“Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in.”
How Bill Watterson made me cry yesterday
Yesterday, while running errands for a few hours, I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, You Made It Weird with Pete Holmes. The episode’s guest was Ben Schwartz, probably best-known as Jean-Ralphio on the TV show Parks & Recreation. (listen to this episode here)
Pete’s podcast often touches on some heavy subjects, including work, life, religion, sex/relationships, and other things we usually only discuss with our closest friends. I’m a very introspective person, especially recently as I’ve been building Mocky, so this podcast makes me feel at home and helps to clarify a lot of my own thinking.
About halfway through the episode, Ben and Pete began talking about how we compare ourselves to more successful people and how that can be so limiting to our own happiness and contentment. This section was really hitting home for me, but then Ben pulled out one of his favorite Bill Watterson quotes.
This quote, reprinted below, pushed me over the edge and I teared up in the car. I’ve tried to preach a similar mindset to friends recently, but Bill is so eloquent and prescient that sharing his thoughts will do for now.
Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you’re really buying into someone else’s system of values, rules and rewards.
You will find your own ethical dilemmas in all parts of your lives, both personal and professional. We all have different desires and needs, but if we don’t discover what we want from ourselves and what we stand for, we will live passively and unfulfilled. Sooner or later, we are all asked to compromise ourselves and the things we care about. We define ourselves by our actions. With each decision, we tell ourselves and the world who we are. Think about what you want out of this life, and recognize that there are many kinds of success.
Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential — as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.
You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them.
To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.
Your preparation for the real world is not in the answers you’ve learned, but in the questions you’ve learned how to ask yourself.
– Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes
Follow me on Twitter here: @DanielZarick
Links:
- The quote is from Bill Watterson’s Kenyon College Commencement speech, “Some Thoughts on the Real World by One Who Glimpsed It and Fled”
- The podcast episode is You Made It Weird with Pete Holmes: episode 198 with Ben Schwartz
- Share your work with your coworkers and clients using Mocky, something I’ve been building.
