I came across a story in Austin Kleon's book, Don't Call It Art, that is going to stick with me into the future.
(Maybe it will even motivate me to get going on a YouTube channel.)
The story concerns one Mr. Charles Jones who was a serial entrepreneur with a long record of failed business ventures.
Each time he would launch a new business, his first step was to order high-quality stationery, pens, and pencils with the new company name.
And each time a company went under, this man would gather all these supplies, bring them home, and hand them over to his kids, begging the children to use them up as quickly as possible. He actually forbade them from using both sides of a sheet of the paper.
Growing up in a household with plentiful art supplies, several of the children went on to careers in art, including a son, Charles Jr.
AKA "Chuck".
That would be Chuck Jones ... of Bugs Bunny fame.
In one college art class, Jones had a professor who warned that the students each had 100,000 bad drawings in them that they needed to get out before they could produce anything of quality. Jones said he felt relief knowing that he was likely well past the 200,000 mark himself.
I guess the takeaway is this: trying and failing leads to more trying and failing which is another way of saying "practice", which leads ... at least sometimes ... to insane success.
No comments:
Post a Comment