Mozart wasn't advocating for obliviousness—he was describing the particular courage required of an artist whose success depends on trusting an inner voice that the public hasn't yet learned to hear. What sounds like arrogance is actually a form of radical honesty: he recognized that chasing applause or fleeing criticism would corrupt the very instinct that made his work worth hearing. A modern parallel appears in any field where genuine innovation matters—the engineer who pursues an unconventional design, or the researcher following an unpopular hypothesis—must develop this same selective deafness to exterior noise, or risk drowning their own better judgment.