Drew Dernavich is the New Yorker magazine’s famous cartoonist, making more funny and enlightening cartoons than anyone else at the magazine’s history.
Many people wrote to him admiring his life, imagining he gets out of bed late every day, thinks of a funny cartoon in 5 minutes, draws it and then sends it to the magazine, and that’s it, his work for the day was over.
Drew is amused and frustrated of people’s opinion of his imaginary lifestyle, so he posted the photo seen above as the true nature of his actual life, it went viral on social media.
The big pile of around 300 cartoons are the ones he’s recently got turned down for. The tiny pile is the one which actually got printed.
Drew started early in life drawing, enjoyed it and eventually became good at it, and became a professional cartoonist but only years of failure and discouragement along the way, yet he continued to love what he did and kept practicing in his spare time which was fun to him.
The photo shows the vast amount of rejections that became his daily life. When he was told to give it up, forget it and how much of a waste of time it was for him.
Luckily he ignored the negativity and those who didn’t believe in him.
This story sounds familiar to most of us, rejection, nobody believing in us when we try something new and different, It is true that many people won’t be happy when we have a go at something bigger than we have ever done before, to achieve something we have always chased and felt passionate about, to become something or someone that loves every day what they do.
I distinctly remember the silence and faces of dismissal when I studied how to make films for our gym, and then imagine years ago that online training could actually benefit our members as lifestyles were changing, and they would engage in it no matter where they lived.
To be honest, I am terrible at drawing and at art in general, but the computer gave me a unique way to make my own art, making exercise films every day that would hopefully inspire our members and create different and unique workouts daily, they could magically watch anytime too, the technology still astounds me. I kept practicing until I became better, and it’s the practice that is the essential part of getting good at anything, just like exercise.
Keep showing up and working on your craft, keep exercising, eating right and great things will happen eventually because your energy will becoming unstoppable.
I realised we are all making art every day if we stay ourselves and not try to be anyone else, expressing ourselves with our own personality and whilst not everyone is going to be happy with our art because all art is subjective, we can still help A LOT of people do great things too.
We are constantly encouraging our members to be fit and healthy, build their self-belief and self esteem, and develop a ton of energy, live with positivity and seize their opportunities in life, which only enables to get so much more out of their own lives, to make them realise that the lessons from what they have achieved through the discipline of exercise, can be applied to showing off their very own unique talents that the world can only benefit from and change others’ lives too.
Next time you have failures and rejections, think of the very successful cartoonist at the New Yorker, where failure is a relentless and essential part of his daily life in finally finding “the one” cartoon that will make plenty of people’s day!!
