I was recently chatting with an old friend from art school. We’ve kept in touch over the years seeing each other’s art shift and form, succeed and fail. We’ve encouraged each other to stay in the race and not give up. I showed him a picture of something I was working on recently. It was just a light hearted cute little illustration of some auburn fall leaves tumbling down turning into little crimson hearts.
“These are deeply satisfying,” he says. “Like Winslow Homer met Bill Watterson. Except more free.”
I don’t believe that my little illustration merited such a tremendous compliment. But I took it anyway. Both of these artists are legends to me. It took me back to my childhood. I didn’t grow up close to the sea. Though I may have loved it as much as Winslow Homer did. I grew up in the landscape of Bill Watterson. The American Midwest. Fall, winter, spring, and summer. Calvin’s summers were much like mine, growing up in a place where the city was far away and the woods were in abundance. I read those comics during the long summer months when school was out and there was nothing to do. The mornings were late, the days were long, and the nights were filled with fireflies flickering over open fields.
Idyllic.
An artist, a cartoonist, a philosopher, a storyteller, a legend… and a six-year-old kid forever. Watterson has gone to a place where few have gone: a place of unprecedented success where his personal integrity and the purity of his art were maintained. With an uncompromising attitude, he turned away more fame and fortune than many of us will ever know to uphold the intrinsic value of his art and not cheapen it with endless merchandizing.
I went to purchase the latest book about him, Exploring Calvin and Hobbes. It contains the crown jewel of interviews: a 35-page interview with Bill Watterson. Liquid gold in the form of words. The reclusive cartoonist opens up about his life and work after so many years of silence. And I do respect his silence.
He’s open, poignant, wise, and naturally very very funny. He also talks about one thing that we can all relate to: Failure (with a capital F). He was fired from his first job out of college and this is what he said about it:
True, although there were a number of years out in the wilderness. My failure was probably one of the best things that ever happened to me, although I don’t recommend the humiliation and insolvency so much. But if my experience at the Post hadn’t been so catastrophic, I don’t think I would have started over. I’d have limped along doing weak editorial cartoons, and would have never gotten to what I was good at. I didn’t want to throw away all that time and effort, but sometimes you can’t move forward without going back to the beginning to get your bearings again.
And in the long run, nothing is wasted. It takes a while to see this, but it’s true. I learned a lot about drawing and about how to work with complex ideas for those years. It was valuable. The failure also raised the stakes for me on a personal level. Years later, when I finally got syndicated—when they finally opened the gate—I ran like my head was on fire. The Post failure made me realize that this wasn’t going to come as easily as I’d thought. So I treated the marathon as if it were a flat-out sprint.
I love what he has to say about his failure. I love it so much.
Nothing is wasted.
I’ve experienced a decent share of failure in life. I'm still waiting for the return on many of those "investments." Oceans of missed opportunity, poor choices, and other inadequacies. There were palliatives for mistakes. And yet, nothing is wasted. That seems like too much grace for me. But I think it’s true. I believe in grace. There is a need for grace in our world.
Don’t be afraid of failure. Don’t be afraid of that wilderness, even if it may last for a few years longer than expected. There is grace and the courage to change. Failure may cause charting a new course and new unexpected opportunities may lie in wait. Maybe the legend of success is different than what success is in real life. Staying true to oneself may be the cause for a longer and more winding road.
Let’s stay in the marathon and overcome. It may take longer than expected, but it will be worth it. Let’s turn mishaps into adventures, problems into opportunities, and failure in to success.
