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To that end, here’s a trap to watch out for (that even geniuses can’t help falling into)…

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Everyone's addicted to addition, greatness is fighting it

On December 22nd 1808, an audience filed into Vienna's Theater an der Wien for a four-hour concert.

The composer was internationally famous and completely broke. His name was Ludwig van Beethoven. The goal for tonight was to fix the broke part.

But the mood inside the hall was frosty. 

For the audience, that was a matter of the weather. It was the coldest December on record, and the theatre had no heating. For the orchestra, the frost was a matter of Beethoven. He had alienated the players so badly during rehearsals that they had refused to work with him in the room. He had been relegated to coaching from a separate space while a deputy ran through the music.

Then there was the actual program itself. 

Beethoven had insisted on including enough items to give "The Twelve Days of Christmas" a run for its money: two brand new symphonies, a new piano concerto with him as soloist, three movements of a mass, a concert aria, a solo improvisation, and—composed at the last minute as a grand finale—a new choral fantasy. The musicians were effectively sight-reading parts of it.

This all amounted to four hours of music the audience had to shiver through. It didn't take long for things to go wrong. 

The young soprano hired to sing 'Ah! perfido' was so frightened of Beethoven that she was visibly shaking and could barely get through the aria. 

Then as Beethoven performed the Fourth Piano Concerto, where he was simultaneously conducting the orchestra from the keyboard while playing the solo part himself, he reportedly became so physically animated that he knocked several candles off the piano.

To top it all off, during the Choral Fantasy, Beethoven played a repeat he had agreed in rehearsal to skip, while the orchestra (correctly) continued without him. Vibrating with enough fury to thaw the frozen hall, he rose from his bench and demanded the orchestra start over. They started over.

The aftermath was rough.

The press response was muted and patrons complained the concert was simply too much. Even one of Beethoven's admirers, the composer Johann Friedrich Reichardt, said afterward: "one can easily have too much of a good thing—and still more of a strong one."

The concert did turn a small profit, but fell short of Beethoven's expectations.

But here's the most astonishing fact of the evening.

One of the two symphonies that premiered that night is now one of the most famous pieces of music ever written.

Dum-dum-dum-DUM. Dum-dum-dum-DUM.

Two hundred years later, everyone recognizes those four notes. The rest of the symphony is built on them—the same idea, repeated and reworked from beginning to end.

How could the launch of such a tour de force be a flop?

Beethoven's symphonies are proof that he understood the power of simplicity in music better than almost any composer who ever lived. He just couldn't apply the same instinct to the concerts he built around them.

It turns out the urge to overcomplicate matters is irresistible even to those who have mastered simplicity in a given domain.

This was actually a repeat offense for Beethoven.

Three years earlier, he had staged his first opera, Fidelio. It had the same affliction as the concert: overlong, overstuffed, trying to do too much, and audiences rejected it.

His friends and patrons staged an intervention, sitting the great composer down with the score spread open and pleaded with him to cut, cut, cut. He raged. He wailed. And then, eventually, he relented.

The leaner version, down from three acts to two, finally found success in 1814—nine years later.

There's a large body of science that argues Beethoven is not alone in his weakness for more.

Recent landmark studies have found that when people set out to improve something, they almost always add. Handed a structure to stabilize, a recipe to fix, an essay to sharpen, we reach for another beam, another ingredient, another paragraph—and rarely think to take anything away, even when the latter approach is the best answer.

We have an addiction to addition.

The trap Beethoven fell into is the one we all fall into. If the man who wrote those four notes couldn't resist the pull of more, the rest of us would do well to be wary.

The only real protection is to watch for it. When you're deep in a project and you feel the urge to add—another feature, another slide, another section—stop and ask whether the better move is to subtract.

And when someone tells you to cut your darlings, you may rage, and you may wail, but then you should probably relent.

Keep it simple, genius.

Final Calls To Action

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