Captain Picard: “The only person you’re truly competing against, Wesley, is yourself.”
Wesley Crusher: “Then you’re not disappointed?”
Captain Picard: “Wesley – you have to measure your successes and your failures within, not by anything that I or anyone else might think. But, erm… if it helps you to know this… *I* failed the first time, and you may not tell anyone!”
Failure affects all of us, however I believe, as the captain has so elegantly put it, what we do with the results of our shortcomings is more important than a failure itself. When I was younger (before art school) I used to think of my life as a long stairway up, with many of the steps being failures and a few success steps in between. I always thought the failures were worth getting through, or perhaps even to be looked forward to, because it meant one step closer to something good happening. When I went to art school this attitude was lost and replaced with a very defeatist attitude. I am currently attempting (with the help of my girlfriend) to build an attitude of progress over this annoying fatalism I seem to enjoy so much. So if you do comics, art, illustration, heck ANYTHING; you could be a car mechanic and have these feelings; do as the captain says, don’t compare yourself to others and see your “failures” more as learning experiences. Good luck.
Tim.
