The immediate reaction, naturally, is to wonder how he does it. But after watching the interview Steel Beans: How The Fck Does He Do This?*, I find the technical question almost the least interesting part. What fascinates me is not that he manages to play several instruments simultaneously. It is that he came up with the idea in the first place, continued developing it, and eventually created something nobody quite knew the world was missing.

We have become remarkably skilled at explaining how things work, but considerably less capable of understanding how something that does not yet exist actually comes into being. Where one person sees a practical problem, a creative mind sometimes sees the beginning of an entirely new possibility. The difference can be as simple as refusing to accept the first explanation of why something cannot be done.

When Nobody Else Showed Up, Something New Began

DeBardi had been making music for many years before the world discovered him. He wrote songs, recorded music, organized bands, booked performances, and tried to hold everything together with musicians who had their own lives, jobs, and problems. Nothing about his story resembles the romanticized image of a young talent discovered by the music industry and quickly transformed into a star. Quite the opposite. His journey is one of years spent playing small venues, struggling financially, and stubbornly continuing to create even when circumstances suggested he should probably give up.

At one point, he was sitting behind the drums, irritated that the other musicians had failed to turn up for rehearsal. He still had his guitar hanging from his shoulder. He began experimenting with combining the instruments and discovered that it actually worked. Not perfectly, and certainly not in the way a traditional music teacher would have recommended, but well enough to spark an idea.

This is where I think his story becomes genuinely interesting. He did not begin with a business plan, a market analysis, or an ambition to invent an entirely new musical concept. He was trying to solve a problem that had emerged in his own reality. What would eventually become his trademark was born out of a limitation.

That is often how genuine creativity works. We like to imagine that new ideas emerge when people have unlimited resources, perfect working conditions, and access to the best technology. But history offers countless examples of the opposite. Limitations can force solutions that would never have emerged in an environment where everything already works.

Someone who cannot afford a particular piece of equipment builds their own. Someone who cannot find a service that solves an everyday problem attempts to create it. An artist who cannot fit into established forms of expression develops a language of their own. This does not mean that poverty or adversity automatically produces creativity, and we should be careful not to romanticize people's struggles. But there is an important difference between lacking opportunities and looking at the opportunities already available from a different perspective.

DeBardi could have concluded that rehearsal was impossible because the drummer was missing. Instead, he started playing the drums himself, with the guitar still in his hands. It was a small incident with rather significant implications. He refused to let the established division of labor determine what was possible.

Twenty Years of Work Behind a Few Minutes of Viral Success

When Steel Beans broke through on the internet in 2022, many saw it as yet another example of an unusual individual suddenly becoming famous through social media. A video featuring a sweating musician in a kimono playing an almost unbelievable combination of drums and guitar spread rapidly. People were fascinated, shared the clip, and tried to understand what they were watching.

But the breakthrough itself was merely the visible tip of a much longer story.

In the interview, DeBardi explains that he had spent approximately two decades creating and recording music. When he finally decided to embark on a solo tour, he had around $300, a minivan, and a very limited social media following. He contacted venues along the American West Coast, attempting to persuade them to book him. One of his earliest opportunities in Los Angeles came from a taco truck that could not offer payment but was willing to provide food.

It was while preparing for this highly uncertain tour that he recorded the video that changed everything. The recording was not the result of some carefully developed marketing strategy. Equipment malfunctioned, the room was unbearably hot, and DeBardi was in a terrible mood. According to his own account, that frustration actually contributed to the aggressive energy that made the performance so distinctive.

A few days later, the situation had changed dramatically. Venues that had barely been willing to book him began receiving inquiries from people wanting to attend. He describes how his follower count exploded and how that first tour turned into a completely chaotic journey. Eventually, he was given the opportunity to open for Tenacious D and later Tool, one of rock music's most established and technically sophisticated bands.

It would be easy to turn this into another inspirational story about never giving up. But such stories can be misleading. Thousands of people work just as hard without ever experiencing a viral breakthrough. The internet does not automatically reward quality, persistence, or originality. Chance plays a significant role, as do timing, audience curiosity, and the possibility of being discovered by the right people.

What distinguishes DeBardi's story from many others, however, is what he had actually built before anyone started paying attention. When the opportunity finally appeared, he did not first have to learn how to become Steel Beans. He was already Steel Beans.

We live in an age where success is increasingly measured by speed. How quickly can a company grow? How fast can an idea be launched? How many followers can someone acquire in three months? We see the results and easily forget the work that preceded them. Someone who has spent twenty years developing a craft can appear to be an overnight miracle simply because that is when the outside world finally happens to notice.

Perhaps we should spend less time discussing rapid success and more time understanding slowly developed originality.

Creativity Is Not Perfection – It Is the Ability to Work With the Unexpected

One of the most revealing parts of the interview comes when DeBardi explains his playing technique. The interviewer tries to understand how he manages to switch between guitar and drums, how he handles guitar picks, drumsticks, and pedals, and how he makes all the sounds work together. To an outsider, it almost looks like advanced electronic manipulation.

But DeBardi explains that there is nothing particularly modern about the underlying technique. The combination of instruments, amplifiers, and playing methods would largely have been possible fifty years ago. He certainly uses effects and other equipment, but his central idea relies on physical coordination, practice, and a self-developed understanding of how the instruments can interact.

That tells us something about our tendency to confuse technological progress with creative progress. We imagine that new possibilities arise primarily through new inventions. Yet sometimes every necessary component is already sitting right in front of us. The innovation lies in how someone chooses to combine them.

Even more interesting is his attitude toward mistakes. During a performance, microphone stands may collapse, drumsticks may be dropped, cymbals may shift out of position, and equipment may behave in ways nobody anticipated. Rather than trying to conceal every problem, DeBardi has developed the ability to incorporate these disruptions into the performance itself. He improvises, makes jokes, changes arrangements, and uses the situation as it actually unfolds.

This is something fundamentally different from the pursuit of perfection that dominates much of our modern performance culture. We teach people to avoid mistakes, follow instructions, and deliver predictable results. In many circumstances, that is obviously necessary. Nobody wants an aircraft mechanic freely improvising with safety procedures. But when the same thinking is applied to every form of human activity, something essential risks being lost.

Creative processes need room for the unexpected. An idea that initially seems terrible may contain something valuable. A failed experiment may open the door to an entirely different project. A technical limitation may give birth to a new method. The problem is that we frequently organize away precisely the uncertainty that makes such discoveries possible.

DeBardi also explains that he cannot always rehearse his performance in the traditional sense. He composes and records music, but the actual interaction between instruments, audience, improvisation, and the physical reality of the stage develops primarily during concerts. That does not mean he is unprepared. On the contrary, his spontaneity rests on an enormous amount of musical experience. He can improvise precisely because he has spent years developing that ability.

This is an important distinction. Creative freedom is not the same as a lack of knowledge. Very often, it is deep experience that makes it possible to break the rules without everything falling apart.

When Technology Can Do Almost Everything, Imagination Becomes the Real Limitation

There is an interesting parallel between Steel Beans and the technological transformation we are currently experiencing. Artificial intelligence has, in a remarkably short time, changed the conditions for people who want to write, compose music, illustrate, develop software, or create digital products. Tasks that previously required several specialists can, in some cases, now be carried out by a single person using digital tools.

That does not mean everyone has suddenly become a programmer, designer, musician, or writer. It means the threshold between having an idea and experimenting with it has been lowered. Someone no longer needs to master every technical step before beginning to explore whether an idea can become reality.

In one sense, this resembles what DeBardi did when he started combining his instruments. He did not accept that every function necessarily required a separate person. He discovered another way of organizing his work.

But there is a risk here as well. When technology makes it easier to produce almost anything, we may begin confusing the ability to produce with creativity itself. It is already possible to generate images, music, texts, and software code on a scale that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. But the ability to produce more does not automatically mean that we will generate more interesting ideas.

On the contrary, we may find ourselves in a situation where people use the same tools, the same instructions, and the same ready-made templates to create endless variations of things that already exist. The result could be an abundance of technically accomplished products that lack any personal direction.

This is where human experience becomes particularly important. Creativity is not merely the ability to execute something. It is also about understanding why we want to do it, recognizing connections that others may overlook, and identifying what we believe is missing from the world. It grows out of curiosity, judgment, accumulated experience, and sometimes a rather unreasonable conviction that things ought to be done differently.

AI can help us test ideas more quickly, but technology cannot independently determine which human experiences deserve to be expressed. It can suggest possibilities, but we still need to develop the ability to choose, question, and occasionally reject the obvious.

That is also why I believe the current technological transformation could be particularly interesting for people with long and varied working lives behind them. Someone who has worked across several industries, solved practical problems, experienced failures, and seen how organizations actually function often possesses a wealth of experience that could never previously be transformed into independent products or projects. Now there are tools that make it easier to experiment with ideas that might once have remained nothing more than passing thoughts.

But the real opportunity does not lie in allowing technology to decide what we should create. It lies in using technology to explore our own ideas.

We Need More People Who Dare to Do Things Their Own Way

It would be tempting to conclude the story of Steel Beans by celebrating the independent creator who no longer needs anybody else. But that would actually misunderstand an important part of his story. DeBardi also talks about the joy of playing with a real band and about music that works better when performed alongside other musicians. His solo performance is not proof that collaboration has become obsolete. It demonstrates that we can find new ways of creating even when established structures no longer suit us.

That is a considerably more interesting idea than the notion that tomorrow's creators should do absolutely everything themselves.

We still need to collaborate, share knowledge, and benefit from one another's expertise. But we also need to question how quickly we place people into predefined professional categories and decide what they should be doing. A musician is expected to play their instrument. Someone working in technology is supposed to stick to technology. A retired person is somehow expected to have completed the productive and creative part of their life. Someone without formal qualifications in a particular field can quickly be told that whatever they want to attempt is simply too difficult.

Much of this consists of social assumptions rather than genuine limitations.

That does not mean knowledge, education, and specialist expertise are unimportant. Quite the opposite. But perhaps we should become better at distinguishing between limitations imposed by reality and those we have constructed ourselves to make reality easier to organize.

There is a particular kind of curiosity among people who continue to be beginners even after becoming highly accomplished in another field. They are not embarrassed to ask simple questions, experiment with strange combinations, or risk appearing inexperienced. Not because they lack respect for expertise, but because they understand that expertise always begins with something we do not yet know.

When I watch Steel Beans, therefore, I see something more than a talented and eccentric musician. I see a reminder of what can happen when someone continues experimenting long after the surrounding world might have considered it more reasonable to conform.

He did not become interesting because he followed a carefully designed plan for how a musician should develop a career. He became interesting because, over many years, he continued building his own musical reality, even when it did not seem to fit anywhere.

Perhaps this is precisely what we should be discussing more often when we talk about creativity, education, entrepreneurship, and the future of work. Not merely how to make people more efficient, but how to give more people the opportunity to discover things they do not yet realize they are capable of doing.

Because creativity is not an exclusive quality reserved for artists, inventors, or exceptionally gifted entrepreneurs. It is a human possibility that can be developed, encouraged, or suffocated by the environments we create around ourselves.

And perhaps the most fascinating thing about Jeremy DeBardi is not that he plays drums, guitar, and sings at the same time. It is that he never seems to have accepted that someone else should decide how many instruments one person is allowed to play.

It makes me wonder how many ideas never become reality, not because they are impossible, but because someone has convinced us from the very beginning that they cannot be done.

Perhaps the world does not need more creative people. Perhaps it needs more people who dare to use the creativity they already possess.