Originally found at Inc.
Buried in Alex Van Halen’s new book Brothers (he spends a lot more time psychoanalyzing David Lee Roth) is a passage that at least in part explains how the late Eddie Van Halen became a guitar virtuoso.
As Alex writes:
For Ed and me, as foreigners working without the benefit of much money, we were used to working our asses off and constantly coming up with workarounds to compensate for missing resources. One of the reasons Ed was always playing a “Frankenstein” guitar that he’d hammered together is that we were used to everything being like that. That’s all we ever had: second (stuff) that we made the best of.
“The main reason why I squeeze so many … call them tricks, call them techniques, out of the guitar was out of necessity because I couldn’t afford the pedals,” Ed said at the Smithsonian. “I couldn’t afford a fuzz box and all the toys that everybody else had, so I did everything I could to get the sounds out of the guitar with my fingers.”
...Researchers conducting a study published in Academy of Management Journal asked a number of employees to rate their willingness to embrace contradictions. Then they asked them to rate how often they experienced resource constraints: limited time, funds, tools, supplies, and other limitations.
While that was going on, their bosses rated each person’s level of productivity, creativity, and innovation when resources were scarce and when resources were plentiful.
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