The Joy of "One-Buttock Playing" (and why every nerd should chase it)
When expertise turns into flow, passion takes over—and only one butt cheek remains on the chair.
Every pianist starts the same way: perched upright, shoulders tense, both buttocks firmly anchored like they’re bracing for impact. They hit every note as if they’re checking boxes. They’re playing the piano, technically—but the music hasn’t arrived yet.
And then something changes.
As conductor Benjamin Zander explains in one of my all-time favorite TED talks, children slowly stop living note-to-note. They learn the phrase. Then the line. Then the emotional arc. Eventually, they’re so inside the music that their body can’t help but sway. They’re lifted—literally—onto one buttock at a time.
This is the transition from competence to flow.
From “I know the notes” to “I am the music.”
It’s the moment expertise becomes joy.
Where this shows up outside classical music
I’ve seen this in startup founders for years. At first, an entrepreneur is a two-buttock operator: gripping the keyboard, managing tasks, sweating every impulse. Necessary, noble, and usually awkward.
But given enough time—and enough honest practice—they relax into the craft. They start hearing the long line of the company. They shift weight. Decisions flow through them instead of being forced by them.
You can see it in engineering, too. And design. And policy. And deep-tech research. And honestly, in anything people do with enough repetition to move from conscious control to embodied instinct.
It’s the same idea behind our past UBQT post on 1000 hours of deliberate practice. Practice isn’t about polishing each note. It’s about reducing impulses until the phrase plays you.
A nerd’s version of enlightenment
When you meet a person operating in one-buttock mode, you feel it. Their enthusiasm leaks. They’re contagious. They’re unmistakably alive in what they’re doing—and very hard to compete with.
Zander captures this perfectly near the end of his talk:
“I realized my job as a conductor was to awaken possibility in other people… How do you know if you’re doing it? You look at their eyes. If their eyes are shining, you know you’re doing it.”
And his definition of success:
“It’s not about wealth and fame and power. It’s about how many shining eyes I have around me.”
To me, shining eyes = people deep in their craft, working from passion, not posture. People playing on one buttock. Nerds living in their obsession.
Build a life full of one-buttock players
Being around these people—founders, scientists, engineers, artists—changes the way you operate. They’re expansive. They pull you forward. They’re immune to cynicism because they’re too busy building things that matter.
The Ubiquity ecosystem is full of them: the nerds whose eyes light up when they talk about lidar waveforms, autonomous cargo drones, microbes as data sensors, FPGAs as inference engines. They shift in their seats when describing the long line of their company. They don’t play each note—they play the phrase.
That’s the energy I chase as a VC. It’s the culture I try to build. And it’s the kind of expertise worth celebrating for its own sake.
Here’s the simple formula:
Two-buttock playing: mastery of the mechanics
One-buttock playing: mastery of the meaning
And if you’re lucky enough, over a long enough line, you end up surrounded by shining eyes—people animated by their craft, by possibility, by music only they can hear.
That’s the whole game.
Ubiquity Ventures — led by Sunil Nagaraj — is a seed-stage venture capital firm focused on startups solving real-world physical problems with "software beyond the screen", often using smart hardware or machine learning.
If your startup fits this description, reach out to us.