Lonely Outsider

I was in the shower when my cell phone started ringing. Pennie answered it for me. It was my partner Jeff Eisenberg.

Dripping, I took the phone. “Yo. Jefferson.”

“I'm sending you an article from The Economist. It's something I've heard you talk about a hundred times.”

“What is it?”

“You know who Peter Drucker is?”

“Management guy.”

“Yeah. The story tells how his bestselling book, the one containing the most detailed, step-by-step instructions, is the one nobody reads anymore. The Drucker books they're studying in all the big colleges today are the ones that were poorly received at first and didn't sell very well. You talked to me about this sort of thing on the day we met.”

“I remember. 'The loneliest people are the ones ahead of their time.'”

Ludwig von Beethoven knew this outsider phenomenon well. Many of the musical compositions we consider to be his greatest today were panned by the critics of his time. Even his own musicians were confused by them. When the famed violinist Radicati asked Beethoven about these pieces he replied, “Oh, those are not for you, but for a later age.”

We are that later age.

Thankfully, Ludwig von Beethoven didn't let the dullness of the public palate affect what he chose to create. In other words, Ludy didn't pander to the finger-snapping jingle crowd.

In my mind, I ask Ludwig why he doesn't try to write the kind of music that sells. I see him there. He looks quietly at me for a moment, then curls a lip, looks at the ground and spits. Then he looks back up at me. After a moment's hesitation I nod.

But I'm not the only one nodding.

“When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” – Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver's Travels

“Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” – Albert Einstein

“Funeral by funeral, science makes progress.” – Paul Samuelson. Yes, even scientists who are ahead of their time are rejected by their peers.

The magnificent Emily Dickinson wrote with complete confidence that her words would never be read. It was only when her family looked in her bureau drawer on the day she died that they found 1,700 poems that would quickly be ranked among the greatest ever written.

Emily Dickinson knew a freedom not felt by other writers. And it made her words soar. Feel them cut like shimmering blades:

FAME is a fickle food

Upon a shifting plate,

Whose table once a Guest, but not

The second time, is set.

Whose crumbs the crows inspect,

And with ironic caw

Flap past it to the Farmer's corn;

Men eat of it and die.

Emily Dickinson was like Beethoven in that she had no need for public praise. She wrote for herself, an audience of one. Study the lives of the Great Ones and you'll find this to be a common characteristic among them.

Cyril Connolly said it best: “Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.”

I believe Peter Drucker, Jonathan Swift and Albert Einstein would agree.

Ludy Von would, too.

Emily says she's in.

How about you? Do you have something new and different to say?

Are you willing to write for an audience of one?

Roy H. Williams