I don’t know who needs to hear this.
Or who will find it relevant.
But last month while listening to a biography about Jim Henson (the guy who invented the Muppets, Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock, etc), I got to thinking about how some of my business “heroes” ended up being what I can only refer to as “successfully disappointed.”
Take these 4 guys:
1. Jim Henson — spent all his time working with puppets until he could find a “real job” with prestige.
2. Dr. Seuss — only wrote children’s books because he was under a contract with his client who he did advertising for not to write any other kind of books. (He originally couldn’t have cared less about writing children’s books and just did it for money.)
3. Gary Bencivenga — according to the interview he did with Email Players subscriber Ken McCarthy, this Email Players subscriber who is universally considered to be the world’s greatest direct response copywriter got into this business to do cool TV and other kinds of advertising campaigns (writing slogans, etc), and never made it out of the direct response department…
4. Stan Lee — he wanted to be a serious novelist, and write the great American novel, not write a bunch of comics for kids where he was mandated to never write words of more than two syllables, etc.
I don’t know about you.
But I’m glad these guys never fulfilled their original dreams!
And I’m sure they were crying all the way to the bank…
And so it is.
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Ben Settle
