Comments on: when your dreams become reality, they are no longer your dreams

By: tinku gallery

tinku gallery — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 16:06:27 +0000

The cartoon on How to Make It As An Artist made me laugh…will send on to my artists friends!
More seriously, you made a good point about how getting to where you are was a combination of many individual steps, a bit of luck and good timing. People think (and are sold on the idea) that success happens overnight. Not true, more often than not.

By: dronbo

dronbo — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 17:28:17 +0000

boronodel

By: Paul

Paul — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 01:25:28 +0000

Thanks Hugh,
I stop here regularly and am NEVER disappointed.
The quality of your writing is inspirational, what you write is inspirational, your success is inspirational.
Bet you never thought you’d be an inspiration uh??
Or if that’s why you do it you’re succeeding!
Ciao

By: Madrugada Jones

Madrugada Jones — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:31:49 +0000

Hugh,
Especially relevant to my situation is your line about not becoming a slave to your dreams because doing so will force you to cut them off before they come true. I draw cartoons and post them on my blog, and lately I’ve felt frustrated because I’ve spent a lot of time on them, and I love doing so, but they’ve begun encroaching on other things I value in my life and I’ve come to the point where stopping the drawing for a while was an option. But I feel differently now after having read this post. You have a way of making it all seem possible. Thanks for your brilliant writing and I’m looking forward to your book.

By: David Everitt-Carlson

David Everitt-Carlson — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 12:53:43 +0000

Here’s the latest on Vietnam.
http://wildwildeastdailies.blogspot.com/2008/06/vietnam-20-martin-sorrell.html
My 2.0 may happen yet…
Please leave a comment on the post if you feel so inclined.

By: John

John — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 09:51:06 +0000

Excellent.

By: aiza

aiza — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 08:58:33 +0000

thank you very much for this.

By: David Everitt-Carlson

David Everitt-Carlson — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 08:15:51 +0000

This smells charmingly like the last chapter in “How To Be Creative”. Touche!
When you’ve realized your dreams the only thing to do is to come up with new dreams. (Screenplay?) When I started in the advertising business the first thing I realized was that I had turned a hobby (writing and drawing) into a business. It was no longer fun.
Who said I had to “feel” creative at 9am in an office cubicle beside an expressway in Dallas?
I didn’t.
But like all good working stiffs, at least I knew it wasn’t a steel factory and that this job was better than a lot of people would ever have the chance to do – so I proceeded to churn out “product”, today called “content” and then cherry-pick the best of it for my portfolio.
Who really thought that I had a deep creative desire to find the underlying meaning and subtleties in the Texas real estate and banking markets? No one, fuck all. I was doing a job and I knew it. So I set about developing other hobbies outside of the office.
I learned to shoot dove in West Texas (very near to you). I picked up sailing on Cedar Creek lake from Pat Beckman and his 25ft Catalina. I became Tower Records best customer by weekly stoking my collection and I developed a serviceable reading jones at the hands of Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Robbins, Brautigan, Vonegut, John Irving and the like.
And life balanced out. I never had any misconceptions that I was writing the great American novel aside from my work to hawk toothpaste, laundry powder or video games. I married, bought a few houses and became a weekend warrior on a 100 year-old money pit in Michigan.
Life was good.
Yet, like you, it was all random. The call to go top Korea was about as weird as I thought things were going to get – until two years later when I started my own company in that odd and foreboding foreign land.
Random? But, not really.
Over time I’ve just learned to accept the twists and turns as gifts from above and make them work for me. To stay a perpetual student and maybe, after time, to be able to teach others how to run the maze.
The trick, I’ve found is in being able to decide, quickly and decisively, what it is you “do not” want to do. That skill will keep you from wasting time on things that just aren’t going to work out anyway.
Hugh, you say the business card cartoons have been going for ten years but I beg to differ with you on that count. I can remember as long as we have known each other, you working with this format. You really were doing it in the early 90s in Chicago, after UT. It’s what has kept us in contact all these years. When you first put up Gapingvoid, I was on your mailing list.
And then, this last year, when I finally got a real chunk of my book “Wild Wild East”, on the net, you were one of the first to respond and link me in. And that fueled my current blog and got me into a weekly 3-post diet.
Now, I’ve got writing, drawing, blogging and marketing all working together in one of the oddest symphonies I ever could have imagined.
This week, I met an American who works in the Internet industry and has moved to Vietnam, who found me because of my blog. Next month, a woman from Singapore will come to HCMC, who had also found me from my blog. Last Saturday I had a date with a woman who has been a loyal reader and this Friday I will attend an industry function and meet another woman who has been following the writing.
Niche, what niche?
Okay, it’s not “Cartoons drawn on the back of business cards” but if “Smart-assed marketing guy in the bowels of a communist country” is a niche, I’ve got that baby sewn up!
The Internet has given us previously undefinable types the opportunity, to, if not go mainstream, go “slipstream” into sideways and previously uncharted social marketing and networking philosophies that have probably always existed, but never had a reachable platform.
Being paid to be exactly who we are has got to be the ultimate reward and measure of the word “success”.
Million dollar checks don’t often come with that, but million dollar smiles really do.
Rock on, Hugh.

By: Joaquin

Joaquin — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 01:48:06 +0000

Or you could become a life coach.
Seriously, since arriving at your blog 3 years ago through http://www.enriquedans.com, a Professor at a business school in Madrid (talk about randomness), I´ve learned a lot on how to detect bullshit (especially my own) and learning to set out to my true North.
You´ve inspired me to put my ideas in cartoons too (I suck at drawing), and that unexpected turn matched with the idea of putting them on t-shirts, which is what I was originally set out to do.
Of course, I´m nowhere near my own shore, but reading this blog has helped me set the true foundations for the ¨sex¨ part of my schtik. I guess that attests to point [C] of the bright side you mentioned above.
So thanks, once again.

By: Shelley Noble

Shelley Noble — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 00:33:37 +0000

Great post, Hugh. Well written, engrossing, and relevant, (and a little sweet). Would make a perfect ending to a book… etc.

By: Ben Rowe

Ben Rowe — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 00:19:06 +0000

Hugh,
That’s exactly the post I needed to read this morning. Thanks.
Like Richard, I feel like I’m at the start of my path — and who knows where it will head. But anything’s possible. You’ve proved that.

By: Emma Kirsopp

Emma Kirsopp — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 23:06:26 +0000

Thank you.

By: Jose Castillo

Jose Castillo — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 22:31:53 +0000

Dreams are fuel for life. The bigger the dreams the bigger the life. They don’t always match up (almost never) but that wouldn’t be fun if we new where we were going.
Thanks Hugh for sharing your dreams with us.

By: Cale Johnson

Cale Johnson — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 22:15:11 +0000

Thanks Hugh.

By: Richard Galbraith

Richard Galbraith — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 22:12:22 +0000

I can tell you straight up now Hugh that your whole situation in your earlier years sounds exactly like what I’m doing now. Things are steady, I work in advertising / marketing, it’s okay but not my preferred path. I have these grandiose expectations of myself and my creativity, I’m 50k words into my first novel, I blog about it, I’m working hard at my fulltime job to add that ‘extra bow,’ and I’m trying to maintain ‘that lifestyle’ whilst floating between Oxford and London.
It’s all outstanding, it’s brilliant to see how it is all possible, and especially through this modern medium we call the social media, which I love, and hope will continue to treat both me, and yourself well.
As you say; Rock on. The future holds bright things, they’re often hard to get to, no one ever said it was going to be easy, but I believe the harder you work, the luckier you get, and I plan on putting in the hours to get where I want to be.
Thanks for your thoughts, and I look forward with baited breath to the book.
Rich