Did you really quit?

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Hey,

I want to talk about an idea I had some time ago, about persistence and quitting as an artist. I don’t think there’s a line that you can easily cross. I don’t think there are people who persist and people who quit, and you’re either in one group or you’re in the other group.

You see, earlier today I was writing an intro to the second volume of The Sunday Strips, which is coming out in a couple of weeks or so. And I remembered when I wrote and drew the first one of these, already more than a hundred strips ago.

As of yesterday’s email, more than 8,200 people were subscribed to my email list. The number of people subscribed when I started?

Zero.

That’s it.

The number of people who got the first Condor Sunday strip in their email was zero. Hell, the number of views that first strip got was zero.

Now, that’s a very good reason to call it a day. To quit for good. To say, “No, this won’t work.”

But the truth is not that I didn’t quit. The truth is that I had already quit a few times before.

I’d had my Substack account for a year or two prior to that, and I’d already written a few posts that no one read. So, before that first Sunday Strips post, I’d already tried a few times before. And I’d failed to get those posts seen by anyone, too.

The thing is, if you try once and you quit, but then a few months later you give it another shot, did you really quit the first time?

To me, both answers, yes and no, are good answers.

To me, defeat exists, is real, but is never definitive. Unless, you know, you die or something.

So, I spent like two and a half days writing and drawing that first strip, posted it, and no one read it.

But once you fail enough times, you get to know yourself, and you get to know you’re going to try again.

So I decided to try again the following week instead of the following year.

Okay, the following week the results were not much better. But by the fifth or sixth week, things had slowly started to move.

The subscriber list started to grow. And it kept growing.

And now, two years later, I can say I have a pretty big one.

I’m not saying persistence guarantees success. I don’t believe in that.

But I do believe that persistence does increase the chances of having any success.

And more importantly, what I’m trying to say is that the difference between persisting and quitting isn’t as clear as we tend to think.

That perhaps you, at whatever you were attempting to do, thought you had quit, when you actually hadn’t.

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PS: The Flight of The Condor: The Sunday Strips, Vol. 1. The fruit of my persistence, volume one.

The second volume will be out soon, as I said. And it already has a cover.

A beautiful cover.

This one: