Every Memorable Story Begins With Pain

The room is dim. A single candle flickers.

Piles of crumpled sheet music cover the floor like fallen leaves.

Beethoven sits hunched over a battered piano, sweat beading on his brow. His fingers hammer the keys, though he can barely hear them. His head jerks sharply as he mutters to himself, half in frustration, half in revelation. The sharp scratch of a quill against parchment breaks the silence as he scrawls notes furiously.

Outside, the world sleeps. Inside, it storms.

Beethoven was completely deaf when he wrote his Ninth Symphony. That’s dramatic. But it’s not my favorite part of his story.

My favorite part is the Seventh.

He wrote it while he was going deaf. While sound was getting further and further away from him.

As he lost his hearing, Beethoven cut the legs off of his piano. He laid it flat on the floor so he could lie next to it. To press his chest, his cheek, his whole body against the wood, so he could feel the vibrations.

I imagine him there. In the dark. Pounding the keys. Desperately trying to get back to a place that doesn’t exist anymore.

He wasn’t a composer writing music as much as he was a human grieving.

And in it, he found a way to tell the truth. Without words.

The second movement, the Allegretto, might be my favorite piece of classical music.

There are no lyrics, of course. But there is pain.

You can hear it. You can feel it.

Because even without words, it tells the truth about his experience.

That’s the thing about pain. When it’s real, it leaks out.

It finds its way into the melody. Into the frame. Into the story.

That’s our triumph.

And triumph is in the Allegretto, too.

When someone else hears it, really hears it, a little miracle happens.

The Allegretto became the most requested encore of anything Beethoven wrote.

That’s the kind of connection we yearn for.

Why This Matters

This is the work. To understand. To listen deeper.

To acknowledge, as Beethoven did, that pain is an inescapable, unavoidable condition of the human experience.

You may not be composing symphonies in grief. But if you’re a marketer or communicator crafting a message designed to persuade, and we all are, your first job is the same: understand the pain. Not yours. Theirs. The person on the other end. What challenge are they desperate to solve? Start there, or they might not hear you at all. When your message meets someone in their pain, and shows them they’ve been seen, that’s when they lean in.

Because what people remember isn’t cleverness. It’s clarity.

And what they trust isn’t confidence. It’s empathy.

Will they feel seen when they hear from you? Have you shown them that you know what hurts? Does your message offer relief? If your message can say, “I see what you’re going through. You’re not alone. And we can help,” then it’s no longer just messaging.

It’s a lifeline.

It’s the kind of connection we all yearn for.

It’s the lesson a deaf composer left behind for anyone trying to be heard.

Shh, listen.

Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92, II. Allegretto by Herbert von Karajan, Berlin, 1962

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