Beatles drummer Ringo Starr talks about how he moves his arms as little as possible when playing the drums. He said, “It’s all in the wrist.” This can seem counter to what many drummers do — which is to gesture with their arms wildly. I’m definitely guilty of that. The point he’s making is this: why would you waste your energy flailing your arms around when you’re most effective playing primarily with your wrists?

Your goal as a drummer is to keep the beat and tempo for the rest of the band. But aside from that, you’re a better drummer when you know it’s all in the wrists.

Depending on your drum set, you de facto have to move your arms (like to reach far-off cymbals)¹. But you want to conserve your energy for the most important work…especially if you’re playing long shows. Playing with your wrists is both effective and efficient.

In business, we often hear about what’s “efficient.” “Can I do this thing faster?” But efficient doesn’t always translate to effective…so is it really efficient?

So as solopreneurs, how do we figure out if we’re “playing with our wrists,” so to speak?

Know the Goal

You can’t measure efficacy until you know what makes something effective.

I was…having a spirited debate…with someone who built an “AI agent” to “write” for them. They train it on their thoughts and it presents ideas. The ideas get approved, and the LLM writes the article. A few rounds of feedback, and boom. Published article they didn’t write a word of².

This is incredibly efficient. But one answer I couldn’t get was: what’s the goal? Is it to convert people to their mailing list? Get people into their membership? Hire them?

And are the articles the LLM wrote doing that? Because if not, you’re just efficiently creating slop. You’re not being effective. And worse, you spent a ton of time building an engine that doesn’t work.

So step one is define your goal. Once you know the goal, you can measure both efficiency and efficacy against it.

Do the Thing Yourself First

When I first started playing the drums, I didn’t use my wrists at all. I flailed my arms about, trying to do cool fills without really understanding that my goal was to keep the beat³. But as I learned more about how to play, I understood that wrist action created better drum beats, and allowed me to move about my kit faster.

You don’t know what’s efficient or effective until you know what you’re doing. Until you understand what works and how it works. If you’ve ever spent a bunch of time developing an online course just to launch it for no one to buy, you know this.

Maybe the way you did it was super efficient. But if no one buys it, it’s not effective. Instead, you want to test your content with your audience, run a live training so you can get feedback, refine, iterate, and then launch it.

That brings me to my last point.

Optimize for the Goal

Once you do something a few times, you should have a good understanding of how it can effectively achieve your goal. That’s when you start to optimize. Automate parts of it so you can focus on the tasks that require your brain and your voice. Delegate tasks that require a brain, but not yours.

For example, instead of manually copying scheduled calls into your CRM, you can use Zapier or built-in automations. Instead of designing thumbnails or other graphics, you can delegate that out to a designer.

Delegating YouTube thumbnails is one of the best things I did to free up my time for a few reasons:

1. They are important so you want to get them right
2. I am bad at making YouTube thumbnails
3. I would spend a lot of time on them

My goal with YouTube is to get people to watch my content and sign up for my mailing list. I know good packaging (title and thumbnail) is the most important thing to get people to click…but good content makes them stay until the CTA. Now, I have someone working on good packaging, so I can focus on creating better video content.

When you automate and delegate in the name of your goal, you will have much better outcomes.

Efficacy is the Ultimate Efficiency

Ringo Starr is in his mid-80s, and is still touring, playing 2-hour shows while playing the drums and singing (which by the way, is really hard to do).

In a recent interview, he credited his longevity and health to eating broccoli. But if he went out there every night playing the drums in a way that looked cool but burned a ton of energy, he wouldn’t be a very good performer…at least not for very long.

As you approach your solopreneur business, this is something you need to keep in mind: efficiency isn’t just doing something faster, and efficiency alone isn’t going to help you achieve your goals.

You need to be effective. That’s the ultimate form of efficiency.

1. Ringo also keeps his drum set simple. ↩
2. They said it was important to have a “human in the loop,” but really this is more like the human looking at the loop through a telescope. ↩
3. …and occasionally, play a cool fill. ↩