Friday, January 6, 2023

JZ Happiness Hack: Don’t be afraid to fail! Accept rejection!

 

JZ Happiness Hack: Don’t be afraid to fail! Accept rejection! 

Fortune favors the bold! 

You can’t make shots you don’t take!

It’s better to have loved and lost then to have never loved at all!

Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes! (That was just thrown in there cause it’s a cool saying.) 

Everybody gets rejected. It’s part of life. There’s the saying, “you can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” You may ask, “How is that related to failing?” This phrase is just a fancy puffed up way of even the best don’t win all the time.  

Obama lost his first election.  Nixon said something to the effect of, “you won’t have me to kick around any more…” after losing an election before becoming president. Okay, that didn’t turn out great but he did win reelection by a huge margin. My ideal Tom Seaver was not the star of his high school or college baseball team. Super rich writers: Steven King, JK Rowling, George R.R. Martin have all been rejected at some point. Einstein didn’t come up with E=MC**2 on his first try. The point is all these people have three things in common:

1)    They tried

2)    They failed

3)    They eventually became successful

 

That’s what you need to do knock on doors, send manuscripts and resumes, talk to people, take that shot. Yeah you’re going to fail – a lot. But guess what you will learn from each failure and improve with each failure. Success (even moderate success) does not come easy and on the first try. 

The key is you can’t have any success unless you try! (Well the one exception may be being born rich like the Royal Family. But being born rich doesn’t necessarily equate to being successful. More on that later.)

BTW, it never hurts to be a little bold and even kind of cocky when looking for opportunities. When I was a sophomore in college my programming skills were growing. I had no doubts that I would get a job as a computer programmer. But as of yet the computer game industry hadn’t really began. There were still very very few personal computers and those that existed cost a lot. It became apparent that at least at first my programming would be all business. If I wanted to get my creative juices flowing it would have to be something else. Since word processors hadn’t yet been invented (at least to the public) I figured my best chance would be to write a comic. Yeah sure I couldn’t draw that well but a number of comic strips were written by one person and drawn by another. 

Being me I decided to start at the top of the heap. I wrote Charles Schultz a letter, where I kindly pointed out he was getting up there in age. I had read an article that none of his kids wanted to take over his legacy. So, I offered. I even wrote up a month of Peanuts gags. My logic and pitch being, we me writing he could concentrate more on drawing. Plus when he finally put his pen down I could take over. Peanuts would still be Peanuts as I would have apprenticed and learned from him.

A month passed and I heard nothing. I went home for summer break figuring, “Oh well I gave it a shot. No harm no foul.” On day while sitting at home playing cards with my sister the phone rang. My sister picked it up.  The conversation went like this:

My sister: No I am sorry Mr. Zakour is not home. May I take a message?

PAUSE TO LISTEN

MY SISTER GRABBED A PIECE OF PAPER

My sister: Okay, so your name is Charles Schultz. How do you spell that?

PAUSE TO LISTEN

My sister: C H

Me (driving over the table): IT’S FOR ME! IT’S FOR ME!! IT’S FREAKING CHARLES SCHULTZ! I’M MR. ZAKOUR. HE WANTS TO TALK TO ME! ME! ME!! ME!!

I grabbed the phone from my sister. There on the other was Mr. Charles Schultz. They say don’t meet your idols. But apparently that doesn’t apply to phone calls from your idols. Mr. Schultz and I had a very nice conversation. I have no idea how long it lasted. Half the time my brain was thinking: Oh my oh my oh my! But he did say he liked my stuff and I had true talent. But he also said Peanuts would only be written and drawn by him. Still he had faith that I would develop my own comic. He even talked about his rejections. It made me feel really good. It also made me know that I could do this as long as I kept plugging away.

Yeah, I got rejected but it was a darn good rejection.  But even that stung a little bit knowing that 19 year old me would not be taking over Peanuts. Heck if I did this book would be called One Life Hack for a Wildly Successful Life: Take over Peanuts. Of course life usually doesn’t turn out to be that easy. Ya gotta pay your dues and take your knocks. But that’s okay. Each knock makes you a little tougher so the next knock stings a little less. With each rejection see if there is anything you can learn from that rejection. Try to take something positive out of it. Even if that positive is only, “Well I tried.” Put it behind you. Forget about it. Move on to the next.

 

Important Note: When it comes to failing having a short memory is very helpful.

Right after college I created a poorly drawn character called The Mouth Monster. I figured maybe I could do my own art? I could not. I mean I could but only the local papers would buy it. Nice extra income (lunch money) but not enough to make a living. It was around then that I discovered established comic strips and magazine cartoonists often buy gags. You just needed to contact the creator through the syndicate or magazine they worked for. I sat down wrote a bunch of gags and sent them out to a whole bunch of different cartoonists. I took a deep breath fully aware that I was bound to get rejected.

Not surprisingly a bunch of them said: “Thanks but no thanks.” Happily a lot more of them said, “we love your stuff. Please write for us.” Over the course of the next few years I literally wrote thousands of gags for comic strips. Later,  I decided to branch out to TV hosts who did a monologue at the beginning of their show. I fought back the fear of rejection and low and behind I found myself submitting gags to both  Joan Rivers and the Tonight Show. I love it. I had found my calling. 

My lack of fear of rejection combined with my love of humor writing and my knowledge of computers is how I become a novelist.  As you could probably guess it certainly wasn’t a straight path. In the early to mid 90s when the World Wide Web first became a thing I was fascinated by it. I realized that now anybody could put stuff out into the world for anybody else to read. My fellow geek friend Ron Pool and I created what may very well have been the first interactive online novel: The Doomsday Brunette.  This was the futuristic story of the world’s last freelance PI and his wise-cracking holographic assistant as they hunted down a beautiful but deadly enhanced human. It was pure fun pulp. I also started to scribble my own poorly drawn computer cartoons and also put them on the web for the world to see.

Of course nobody knew the cartoons or the mini-interactive novel where there. We had no marketing budget and quite frankly no way to monetize this yet.  Then I discovered something called The Cool Site of the day and I also discovered something called Yahoo. I wrote to them both saying: “Hey why don’t you feature us?”

Much to my pleasure they both emailed back and said, “Sure!”

BOOM. Due my lack of fear of rejection the world knew about us. We got calls from NY Times, Detroit Free Press, San Fran Chronicle. (I can’t even remember. But a lot of newspapers when newspapers still had more power than the web.) We won a Webby award. A bunch of books named us to top 10 web sites. A few people even bought cartoons. We made some t-shirts and sold those.

All the while we still had our day jobs. As for creators there still wasn’t a way to make even a moderately successful living off of online revenue. Then the big companies started to jump online. NBC / Universal started their Scifi channel web site, scifi.com. On a whim my lack of fear of reaction caused me to email them and say: “Hey I wrote this story called the Doomsday Brunette about a cool pulp sci fi PI. Would you like me to write original interact content for you?”

The next day I heard back: “You know that’s a cool idea. Send us the first chapter.”

Right then and there I wrote the first chapter of The Plutonium Blonde. Took maybe an hour. I highlighted what I thought the links could be. I sent it off. The next day I got a e-mail from Sean at scifi saying Bonnie Hammer (who was a VP I believe at that time) liked it. Let’s move forward. Boom, the The Plutonium Blonde was born. For the next twenty some odd weeks I would write a chapter (send it to a reader to edit) and then send it into the scifi.com. NBC universal would then me actually money for writing stuff.  I felt great. All because I took a chance and sent an email. 

Plutonium Blonde ran it’s course on scifi.com. I felt good about it. I believe they felt good about it. I talked with scifi about doing an audio version but nothing came of that. I talked to scifi about doing a movie version. But they ultimately decided it would be too costly. That was that. At least for the time being.

Out of the blue the online service Prodigy contacted me. One of their VP’s said: “I love your writing and your cartoons I want to buy it all.” I said, “Sure.” For awhile my cartoons appeared on Prodigy.  But then Prodigy got bought out by another company that wanted to focus on music. I was gone. But hey I gotten paid a nice salary while it lasted. 

Sometime later, my cousin Larry Ganem (who is now a cool VP at DC comics) told me there was this new company called Peanut Press and they were doing something called e-books. I said, “Great I’ll write to them.”

Larry said, “Don’t you want to think about it for a bit.”

I said, “Nah, thinking is way over rated when it comes to new technology.”

I literally hung up the phone with Larry and sent an email to Peanut Press. I asked if they wanted to turn Plutonium Blonde into an e-book. To my surprise they answered immediately. They had read the story on scifi.com and loved it. They said sure. Long story short Plutonium Blonde went on to become the number e-book in the nation until Stephen King finally knocked it off the charts with his Riding the Bullet.

Time passed I continued to write, draw silly cartoons and work on web stuff. That was still my main source of income. One day I got an email from a lady I thought was crazy she said, “Hey I’m owner of Daw books and I want to turn your e-book into a novel. You up for it?”

I said, “Sure.”

The rest as they say is history. I needed to expand Plutonium Blonde out some to make it a novel so I enlisted Larry Ganem again. After all he was a communications major and knew things like the difference between an adverb and an adjective. The Plutonium Blonde was released and went on to be called the funniest sci fi book of the year. Some people even compared it to Good Omens and Hitchhikers guide. 

I now had the start of moderately successful writing career all because I had no fear of being rejected.

Another lesson of life hack to learn is:

            It never hurts to ask….

Note: it might be a little scary or a little hard to ask. But the worst that can happen is that somebody says “no thanks.” That is hardly ever fatale.

After I had established as both a gag writer and pulp humor novelist I was invited to San Diego comic com. While walking the floor in amazement that I was at comic con to speak on panels I ran into Bongo Comics group. These were the people who produced Simpsons comics. My son and I talked to one of the editors and I told him what a fan of the Simpsons I was. How I loved the show and the comics. At my son’s coaching I took a deep breath I then asked, “Are you open to freelance writers?”

To which he replied. “Actually we are? Do you have a web site or a resume?” 

We got talking more. The next month I was pitching and selling stories to the Simpsons comics. This lead to work with Rugrats, Fairly Odd Parents and many others. All because one I listened to my son and two I fought back my nerves and asked.

Summary: Don’t let fear of rejection stop you from asking. Keep on plugging away!

 


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