Learning From Failure #2 — The Edge of Success
In 2005 I was riding a creative wave. I had a comics website up, and I was working on 3 comics simultaneously.
I was 27. I should’ve known better.
The first comic was called The Fermento Show, and it is a lengthy subject for a different post. I still get shivers when I hear that name. Good or bad, I don’t really know yet.
The second comic was a medieval fantasy story. I called it The Drisdane Chronicles.
The Drisdane Chronicles was the product of a project I started in 1992 when I was 14 years old. I would often “forget” my physical education uniform so that I wouldn’t have to participate. I may have flunked that class. Who cares?
Instead, I’d sit on the bleachers, open up the back page of my school notebook, and write my story. Elves, dragons, and a magical goblet. Derivative, to be sure, but I was writing even back then. I just didn’t realise that I was doing it.
I probably wrote three chapters before I decided to shelve it and focus my entire creative energy into absolutely fucking nothing. I think that was around the time I became addicted to video games. A Link to the Past if I remember correctly.
The Drisdane Chronicles
Years later, when I started my comics page, I picked my old story back up, changed a whole bunch of things, and decided to make a comic out of it. A full-page, colour comic, using the techniques I was exposed to at the time. Mainly manga.
Each page took me about 4 hours to finish. Work allowed for a lot of free time, and I would typically stay up late at night, often till 5am. I’d sketch, scan, ink and paint each of these while chatting on MSN and listening to my collection of Celtic music on Winamp.
Every page I managed to finish was published with love. I will admit to that right now. This comic was a labour of love.
I wanted it to succeed.
It didn’t.
I’ve been meaning to write this post for months now, but I hadn’t been able to because the pages of the old comic had been lost to time and faulty hard drives.
The Wayback Machine came to the rescue though, and I was able to salvage 6 of the original 16 pages. I didn’t know what I would find when I went looking for work I’d done almost 13 years ago.
What I found was a comic that…I don’t hate.
In and of itself is a mind-blowing revelation. I don’t hate something I created.
The Drisdane Chronicles wasn’t a bad comic.
Also, in 2005 I was working on three comics at a time. I wasn’t even fazed by the workload. I had the time. I had the passion. I had the drive.
Why did I fail?
The Edge of Success
I recently either read an article or saw a TED Talk (I honestly don’t remember where I get my information these days) that said you need to have 300 pieces of work before you can even begin to think about success. That’s 300 published blog posts, or 300 completed comic pages, or 300 processed photographs.
Had I known this years ago, who knows, maybe I wouldn’t have wasted the ensuing 12 years thinking I failed because I suck.
Everyone has a success limit.
Hear me out.
Everyone you know wants to succeed at something. Sports, career, creative pursuits. Now think about how many of them actually have.
Not many, I assume. At least not in my Facebook friend’s list. People dropped their dreams and #goals for the path of least resistance.
Everyone has a limit.
My limit was 16 pages.
I was an idiot back then.
I mean, I’m still an idiot now, but at least now I pay my own mobile phone bill. So I’m an idiot with responsibilities. I don’t know if this is the preferable outcome.
But back then I hit “publish” on each comic, thinking “This is it. This is the one that will make me famous”.
See, I wasn’t even doing it from the heart. I loved my comic children. But I still wanted them to grow up to be NBA stars so they could take care of me in my old age.
After publishing I’d obsessively check my stats. And every time I noticed the needle wasn’t moving…good god, I still remember how my heart would sting.
This is where I had it right though: I’d pick myself back up, write another page, and spend 4 hours painstakingly sketching, inking, and painting a new comic.
And I’d hit publish again.
And again.
Until I hit my limit.
My limit was 16.
I was 284 pages short.
To My 27-Year-Old Self: You Imbecile
I was surprised today, I must admit. I went looking for a silly comic with roots in the mind of a 14-year old boy. Instead, I found a rather good premise, and art that, while still terrible, has aged somewhat well.
It’s not a bad comic.
It deserved better than it got, back in 2005. I closed my website, left my files to rot in my old computer, and moved on to something else. But I’ve carried that failure on my shoulders for years.
Because I didn’t learn from it. I thought I wasn’t any good at it. I thought my stories were terrible and nobody wanted to read them. I thought too much and wrote too little. I thought I wasn’t working hard enough.
But I was. I just didn’t work hard enough for as long as I needed to.
These days I beat myself up for not knowing how to work as hard as I should on the things I really want. I guilt myself into believing I’ve never really learned how to work. That no one taught me, and that my life would’ve been different if I’d had mentors when I was younger.
Maybe it would’ve. But not because they’d teach me how to work.
But because they’d teach me how to not give up.
I was already doing what I had to do.
I just needed to do it for longer.
I just need to do that now.
Now, where did I leave my Celtic music CDs?
Hey, I’ve started an email list! Sign up to get updates on new posts directly to your inbox.
