When a student pointed out that Beethoven had broken one of the sacred rules of harmony, Beethoven asked who had forbidden it. Then he answered his own question: I allow it.
Rules did not make Beethoven. Beethoven made the rules.
This is very true. When I look at music, I see three groups of music creators.
There are the artists who are the trailblazers. They challenge the norms. They push limits. They ask why when everyone has accepted the way things are. And they go places where others dare not go. They have a sort of a genius to them that is almost uncontrollable, often to themselves. Whatever it is that touches them, call it a muse, call it madness, it is not something they own. It owns them. You cannot schedule it, and you cannot switch it off, and the artist is often the last person in the room to understand what has taken hold. Like a pot boiling over, and the only way to stop the overflow is to either share what is boiling, or remove the pot from the fire, which often results in these people chopping off their ears or joining the 27 club.
Once these people have paved a new path, we run into the musicians. These are talented people who lack the intense energy and creativity of the artists. These people often follow close behind and adapt quickly to the newest genre or trend and ride the wave. Often producing really good content, but they are a few steps behind the true creators who have been touched by a muse. They are also the ones who make the artist legible. Nobody understood the trailblazer until a musician translated the noise into something you could hum.
The final group, often laggards, are the entertainers. These are people who have some base level talent but they have an intense willingness to follow rules and gain success based on what has now become the mainstream norm. These are people who are identified by talent hunters like American Idol. While extremely successful, they are the bottom feeders from the cauldron of art!
There is a distribution and the true artists sit in the right tail. Then come the mainstream musicians who are in the central part of the distribution, often followed by a tail of entertainers, trying to play to an algorithm developed by the artists and fine tuned by the musicians.
Being from the finance field, I have to talk about returns. So notice who gets paid.
The entertainer conforms to a demand that already exists, so the market can price him. The artist is an out-of-the-money option: most expire worthless, and the few that pay off will often pay off long after the artist can spend it. Van Gogh sold one painting in his lifetime. The famous Indian poet Mirza Ghalib spent his entire life chasing after a pension from the government. We remember them because their options paid. We do not remember the thousand whose options did not, and that is the trick our memory plays on us when we tell dreamers that genius always wins.
But this is not just limited to music or art. It is the case everywhere in life. We see the same pattern in business, politics, economics, academia, religion, etc. And every time as we reach the left tail, there is a need for a new burst from new artists, the pioneers to revive a dead and decaying field.
And what about AI? Isn’t that the new genius? I would say the opposite. The AI we see today has been trained on everything that has already been made, and it gets better and better at producing what sits in the middle of the distribution. It plays the algorithm, and it plays it beautifully. But it cannot sit in the right tail. The visionaries who built it were the artists, dismissed for decades until their option paid. What they built is the entertainer phase of their own idea. That is the cycle, happening in front of us.
And the world sits in the left tail for most things. The brand new ideas that built the world we live in were generated many years ago. The pioneers who came up with brilliant ideas have had their thoughts stripped and dissected, first by the musicians of life, and now by the scavengers, and what is left is a set of rules that nobody remembers the reason for.
There is a need for a new breed of pioneers to come up and challenge all the norms. These people, when they are creating, often come across as dreamers, removed from reality, and often, insane. But within the insanity lies the seed of the next brilliant idea. The problem is that from the outside, the insanity with a seed and the insanity without one look exactly the same. We cannot know in advance who is Beethoven and who is simply breaking the rules. We cannot tell them apart, so we shun both. Where are my dreamers at?
We need you. Know that we are greedy and lack vision so we will shun you and shame you, sometimes because you are wrong, and sometimes because you will challenge how we live. You will threaten the status quo. We will call your ideas ill-conceived, and sometimes they will be. But sometimes what looks ill-conceived is simply a reality for which the rest of us do not yet have a model.
So please know that when we challenge you, it is because we are limited and cannot begin to comprehend what you are seeing. Our challenge is not proof that you are wrong. Nor is your conviction proof that you are right. I will not promise you that your ideas will prevail. Most will not. But the ones that do will become so normal that the next generation takes these as normal and we are into the next cycle of creation-replication-corruption.
A new idea becomes a new convention. A new convention becomes a new rule. And eventually someone has to ask Beethoven’s question again: who forbade it?
Do it anyway. I cannot wait to see what new world you can create!