Introduction

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.”

I

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.

II

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.

III

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.

Spe...

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