He wanted to conduct, but his style just didn’t seem to work. During soft passages of the music, he crouched extremely low, for loud sections he would leap into the air, sometimes shouting at the orchestra. His memory was also very poor, once he forgot that he’d instructed the orchestra not to repeat a section of the music. During the concert when he expected them
to repeat the section, they went forward, so he stopped the piece and jumped up and down shouting, “Stop! This is wrong, it will not do at all, and we will have to start again.”

For his own piano concertos he tried conducting from the piano bench and at one concert he jumped up and banged the top of the piano so hard that the candles fell off the piano. At another concert he got so excited that he knocked a choirboy over as he tried to reach the orchestra to point out a mistake. It was obvious to his friends that he had a hearing impairment and as his hearing worsened the musicians tended to ignore his conducting and
get their cues from the first violinist. Finally, his friends pleaded with him to give up conducting and concentrate on his composing, which he finally agreed to do. So who was this manic conductor? He was Ludwig Van Beethoven, the man many consider to be the greatest composer of all time. But he finally learned the lesson that nobody can be the master of all
trades.

We all have different gifts given to us by God, so we should try and recognise and develop those gifts. This can sometimes be intimidating, especially if you’ve spent your life looking for approval from people who’ve none to give you. So we should stop making our lives an ongoing struggle to be something we weren’t meant to be. God made us who we are and when we try to be somebody else, we can only ever be number two. The moral is, to be yourself, after all, who’s more qualified than you are.