“I was a profound failure. Not really profound enough. I kind of slid in the middle of failure. Some of us were picturesque. I was just dull.”
Chuck Jones went to art college at age 15.
You might have heard of Chuck Jones before. He eventually became the Oscar-winning animator behind the best Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck cartoons… the creator of Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote… and the director of How The Grinch Stole Christmas.
But back at art college, Jones found everyone else was taller and could draw infinitely better than him.
He was dejected. One thing that helped him was a teacher who stepped in front of the whole class and said:
“Every one of you has 100,000 bad drawings in you. The sooner you get rid of them, the better it will be for everybody.”
This includes everybody who signed up for my Influential Emails training. They’ve all been getting emails from me. I want to know why they signed up, and what they hope to get out of it. One guy replied:
For me, the challenge is finding ideas that seem unrelated, connecting them to create insights and then communicate them in an intriguing way without sounding fake.
In all honesty, its to remove the fear of I don’t know what to write with the confidence that I have a process for figuring out exactly what to do.
I’ll talk about the specifics of my process inside Infuential Emails. But honestly, the comment above brilliantly lays out the gist of my process, in just one sentence. That’s all you need to get started. That, along with the Chuck Jones quote above to get over any lingering fear.
But wait, there’s more!
This is part of a bigger thing I’ve found in life.
Many times, if I’m faced with a brick wall in my path and I can’t see any way through it, I’ll take out a piece of paper. And I’ll start writing down my currently available ideas.
“#1. Bang head against wall. #2 Beat fists against wall. #3 Lie down and die. #4….” When I free up my brain of bad ideas that take me nowhere, I sometimes find good ideas underneath.
Do you remember the rejection game? It was a trendy thing some 10 years ago.
Each day the goal was to get somebody to tell you no. As soon as you did that, you succeeded. The point was to keep the streak going for as long as you could.
I tried it back then. It was surprisingly fun and liberating.
Because when you seek out and reward yourself for reaching what you normally avoid, you don’t just achieve more. You reframe what success means.
Did you find this informative and motivational? Are you ready to get going writing something yourself? If so, good.
But did you think I’ve written more coherent and interesting emails in the past, and that this isn’t among one of my standouts?
Even better. I’ve just gotten rid of another one of those 100,000 bad emails, and freed up my brain for something new and possibly amazing the next time I sit down to write. And you can do the same, starting today.