Bill Watterson Commencement Speech (1990) | Hacker News Reader

Bill Watterson Commencement Speech (1990)

graduationwisdom.com

72 pointsmrbogle14 comments

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Yes, but he wasn't working continuously for 8.5 years. If a full time work-year is about 240 hours, that's 312 1/2 years! I admire his persistence.

240 hours is a very short full time work-year.

(52 weeks/year - 2 weeks vacation) * 40 hours/week == 2000 hours. Many workers exceed that.

50 weeks/year * 40 hours/week * 60 min/hour = 120000 work min/year -> 37.5 years.

So, most possibly, Watterson was refering to the total time, not just the time spent at work

365.25 days/year * 24 hrs/day * 60 min/hr = 525960 min/yr -> 8.5 years which is STILL a very long time.

I have not (yet) had to spend so many years on something I did not like.

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

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