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This is FiveMinuteFriday, Play with Feeling.
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Welcome back to the SuperDataScience podcast, everybody. Super excited to have you back here on the show. I came across a quote by Beethoven just now, which inspired me to record this episode. And so I was listening to the piece Für Elise, one of Beethoven’s most famous pieces, on YouTube. By the way, a fun fact is that I just learnt today that Beethoven never published this piece during his lifetime. It was discovered by another composer 40 years after the death of Beethoven, and now we all know about this piece. Imagine if that person hadn’t found it. I guess he found it in Beethoven’s archives. Imagine if they hadn’t found it, we would have never heard of it.
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Yeah, so I was watching this video. It’s one of those videos where a person’s playing piano, view from the top and then it’s combined with the CGI of these notes falling and him pressing the keys to the notes. So one of those educational videos. And I felt like the person was playing too fast. To me, it felt, this is way too fast, but then I thought maybe it was just me. Went into comments and found that the most quoted comment actually said, indeed, that person was playing too fast, and a lot of people agreed with that.
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And the person making this comment quoted Beethoven himself, which was very ironic. So Beethoven said something that later became a quote, and he said, “To play a wrong note is insignificant. To play without passion is inexcusable.” I personally prefer the version of the quote which goes like this: “It’s not bad playing a wrong note, but playing without feeling is unforgivable.”
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So that can be applied to music. It’s much more important to play with feeling, with your heart, with emotion, that you feel the music going through you, rather than that everything is perfectly correct. But that can also be applied to life. And given that many of us here in our data science community, we are more of the thinkers rather than feelers… We give a lot of weight to thinking, to making sure we follow processes, everything is step-by-step and accurate and precise. We make minimal mistakes because mistakes can be costly in this profession. Given that, and I know this from my own experience, we often can get caught up in making everything correct in our life. Not just in work, but in our lives. Making everything correct and everything to the T rather than feeling things in life. Right?
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So for instance, most days I have a checklist. When I need to go somewhere or I need to meet someone, I have a checklist of things I need to talk with them about. And my main concern is I should not forget to say this, this, this, or mention this topic or bring this up, or we need to discuss this. We need to resolve certain items. And I operate on these checklists, but often it can become robotic, mechanical and it lacks the feeling. I don’t feel as I live through life, I just check boxes off.
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And so taking Beethoven’s quote into account, I’m doing the opposite. I’m trying to make sure I don’t play a wrong note, but I’m completely disregarding often feeling, playing, or living with feeling is on the back-burner. It’s secondary or tertiary or not even on the radar. And for me personally, this quote is a wake-up call or a reminder to stop and not think about it, but to stop and feel about it. Stop thinking incessantly so much, but rather feel. Play with feeling, live with feeling.
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And it’s okay if I make a mistake, if I forget to talk to someone about something, forget something in my day. That’s all right. At the end of the day or when I’m old and looking back on my life, am I going to think I did everything correct? Perfect? I loved that I did everything and I made no mistakes? Or am I going to look back and I’m going to say, “I loved that I lived with feeling?” Yes, I’ve made mistakes and that’s human, to make mistakes. That’s okay. But I lived with feeling. I would much prefer the second.
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So there you go. Quote from Beethoven. “It’s not bad playing a wrong note, but playing without feeling is unforgivable.” And I wish you a fantastic weekend hopefully. And I wish you to see a moment this weekend when you are making a mistake, but you’re living with feeling and to remember this quote, and hopefully that’ll give you a smile and you’ll be more forgiving to yourself for the mistake, but you’ll be excited about living with feeling. And I look forward to seeing you next time. Until then, happy analyzing.
