Why you should believe in yourself

Did you know that Ode to Joy was a poem written by Friedrich Schiller in 1785 before being the song we all know ? Me neither. The sad part is that Friedrich regarded it as a failure, going so far as to say it is "of value maybe for us two, but not for the world, nor for the art of poetry" in an 1800 letter to his friend Christian Gottfried Körner (whose friendship had originally inspired him to write it). In short, he gave himself a one star review and moved on.

Fast forward 200 years and the song that Bethoveen wrote based on this poem is now the European Anthem.

Beethoven had been obsessed with that poem since he was 23. He spent thirty years trying to set it to music, filling notebooks with attempts, rejecting over 200 different versions of the Ode to Joy theme before finally getting it right in the Ninth Symphony.

The Ninth Symphony premiered on May 7th, 1824. By then Beethoven was completely deaf. He stood on stage anyway and pretended to conduct — except the orchestra had been privately instructed to ignore him entirely and follow the actual conductor standing nearby.

As we speak, the song is literaly on a spaceship, the Voyager probe launched in 1977, moving currently at the speed of 14km/s (yes, per seconds!). The song was engraved onto the "Golden record" to showcase the culture of humans to aliens.

"Faith, it seems, is not without a sense of irony" - Morpheus, Matrix (Yeah I know, weird quote... but my blog, my rules)

So don't despair. Schiller called his own work worthless. Beethoven couldn't hear his greatest triumph. And somewhere right now, both of them are hurtling past Saturn at 14 kilometres per second.

You're doing fine.