

Bill Watterson Commencement Speech (1990) - mrbogle
http://www.graduationwisdom.com/speeches/0025-watterson.htm

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paul
"Drawing comic strips for five years without pay drove home the point that the
fun of cartooning wasn't in the money; it was in the work. This turned out to
be an important realization when my break finally came."

I feel like this is the key to any great work.

~~~
toyg
How many people are able to spend 5 years without income ?

Should we commend Mr. and Mrs. Watterson Sr.? Without them, Calvin & Hobbes
might have never been created; but how healthy is it to subsidize your
children for so many years, hoping that they'll eventually find their own way
?

As a (not particularly wealthy) parent, this is the sort of question I keep
asking myself, and my experience tells me to do the exact opposite of what the
Wattersons did.

~~~
easp
What do you think the Watterson's did?

They may have paid his way through 4 years of college, but it seems pretty
clear that he held jobs after left college, he just wasn't making any money
off his comic strip.

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mattdeboard
One of the great American artists, IMO, and one gets the sense his
noteworthiness is increased by several orders of magnitude by his
steadfastness in the face of "sell out" pressure. I think about the artist
behind Calvin and Hobbes every time I see some unlicensed Calvin urinating on
some automobile manufacturer logo, or kneeling at some religious symbol.

~~~
thesash
So cool to see him speak about his values reals rivet early on in his career,
knowing that he stuck by them.

~~~
Natsu
He's a pretty cool guy from everything I've heard. It's sad to hear about some
of the things that drove him away, especially the fights with the syndicate,
or even how when he used to sneak signed books into a local bookstore, people
started selling them, much to his chagrin.

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djtriptych
Amazing - perhaps my favorite graduation speech with "This is water" by David
Foster Wallace (<http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/sep/20/fiction>).

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Natsu
In case anyone else was curious, 4.5 million minutes works out to about 8.5
years.

~~~
djtriptych
And in case anyone was wondering about the easiest way to figure that out:
<https://www.google.com/search?q=4.5+million+minutes+in+years>

~~~
Natsu
Heh, that's precisely what I did to find it.

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sardonicbryan
I've never heard of Kenyon College, but the quality of their commencement
speakers is staggering.

