
"It's surprising how hard we'll work when the work is done just for ourselves." - Bill Watterson - zach
http://home3.inet.tele.dk/stadil/spe_kc.htm
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mynameishere
Open up a newspaper, and look at some of the strips. Rubbish. Absolute utter
rubbish. And yet they all got published! Somebody looked at them and said,
"Yep, that's a winner."

And here, unsurprisingly, is Watterson talking about how hard it was to get
into print. Maybe--since this website is intended for businesspeople as much
as creators--maybe it would be fitting if everyone remembered just how
completely powerful people can fail--and not even realize it, nor be punished
for it.

~~~
iamwil
Well, though I share the same sentiments in general (there are a few good
strips), someone out there is reading all that rubbish. Either we're not like
most people, and most people like rubbish, or good content is not how strips
are being evaluated to make it to print. Perhaps they're catering to something
else other than good content.

~~~
farmer
I think it's the former: we're not like other people.

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iamwil
I suppose there are correlations between his life and founders. He failed as a
political cartoonist right out of college, and failed for a couple of years
drawing C&H...not; a lot of newspapers wanted to take his work.

The most amazing thing to me, though is that he chose a stopping point. He
stopped C&H; at what one might call the pinnacle of his popularity because he
felt he had completely explored what he wanted to explore with the medium,
unlike those long running one-liner and uninspired strips like Garfield.

Software might be amendable to the same time of attitude--they only should go
up to a certain point, instead of add feature after feature, ad nauseum,
creating an uninspired pile of features.

It might be like how the Ilwrath just got a little bit too good and wrapped
around to evil.

~~~
notabel
Even if there isn't a cut-off for adding features to software, there's
probably a cut-off for where adding features is the best occupation for the
founder. Either the software fails, and its moot, or it takes off, and if it
takes off, there is probably a point at which it makes more sense for the
founder to leave and work on a new project--one where the hard problems still
have to be solved.

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Alex3917
It's only surprising if you've missed out on the last thirty years of research
into motivation.

Rule of thumb: As books read decreases, the insightfulness of other people's
blog posts increases.

Kvetching aside, the speech as a whole is a great read.

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zach
The first link I submitted to reddit. It garnered 27 points, at that time a
huge number. Watterson is a fascinating character. He's last storied to be
painting landscapes near his hometown of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, burning them
once they're completed.

