art for all

31. How I succeeded by failing 

May 28, 2021 Daniel Gregory Season 2 Episode 31
art for all
31. How I succeeded by failing 
Show Notes Transcript



welcome to art, for all sketchbook skool podcast. I am your host. Danny Gregory. And I'm the author of a dozen or so books on art and creativity. And I am a sketchbook artist, and I want to talk about the dozen or so books. I want to talk about success and how it comes about in ways that you just can't anticipate ways that are, that are tough, but are also full of lessons. So you're lucky today you get to profit from my mistakes. Right. This is going to be a bit embarrassing, but I'll tell you about it. As frankly, as I can, when I was a teenager, I loved the new heart show, not the Bob Newhart show, where he was a shrink in Chicago, married to Suzanne push yet. But the leader one in which Bob had a different wife and lived in Vermont. You may remember that show. It was not, not terribly funny. It was a precursor to faulty towers, maybe in which Bob ran an Inn. And there were three local brothers named Larry Darryl and Darryl. Okay. You got it. Now I love the show because of Bob's second career, his real career. He was a successful author of how to books. This struck me as a perfect ambition. To sit in a cozy study and to churn out books that were just effortless to write. Not to strive for Pulitzer's or national book awards, but just to crank out shelves, full of books on animal husbandry on basket weaving and transmission repair. Recon books though. Nonetheless, a raid on shells filled with one's name over and over on the spines. The first book that I ever had published was called hello world, a life in ham radio. It was inspired by a collection of special postcards that I found at a flea market cards that were designed by amateur radio operators to confirm the virtual meetings that they had on the air treed by the stories behind these cards and by the community of quirky men who wrote them and kept this technology alive long after sell by. But I wrote this book primarily because. Someone was interested in publishing it. I really, really wanted to have a book with my name on the cover. Even a book about ham radio, precisely the sort of book that Bob might've written and the book did well. It was written about in the New York times, and it was certainly snapped up by every Hamm's hipster grandchildren, less than a year later. The same publisher brought out my second book. Everyday matters and illustrated memoir of my first wife Patty's crippling accident and how it inspired me to start drawing. Initially, I had a lot of ambivalence about the publication of the second book. I wasn't sure that this story was legitimately mine to tell it seemed that Patty should be the one to write such a book. I also felt fraudulent writing a book about art-making. I wasn't an artist or an illustrator. And where would this book take me now? Would it lead to Bob's study in the woods with two books under my belt, I felt ready to get a literary agent and to step up my efforts. My first publisher was a small niche publisher of already books. What I really wanted was a major publisher. That was a household name. And it seemed like a real agent could get me into this more August company, not to mention getting me a big fat advance that I could live off and just write books, but no ideas for my third book. Then one weekend, I went back to the flea market and I found a trove of educational film strips, and they stirred memories long forgotten of sitting in boring elementary school classrooms, listening to the clickety click of the advancing strip in a semi darken room. Do you remember it? It was a memory that I was sure that other people had too. I thought I could surely turn those film strips into another richly illustrated bestseller one. There a major publisher would jump at my new agent dutifully, found me a new publisher, a minor division of a major house who handed me a five figure advance to write the book. I began researching the dusty history of educational policy. I squeezed and squeezed those filmstrips until every drop of drama and snarky comedy was extracted. It was tedious, but essential. If it was, I was to carve out my place in the bookstore. It was just the sort of work that I'm sure Bob had to do all the time. And one day I would become a beloved author with a long series of books on quaint and obsolete technology. It seemed like a niche that I could define it and dominate when the book came out. I achieved another of my teenage dreams. I was interviewed on CNN. It was on the way soon I could quit my job in advertising and get that in and a bunch of cardigans. But that book wasn't really my book. It was a jokey, intellectually suspect effort that I would never buy a copy of myself. It was a ploy, an illusion. That I conjured up to shortcut my way to my puny ambition and it turned out I hadn't fooled anyone. My third book became the first book I wrote that was remaindered that meant that the publisher gave up on it, stopped printing it and sold the remaining copies at pennies on the dollar, on the sales table at Barnes and noble. It was a humiliating turn of events. Not only had I prostituted myself to get my name on the books, cover making something I didn't believe in just because of some delusions about what I wanted, but the world hadn't even bought it. I hadn't been true to myself at all. And the results stunk to high heaven. Failure is a great teacher. We avoided. We flee it. We dread it, but it shows us exactly who we are. We may have taken a wrong turn along the way, maybe pursuing a misguided fantasy, but when failure brings us up short, we have to face this abrupt in irrefutable sign. That it's time to think again, it's not the end of the road. Failure happens when we're not quite there yet. But it's not proof that we shouldn't keep trying. When I look at the failure of my book, I see a life-changing lesson. My failure was due to being inauthentic, to working hard and a lazy goal, looking for a shortcut to some trapping of success that wouldn't have made me happy because it wasn't true to me. Not long afterwards. I suffered another humiliation for the first time in my life. I was fired from my job. It was a big job, chief creative officer of a successful ad agency. It was a job I wanted because I wanted to feel important to achieve something. The fact that the agency was never my cup of tea, didn't dissuade me. The fact that I felt like a miserable fraud every day. I nodded on my Hermes tie. Didn't stop him. The fact that the job required me to do everything, but the things that I was best at writing and coming up with ideas didn't occur to me. I wanted to be a big shot. Even though every day I felt ill, exhausted and afraid, and then it was all over. I was told that after three years of acting the part. The Schrade was finished. I was done and there was the door I was embarrassed. But then, and obviously relieved. I could try to find me again. A few days later, I sat in a coffee shop with no idea what to do. And of course it was raining and hard. And then just like a scene from a cheesy movie. My agent called to say that a big publisher had been in touch. They wanted to give me a six figure advance for the paperback rights to everyday matters and to write another book, any book I wanted so long as it felt as wonderfully real as that book did. And I had permission to write whatever I wanted. Terrified of getting what I'd always wanted and blowing my last chance, who was I to take this on? I'd been, remaindered fired, shown that my dreams were just fantasies. What if I made another mistake? I couldn't do this. Had nothing to say. The initial consequences of my failure were a deep sense of powerlessness and confusion, but there's real power in having nothing to lose rather than trying to win at a game that I'd never really wanted to play. I could look honestly at myself and take a fresh path. When I started to draw, I made so many mistakes. But I kept pushing on until slowly my wine grew more competent, more expressive of what I wanted to create. My skills were built on a huge pile of failures, crumple pages, and pencil stubs. Without them, I would never have progressed learned that the biggest impediment wasn't making mistakes, it was being freed to make mistakes by blundering head. Taking risks going into new territories, punching above my weight class. I had breakthroughs. I decided to write a book about living with that fear and use it to help people to overcome their obstacles. People need to be given permission to do new things, to be vulnerable, to blunder, and to stumble ahead without fail. Fear of the consequences. We all screw up. We all fall down. It's okay. If we're making an honest effort to grow, the book I wrote was called the creative license, giving yourself permission to be the artist you truly are. I wrote the book for me, a self-help book that I'd never found in a bookstore, but which I needed to read and badly. I needed someone to tell me it was okay to fail that I'd get past it. That I would be good so long as I let myself keep trying. It was a how to book that showed me how to be. I hope that Bob would have liked it too. I couldn't have written the creative license if I hadn't lost the job title that I wasn't entitled to. If I hadn't written that other inauthentic book that showed me who I wasn't. So I could find out who I was. My mistakes have made me who I am. I hope you can learn from them and from your own. Thanks for joining me today. I'll create something new for you again next week until then I'm Danny Gregory. And this is art for all.