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Embrace Failure
Stop letting perfect be the enemy of good.
When I was about nine years old or so I read this hugesque biography of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for a school project. That thing was the biggest book my little hands had ever cracked open and I was absolutely fascinated by it. To this day there’s little stories from it that I will tell people because they’re just so weird and funny. And when I was a kid, as much as this biography humanized Mozart for me it also made me feel like I’d never amount to anything. I know that’s absurd. But Mozart wrote Mitridate, re di Ponto, when he was 14 years old and that was not his first opera.
How’s a girl gonna compete with that??
I was today years old when I could even complete singing one of the arias from Mitridate, and let me tell you something: it don’t sound great. The everything in Mitridate is incredible, but it’s also extremely technically demanding. I could tell you the range and you’d be like, “… whoa …” but that doesn’t even begin to explain how challenging this music is.
But, the thing that I haven’t told you yet is that Mozart was a colossal screw-up. He had no idea how to manage money, his time management was so bad that for one of his operas the orchestra had to sight read music still dripping with wet ink while they played the overture, and he managed to continually…
