predecessors, sometimes to the point of obsession.
Too many creatives are focused on becoming the "next Bach" without undergoing the metamorphosis that true creativity requires—a process built on imitation, derivation, and shadowing great predecessors and peers.
So you’re telling me that your “creative thinking process” begins with imitation and derivation?
Exactly.
The creative process begins with imitation, derivation, and the use of templates—where you trace the lines, fill in the blanks, add color, or tweak something that already exists.
As one improves and internalizes these processes through a first-principles understanding, they can gradually increase the number of blanks to fill, eventually creating from an entirely blank canvas.
For me, true mastery is the perfect balance between creativity and craft. The ideal lies in that sweet spot where both meet. Too much craft without creativity leads to a robotic execution that moves no one, while too much creativity without craft results in something akin to a child’s painting that, while charming, belongs on the family fridge.
When we were children, we crudely imitated sounds until we developed an understanding of the parameters and rules of language and speech. As we imitated sounds with increasing precision, we built a database of words, sentences, and context to draw from. Eventually, we were able to create unique sentences in our unique accents, shaped by our schooling, biology, upbringing, worldview, and education. Everyone ultimately has a unique database of experiences to draw upon.
In both creative and business worlds, what do you think matters more: a great idea or a great execution?
Both idea and execution are very important, but here is a twist.
The execution of an idea is almost always where genius and innovation truly reveal themselves, and this applies to both music and entrepreneurship.
A great example of this in music is Ludwig V. Beethoven's Diabelli Variations, regarded as one of the most extraordinary musical explorations ever written. Interestingly, Beethoven didn’t consider the original theme, composed by Anton Diabelli, to be particularly remarkable. Diabelli had written a simple waltz theme and approached various composers, asking each to create at least one variation for a collective project.
Beethoven being Beethoven(!), saw this as an opportunity to turn this simple theme into something in which he can showcase his own genius and understanding of music, eventually composing 33 variations, lasting nearly one hour. This was one of the most extraordinary musical explorations ever written.
I think this concept can be compared to the worlds of business and tech that you know so well. The initial product or idea is often far, far less important than the creativity, innovation, and skill set of the team behind it to execute it. When the most talented entrepreneurial minds, coders, and technologists focus their abilities on a project, the starting point almost becomes irrelevant—it’s the treatment, and the process, that can turn an unremarkable concept into something groundbreaking.
Similarly, in music, a strong theme or melody can carry a piece, but without masterful nurturing and development it will rarely transcend into something remarkable.
Are there any specific habits, routine, or perhaps the setting that helps your mind to stay focused on creating new pieces?
I love setting parameters for myself, and if I’m commissioned to create within a specific set of constraints, even better.
I often refer to Stravinsky’s brilliant insight: “The more art is controlled, limited, worked over, the more it is free [...] The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.”
One can also set chronological parameters. Above my piano, I keep a collection of small hourglasses that I sometimes use to tackle creative problems. For example, I might say, “I’m giving myself 10 minutes to compose the structure of a prelude,” followed by, “I’m giving myself 15 minutes to hyperfocus on the opening two bars and clean them up.”
As pattern-seeking creatures, we naturally thrive when we have quantifiable goals within set parameters, which help drive creativity.
What principles guide you towards creating new pieces? Do you have any sort of guiding points or inspiration sources there?
An increasingly demanding thing as life gets I almost exclusively come up with ideas of things, or find the answer to a creative problem when my subconscious is activated, usually when walking, biking, in the flow of conversation or doing something banal like cleaning the dishes.
Nothing for me is more important than the mental setting of feeling light, still, and feeling the space and mental maneuverability to come up with ideas and concepts.
While you're improvising, do you feel like you’re passing along a story, a state of mind, and an interesting take on things to the audience? If so, what was the last story you “told” or “interpreted” from the stage?
I believe firmly that the job of the artist is to take something abstract and then to give it order, narrative, harmony and direction.
In almost every single one of my solo recitals, usually at the end, I ask the audience to give me a narrative, a famous song, a series of notes, a poem or a mood to then convey into a narrative.
Recently, I did a concert at the house of the founder of Sofar Sounds, Rafe Offer, to celebrate their 15 year anniversary - and someone in the audience came to the piano and picked a random set of notes that naturally only had a few specific harmonic ‘solutions’ that took us into a really interesting soundworld (again, parameters and limitation are a creative’s best friend!!). I then asked members of the audience to guide the narrative of where this sound world should go.
Entrepreneurs may sometimes have moments when they feel stuck, especially when they are about to found a completely new type of venture, or significantly change the current one.
Was there ever a moment in your work when you felt stuck? If yes, what was it, and what helped you to get through?
I believe one of the best ways to get unstuck is to explain your venture to someone who has no understanding of what you’re trying to solve. By doing this, you force your brain to approach the problem from a first-principles perspective, reducing it to its core offering — or sometimes revealing that there is no clear, understandable core, which is equally valuable!
Similarly, in music, when I’m stuck, I’ll play the piece or parts of it for others and try to explain what I’m aiming to solve. In the process, new ideas often emerge.
However, my favorite tool is simply doing nothing related to the idea and letting it decant in the background while I tackle other things for a few days (or even weeks haha). Often, by working on something else, I find connections that help solve the original problem.
How would you describe an ideal team work when it comes to composing for an orchestra and playing music along with an orchestra? Can you make a parallel here to teamwork in business?
Playing with an orchestra parallels teamwork or business in many ways.
Successful performances are largely about maximizing individual strengths and minimizing weaknesses, both at a personal and collective level, while maintaining a shared vision for the direction of the piece. As a soloist with an orchestra, I often present my vision for a concerto to the conductor. This then usually results in a practical compromise which is to do with his understanding of what is possible with his musicians and how much rehearsal time we have (or often, don’t have!) which then becomes our shared vision for the performance.
In any successful team, clashes of egos must be avoided. Some of the most harmonious and well-performing orchestras are not necessarily composed of individually brilliant musicians, but of players who know each other intimately—understanding their desk partners and the different sections' approaches and working styles. This kind of familiarity often leads to better collective performance than an orchestra of soloists who may lack that close understanding of each other.
Now let’s do some blitz with classic “Mindset matters” questions.
1. What's a common "meaningful life" advice that you just can't stand?
The concept of living life for the future — where the mindset is, "If I sacrifice 20-30 years doing something I can’t stand, I’ll have a nice maxed-out 401k or ISA, and then I can start living"— seems insane to me.
I don’t know if it’s tied to the explosion of credit in the Western world and an obsession with future growth, but the idea of delaying a peaceful, joyful, meaningful, and dignified life until some distant future feels misguided at the very least.
2. What's a big lesson life has taught you?
All suffering stems from trying to make permanent what is temporary (which is everything!) and that one’s entire quality of life at any given moment is dependent on the intensity and love you bring to your approach of the process rather than fixating on outcome.
3. What's one thing you wish someone had told you when you started your career?
Perfectionism is the biggest barrier to creativity and bringing something beautiful into the world. Instead of striving for perfection, consistently producing a solid body of work gives you a much better chance of hitting the mark.
4. What moments make you feel like your life is genuinely wonderful?
I’m pathologically optimistic so there are many! Good conversations with interesting people, seeing something in a new light, seeing those around you and your loved ones succeed and be joyful is great. A nice crisp Sazerac whilst listening to Bill Evans also is not a totally horrific experience :)
5. If you could change 1 thing in society at large — what would it be?
For people to live, and do things consciously.
As opposed to living based on what they believe their identity — or collective identity — should be, often shaped by a crude sense of memory and mimetic desires. These desires are influenced by quadrillions of data points they've been exposed to, with or without their conscious control.
I’ve known actual billionaires that have fallen into this trap and still are striving for ‘more’ (more of what..?!) where they think salvation would arrive once they acquire X or Y.
As a result, our food system, air quality, human connectivity, and general mental wellbeing has declined sharply in replacement of shareholder value and ‘growth’.
That's all for today.
If Arsha's words resonated with you, feel free to leave a comment or share this newsletter with someone who might need to see these insights today.