Last night, I was watching Anatomy of a Fall.
During the film’s first minutes, we hear someone playing the piano entirely out of tempo.
As soon as the movie develops, the piano gets brighter, funnier, and even with a message.
The player is learning, and the piano becomes an instrument where this character can talk with the audience.
He hit the wrong notes, of course, but also he was dragging the keys to be an utterly unarranged set of notes.
In the end, as Debussy said, music is the space between notes or “silence.”
When I started playing the piano (or at least learning to play the piano), each key had a meaning, and after playing the wrong notes for a while, I started to hit the right ones. However, after a few minutes of trying to find the correct ones while reading the music sheet, I realized it didn’t sound like music, or at least it didn’t sound like the piece I was looking for. It was a John Cage piece, at most.
After hours and hours in front of the piano, increasing each movement’s speed and the keys’ overall correctness, I started to hit the notes I wanted correctly.
I played for a few hours more, and then, suddenly, the music began to appear. Note after note, Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1 at the correct phase started to appear.
Before practicing and reaching the correct tempo, the same notes I was playing didn’t sound like the piece at all.
Now, the exact same exercise made me think that speed is as important as being correct.
It’s been a few years since I stopped making music, producing, and playing altogether, although a good discovery gave me pause for thought last night.
It’s not correctness but speed that makes your work outstanding.
Furthermore, it doesn’t make sense if I now replicate what Darwin did, researching and getting those conclusions in the Galápagos, even if the DIY culture started to gain so much traction in the past few years.
At most, it will help you at a personal level, but it won’t reach any boundary or frontier; it will be a more (and totally valid) personal journey.
Now, to contribute ideas and create something, you need to combine two characteristics: you become good at the Pareto frontier if you are knowledgeable at something, but you also need the speed to keep it up.
Ideas come from the same family of thoughts: you can be correct in what you think you are saying, but you require speed to practice all that you claim.
Speed does not make you good by the sole fact of being fast, but it makes you fail faster than others and try more.
Otherwise, if ideas are not being implemented, or you are too slow to put them into full flesh, you will end up with just one, maybe two, at most, trying to be your best ideas.
Yet, it’s not about being first; it’s about doing it in sync with other needs of society. Being first (or failing first, to put it in better terms) without the world being ready for your idea will make you more likely to fail and start again.
Ideally, you will need to fail.
Practically, you need to fail.
If you are too slow to start again or to adapt to new environments, your entire lineage will be gone by the end of your life cycle.
Speed and synchronization would make you flexible to the environment.
Add correctness and get the right amount of knowledge; you will have the perfect combination to do meaningful work.