This is one of my favorite of Seth’s discoveries.
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Notes
Drew Dernavich, the prolific cartoonist for The New Yorker, is “not a genius. He just has more paper than us.”
“How many cartoons would you need to have rejected before you gave up?
“On the other hand, how many not-very-good cartoons would you have to draw before you figured out how to make them funny?
“These might be related.”
Thoughts
To be clear: Dernavich’s “No” pile isn’t really a “discard” pile, in the sense that he didn’t create all those cartoons and decide that they’re not good enough to send out. It’s a reject pile—cartoons that he sent in for publication and was told, “No.” (As he wrote on his Instagram: “Cruel business, my friends.”)
In my first year of college, I took a jazz class during one of the intersessions. I remember thinking that I didn’t need what the teacher was showing us—I was already great. I resisted everything, always knew better.
The class did a short performance for one of the other classes, filled with students studying classical music. (I was at Bethel College—now University—and they were heavily oriented towards classical.) The teacher, despite my obnoxious attitude, let me have a guitar solo, and I ripped… Well, to believe that, I needed to ignore the looks of distaste around the room. But that wasn’t hard to do, since they were classical nuts and just didn’t understand me.
Then a jazz guitarist came to play for the class, and I realized that I knew nothing. I was horrible. I was worse than a rank beginner, because—until that moment—I had thought I wasn’t a rank beginner.
When I think back on that experience, it dawns on me that it was a good thing that I didn’t know how bad I was for those several years. I would have given up, for sure. But that guitarist showed up just when I was ready to have a shock to the system. That was when I learned the value of failing on the way to failing better1.
That’s not directly related to the point of the chapter, but it’s adjacent. Now I’m even more clear on what I know and what I don’t. I still need to be willing to fail more, on my way (one hopes) to improvement and growth. But I would have quit long before I had a chance to improve if, back at the beginning, I’d been aware of how bad I was. (The opposite of imposter syndrome—Dunning Kruger?)
This series is meant to capture my thoughts as I work through Seth Godin’s The Practice. It’s a book with over 200 (very short) chapters, which I hope to work through and, I further hope, to implement over time.
If you’re interested in more of Godin’s ideas, or my thoughts about them, you can check out this collection of posts. Note that if you’re more interested in the former, you should probably get Godin’s book and read it yourself; my notes will be both incomplete and idiosyncratic, and my thoughts will relate to my own experience.
But if my thoughts resonate with you, or if you think I’m just silly, I welcome your comments.
- I’m thinking of Samuel Beckett here: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.