Why Deaf Men Make The Most Beautiful Music
Monday, February 27th, 2012 by admin | Posted in Unconventional Thinking | Comments
Don’t tell me that Stevie Wonder can’t see the world around him. Have you heard the magic that comes from his brain. The insights. The majesty. The “Ribbon in the Sky?”
The truth is, he finds a way to see.
Don’t tell me that Beethoven was going deaf when he wrote the Fifth Symphony. Have you heard its soaring crescendos. Have you been moved by the triumphant mystery of it all.
The truth is, he found a way to hear.
Don’t tell me that Steve Jobs was uneducated because he went to a mediocre college and walked out the doors before he had a degree in hand. Hold an iPhone in your hand and marvel at it.
The truth is, he found a way to learn.
Throughout history, great people, drivers of growth and progress, have defied the need for the personal assets and credentials the mediocre among us seek to impose on them. Contrary to popular mythology, the greatest business people do not have Harvard MBAs. The most inventive and ever-lasting musicians did not attend Julliard. The truly supreme code writers have never even walked the halls of M.I.T.
The fact is, those who enter the realm of a new dimension in their art, their science, their enterprises, often do so through sheer will fused with a innate skill/talent/blessing that runs counter to the classic rise to excellence and the personal achievement that goes with it.
We are all surrounded by “experts” who simply follow the rules established by others, even if this leads to a dead end that runs smack into a brick wall. And as much as you show them that their “way” is not succeeding, and even prove it to them, they hold up their credentials as a cross — the way one fends off a vampire — and insist that the pedigree trumps the results every time.
The intellectuals, the private schoolers, the trust funders, the PhDs, the New York Times columnists: they are certain in the value of their pieces of parchment even though the only ones they impress are their fellow members of the Royal Society Of The Elite.
It is the blind man who finds a way to climb Everest, who fascinates me. It is the street dog who starts with zero, never asks for approval, buys a cottage, restores it and works her way to a real estate empire, who has my attention and respect.
They find a way to do it. As we all can. As we all should.
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February 28th, 2012 at 4:43 pm
My grandfather had the privilege of working in an era, where he could start out as a laborer at a factory and retire there as an engineer. Today that kind of thinking is unfathomable. It really is sad. I believe there is so much self educated potential out there that will never be noticed or under utilized. I myself am one of the self educated and extremely proud of it.
http://silentpartnerbc.blogspot.com/
April 2nd, 2012 at 7:22 am
Thank you for these words of encouragement! I have a wonderful, passionate, creative teenage son who has been labeled as “learning disabled” because he doesn’t learn the way that they want to teach him. I struggle every day with the balance between holding him accountable while not crushing his spirit. I’m going to meditate on this piece and use it to continue the on-going discussion we have regarding the fact that we aren’t robots and not every brain is identical and not every one has the same road in life.