#154 Charles Schulz (Charlie Brown)

What I learned from reading My Life with Charlie Brown by Charles Schulz. ---- [0:24] Beginning with the first strip published on October 2nd, 1950, until the last published on Sunday, February 13th, 2000, the day after his death, Schultz wrote, penciled, inked, and lettered by hand every single one of the daily and Sunday strips to leave his studio, 17,897 in all for an almost fifty-year run. [4:08] If there were one bit of advice I could give to a young person, it would be to do at least one task well. Do what you do on a high plain. [5:54] Slow consistent growth over a long period of time: Year / # of newspapers1950 71952 401958 3551971 11001975 14801984 2000 [12:00] There are certain seasons in our lives that each of us can recall, and there are others that disappear from our memories, like the melting snow. [14:05] I used my spare time to work on my own cartoons. I tried to never let a week go by without having something in the mail working for me. [21:03] You don’t work all of your life to do something so you don’t have to do it. [22:09] On where ideas come from: Most comic strip ideas are like that. They come from sitting in a room alone and drawing seven days a week, as I’ve done for 40 years. [25:03] When he is 73: People come up to me and say: “Are you still drawing the strip?” I want to say to them, “Good grief—who else in the world do you think is drawing it?” I would never let anybody take over. And I have it in my contract that if I die, then my strip dies. [30:15] At the point he is writing this he is making $30 to $40 million a year. The total earning of Peanuts is well over $1 billion. [32:37] But as the year went by, I could almost say that drawing a comic strip for me became a lot like a religion. Because it helps me survive from day to day. I always have this to fall back upon. When everything seems hopeless I know I can come to the studio and think: Here’s where I’m at home. This is where I belong —in this room, drawing pictures. [40:01] If you should ask me why I have been successful with Peanuts, I would have to admit that being highly competitive has played a strong role. I must admit that I would rather win than lose. In the thing that I do best, which is drawing a comic strip, it is important to me that I win. [44:26] To have staying power you must be willing to accommodate yourself to the task. I have never maintained that a comic strip is Great Art. It simply happens to be something I feel uniquely qualified to do. [45:18] He is the most widely syndicated cartoonist ever, with more than 2300 newspapers. He has had more than 1400 books published, selling more than 300 million copies. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Senra?

  Charles Schulz was 20th Century America's favorite and most highly respected cartoonist. His comic strip, Peanuts, appeared daily in over 2,000 newspapers. Compilations of the strip sold in the millions of copies. Thousands of toys and gift items continue to bear the likeness of Charlie Brown, Lucy, Snoopy, and other characters who populate their world. Beginning with the first strip published on October 2nd, 1950, until the last, published on Sunday, February 13th, 2000, the day after his death, Schulz wrote, penciled, inked, and lettered by hand every single one of the daily and Sunday strips to leave his studio.

• 0:43David Senra?

  Seventeen thousand, eight hundred and ninety-seven in all, for an almost 50-year run. Charlie Brown and his friends were preoccupied with what has possessed and continued to obsess us all: the relationship of the self to society, the need to establish our separate identities, anxiety over our neurotic behavior, and an overwhelming desire to gain control of our destinies. Charlie Brown appeals to us because of his resilience, his ability to confront and humanize the impersonal forces around him, and his unwavering faith in his ability to improve himself and his options in life.

• 1:26David Senra?

  In his insecurities and defeats, his affirmations and small victories, Charlie is someone with whom we can identify. This has been Charles Schulz's amazing gift to the world through his small drawings appearing daily in the buried pages of the comic section of the newspaper. Schulz's major writings have been gathered in this volume. Here, the reader will learn directly from the man himself: the facts of his early life and the development of his career. Here, he talks about a wide variety of topics: the sources of his creativity and inspiration, how Peanuts came to be, the meaning of each character in the strip, his daily routine, how to achieve a career in cartooning, the importance of his work in animation and television, and his work ethic.

• 2:12David Senra?

  The intent of this collection of Schultz's essays is to round out the portrait of the man as he saw himself. He speaks entirely for himself in these pieces, and the reader can experience directly the greatness of his mind and soul. And that was the excerpt from the introduction of the book I'm going to talk to you about today, which is the autobiography of Charles M. Schultz, and it's titled "My Life with Charlie Brown." And I just love that last sentence right there, and I think it's a great way to quickly demonstrate why learning from biographies and autobiographies is such a valuable activity. "The reader can experience directly the greatness of his mind and soul." I want to go back to what I feel is the most remarkable, one of the most remarkable paragraphs

• 2:57David Senra?

  in any book that I've ever read for the podcast so far, and that's this idea that, beginning with the first strip, published in 1950, and the end, the last strip in 2000, so it's almost 50 years, it's off by about six months, and that one obviously appeared the day after his death, "The fact that Schultz wrote penciled, inked, and lettered by hand every single one of the daily and Sunday strips to leave his studio, 17,897 in all." And I think the reason that paragraph's so important to me is because I think it could act like a North Star. You can find, if you think about all the information that's conveyed in just a few sentences there, it's really telling us, find work that you love to do that you never want to quit. And in doing your work, make the lives of the people that

• 3:42David Senra?

  enjoy your work a little better. I think that's a fantastic, just a fantastic achievement. Okay, so let's jump into the rest of the book. As the introduction said, it's a collection of essays that are going to function as an autobiography. A lot of what I'm going to share with you today is random. I feel it's just me and you listening directly and learning directly from Charles Schultz. So let's go into his first piece of advice. This is his advice to young people. He says, "If there were but one bit of advice I could give to a young person, it would be to learn to do at least one task well. Following that, I would also say, don't sell out to the baser elements of your profession. Do what you

• 4:23David Senra?

  do on a high plane. If God has given you a talent, do not use it ungratefully." And that is kind of a preview for advice that he gives throughout the entire book. Where he's, you know, his one thing that he did really well was just, I make a cartoon. I draw funny pictures. That's exactly what I'm doing. And so he talks about, even though later on, I'm going to share with you, like the, just the, it's going to blow your mind how financially successful this guy's business was. But he'd never, as big and as popular and just, you know, they took some of his drawings in the Apollo space missions. It's just, he had presidents calling him, talking about how much they loved his comic strip. But what I loved about what he did, he's like, listen, I can, I always have to go back to the basics. All I'm doing is every day, I sit down at my desk and I draw funny pictures and I can't

• 5:08David Senra?

  lose sight of that. And if I do that really well, and I do it over a long period of time, then I'll let the rest, everything else, take care of itself. But I'm going to focus on that. And I think that's fantastic advice for everybody. In the very beginning of the book, there's like a chronological order of main events in his life. I'm going to skip over a lot of that. I do want to highlight one thing to you because it talks over a, let's see, this is a 34-year period. Talks about the growth of the comic strip. Okay, so I'm going to read a bunch of numbers, the years, and then how many newspapers his comic strip appeared in. And it's, you know, I think he held, at one time, he held the Guinness Book of World

• 5:48David Senra?

  Records for the most, like, his comic strip was in the most, the number of newspapers, right? But what was fascinating to me about this section is how long. It was just slow, consistent growth over a long period of time. And that is the main, I think, takeaway I took from this section. So in 1950, starts out in seven newspapers. Two years later, he's in 40 newspapers. Eight years later, he's in 355 newspapers. This is, when I say eight years, it's eight years from the starting point, 1950, okay? Let's see, 21 years later, he's gone from 355 up to 1,100.

• 6:27David Senra?

  25 years later, he's up to 1,480. And finally, 34 years later, he is in 2,000 newspapers. And I think embedded in those numbers is the fact that there's a huge benefit to just not quitting. In other words, don't interrupt the compounding. Okay, now, here's an essay he's writing. So he says, and so 25 years have gone by. So he's been doing peanuts for 25 years. And this was actually surprising to me. I actually changed my note that's on this page. Let me read it to you first, and I'll tell you why. "I have been asked many times if I ever dreamed that peanuts would have become as successful as it is. And I think I always surprise people when I say, 'Well, frankly, I guess I did expect it.'"

• 7:11David Senra?

  Because after all, it was something I had planned for since I was six years old. "I did have the hope that I would be able to contribute something to a profession that I can now say that I have loved all my life." So the interesting point to me was that he only ever had one goal in life. He wanted to be a cartoonist since the time, he's saying, since he started falling in love with reading comics at six. Didn't go to college, decided to go to art school instead, was writing, drawing comics the entire time of his childhood. But the reason I changed the note on the page was, this was surprising to me, because in this book, it's very similar to a few podcasts ago with the Catherine Graham autobiography, where I said it was, it's kind of like you're reading a diary or a very personal journal

• 7:54David Senra?

  of somebody, because they're revealing emotional states that I don't think most people reveal to the external world. And the reason this is surprising is because he talks about, you know, Charlie Brown is kind of like a loser. It's his words, that's the way Charles describes Charlie Brown. And he's very insecure, nothing ever goes right. And he says that that, that the inspiration from that came from his own insecurity. He grew up very awkward, unsure of himself, didn't know where he fit. And so Charlie Brown has, the same way Charles Schultz felt when, when he was a child, is the way Charlie Brown is drawn and conveyed to the reader of the comic strip. So I thought there was a very interesting juxtaposition there in the sense that he's

• 8:38David Senra?

  insecure, he's not sure of himself, but he knew that he was going to be successful being a cartoonist. I don't know how to reconcile that. I don't know if you can reconcile that. I just thought it was a very interesting observation, and I wanted to share it with you. And in this, moving on into this essay, he talks about his early influences and then his memory of his parents. So he says, "I was drawing cartoons in the early years, but created very few original characters." So he would just copy other ones. This is how we learn, right? We imitate first. "Most of the time, I copied Buck Rogers or Walt Disney figures." He talks about the huge influence that Walt Disney had on his life. "I used to buy every big, little book and comic magazine that came out and study all the various cartoonist techniques.

• 9:20David Senra?

  In my high school years, I became a Sherlock Holmes fanatic and used to buy scrapbooks at the local five-and-dime and fill them with Sherlock Holmes stories in comic book form." That's actually really smart. Essentially, he's converting the story in one medium into the medium that he's going to work in. "A friend of mine named Shermy was one of my faithful readers, and when I started Peanuts, I used his name for one of the original characters." Now he talks a little bit about his parents here. I think, and this is actually really good advice and something I try to do with, especially with my daughter. "I think it is important for adults to consider what they were doing and what their attitudes were when they were the age their own children are now.

• 10:02David Senra?

  There is no other real way of understanding the problems of children. Charlie Brown's father is a barber, which is autobiographical, for our family's life revolved around the long hours my dad spent in the barber shop. He loved his work very much. I recall him telling me once that he really enjoyed getting up in the morning and going off to work. He was always in the barber shop by 8:00 in the morning, and during the 1930s, he always worked until at least 6:30 at night. And on Friday and Saturday nights, many times, he was working till 8:00 or 9:00 at night. He had one day off each week, Sunday." I would say that it's very interesting now that, looking back on that paragraph. Because it follows his, I don't think Charles took any days off.

• 10:47David Senra?

  He'd go to work early in the morning. I think he'd try to be done by like 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon. But it's something he did every day. I wonder how much of his dad's schedule had an influence on him. He loved to read the comic strips, his father, that is. And we discussed them together and worried about what was going to happen next to certain of the characters. And he talks about his dad a lot more in the essays than his mom. And we're going to see why, because his mom had tragically died of cancer. It says, "My mother also encouraged me in my drawing, but sadly never lived to see any of my work published. She died a long, lingering death from cancer when I was 20, and was a loss from which I sometimes believe I never recovered. Today, it is a source of astonishment to me that I am older than she was when she

• 11:32David Senra?

  died, and realizing this saddens me even more." So he is writing those words about 32 years after she died, and he's only 52 when he's writing those words. So she died really young. So in this next section, he's actually talking about a lot of the storylines that he gets for, that he got from Peanuts actually came from his own childhood. But this is just a fantastic sentence, and I just want to read it to you as a standalone. "There are certain seasons in our lives that each of us can recall, and there are others that disappear from our memories like the melting snow." And now we get to the point where he decides to take, to pursue this as a career, and he does this really early. He says, "During my senior year in high school, my mother showed me an ad that read,

• 12:17David Senra?

  'Do you like to draw? Send in for a free talent test.' This was my introduction to art introduction schools incorporated, the correspondence schools." So this is what he does instead of college. He says, "I could have taken all, I could have taken my drawing there in person, but I did all of the lessons by mail." Now, here's, gives you an insight into like, why would he do that? It's, you know, there's some people that have to do, have to do the college courses by mail, but this is actually located in Minneapolis, where his family was at the time. He says, "I did that for, because I was not proud of my work." So, we see that, that lingering Charlie Brown-esque insecurity there.

• 12:57David Senra?

  "The entire course came to $170, and I remember my father having difficulty keeping up with the payments." This is during the Great Depression. "I realized then, that during those Depression days, he had become accustomed to owing people money. The following two years of high school were, uh, excuse me, the two years following high school were extremely difficult. For this was the time my mother was suffering so much with her illness. I was drafted into the Army in 1943 to serve in WWII. I went into the bedroom, this is terrible, this is just sad, man. I went to the bedroom to say goodbye to my mother. She was lying in bed, very ill. And she said to me, 'Yes, I suppose we should, we should say goodbye, because we will probably

• 13:40David Senra?

  never see each other again.'" She died the next day. Okay, so he graduates from that course. He actually starts teaching at that art school. And while he's doing that, and he's trying to pursue his own career, career in being a cartoonist on nights and weekends and any of his free time. So, this, the next section, I consider this the prehistory of his career. "There were many of us on the staff at the, at the art introduction school, who had ambitions to do other things, and I used my spare time to work on my own cartoons. I tried never to let a week go, to let a week go by without having something in the mail working for me."

• 14:20David Senra?

  So, this is a sentence that appears multiple times in the book, over, you know, many decades are separating all these essays that he's writing, but this idea that you should always have something in the, we have to use as a metaphor. Obviously, but he's like, you should always have something in the mail working. So he makes maybe a few comic strips, sends them off in the mail. What he means is he's sending those off to different syndicates, the people that actually get comic strips in the newspapers. And he never lets a week go by where, again, he has like a store of value for his work. I made it, I send it off, I forget about it, and then I create something new. And then I do, I repeat that over and over and over again. This is how he winds up breaking into being a cartoonist and getting, signing the syndicate deal for what becomes Peanuts.

• 15:05David Senra?

  "I submitted cartoons regularly to the Saturday Evening Post and sold 15 of them. These are like one-off occasions. These are not, these are not strips I run over and over again. These were, these were strongly formative years, and my ability to think of ideas and to present them properly was improving steadily. It seemed that it would only be a matter of time before I'd be able to sell some type of marketable feature to a syndicate. I'm still convinced that my eventual success was due largely to what I have called the invigorating atmosphere in the Department of Instruction at the Correspondent's School. It was an exciting time for me because I was involved in the very sort of thing I wished to do." And part of the reason, I think, that he talks about why this is so invigorating is

• 15:49David Senra?

  because all the instructors were trying to do the same thing. So they would collaborate, they would share ideas. In fact, a lot of the characters named in Peanuts are named, their first names are from fellow, like friends and instructors during this time of his life. And he's really young, early twenties is when this is all happening. And one of the, one of his friends and fellow instructors actually encourages him to submit, which is eventually going to become Peanuts. So it says, "Frank Wing, my fellow instructor at Art Instruction," Art Instruction said, "Sparky," that's, that's Schultz's nickname, everybody calls him Sparky. "Sparky, I think you should draw more of those little kits. They are pretty good." So I concentrated on creating a group of samples and eventually sold them as a weekly feature called The Little Folks.

• 16:31David Senra?

  So Little Folks is going to run for two years, and it's going to morph into Peanuts. It's going to be renamed, the character's going to be developed, but this basic idea he just keeps working on for a few years, and eventually that changes into what's going to be his life's work. "I was making regular trips to Chicago to try sell, to try to sell comic features. I dropped into the Chicago Sun one day." And showed my work to Walt Ditsen. He talks about this guy over and over again. I think this is the most, the single most important influence in his career, who was then their comic editor. And he was very impressed with what he saw. I recall him exclaiming, "I certainly cannot say no to this. We'll have to take it to the president." We went into the man's office. He barely looked at the work and abruptly said, "No."

• 17:15David Senra?

  At this time, I was also becoming a little more gregarious and was learning how to talk with people. When I first used to board the morning train to ride to Chicago, I would make the entire trip without talking to anyone. Little by little, however, I was getting rid of my shyness and feelings of inferiority and learning how to strike up acquaintances on the train and talk to people. So more in his career prehistory and this idea of just always keeping something developing in the mail. I continued to mail my work out to a major syndicate. One day, I opened up a letter from one syndicate that turned me down. And the next day, I opened up one from a director who said he liked my work very much. Arrangements were made during the next few months for me to start drawing a Sunday feature. But at the last minute, their editors changed their minds and I had to start all over.

• 17:56David Senra?

  I accumulated a batch of some of the better cartoons I had been drawing, for this deal that fell through, and mailed them off to United Feature Syndicate in New York. This is the one, this is his finally big break. I don't know how much time went by without me hearing from them, but I'm sure it was at least six weeks. I convinced that my drawings had been lost in the mail, I finally wrote them a letter describing the drawings I had sent and asking them if they could recall receiving anything similar. I received a nice letter from Jim Freeman, their editorial director, who said they were very interested in my work and would I care to come to New York and talk about it. When I got to the back, so it's really funny that happens there. So he goes to New York. He arrives too early at the syndicate office. No one's there except the receptionist.

• 18:41David Senra?

  He's like, "Okay, well, I haven't had breakfast yet. I guess I'll just go have breakfast and come back and then we'll have the meeting." By the time he gets back, the meeting is already over and they decided to offer him a deal. When I got back to the syndicate offices, they had already decided they would publish a strip. This made me very happy. I returned to Minneapolis, filled with great hope for the future, and asked a certain girl to marry me. When she turned me down and married someone else, there was no doubt that Charlie Brown was on his way. Losers get started early. And that actually becomes a storyline in Peanuts.

• 19:15David Senra?

  Okay, moving on to the next essay. I love this part because he's really, it kind of echoes that paragraph I talked about at the very beginning that I found so interesting. The fact that he could work on something almost every day for 50 years. The body of work, 17,000-plus comic strips. And I feel 30 years, this is, let's see, what, 35 years into his career? It's another way to explain the same concept. The fact that you can tell that he found something he loved to do, which is so rare for humans to find in their lives, which is really bizarre if you think about it because work is going to take up, what, half of our conscious time they're actually awake? You sleep eight hours a day, work eight hours a day, have eight hours a day to yourself.

• 19:59David Senra?

  You have 16 awake hours, or thereabouts, and half of them you're probably spending working. So, he says, "Sometimes it takes me a long time to come to certain conclusions. I've been drawing the peanut strip for almost 35 years now, and of course, I've had many strangers visit my studio. They look at all the books in my room and then look at my drawing board and express amazement that this is the actual board at which I sit and draw the strips. Inevitably, the conversation turns to how far ahead I work. When they learn about the six-week daily strip deadline, so he's got to turn, for the one that appears on the Monday through Friday newspaper, he's got to turn that in six weeks early. The 12 weeks, for the one that appears Sunday, the bigger, obviously, paper, he has to do that 12 weeks in advance.

• 20:44David Senra?

  A visitor almost never fails to remark. Gee, you could work really hard, couldn't you? And get several months ahead and then take time off. This is the most important part of this section, which I love. Being, as I said, a slow learner, it took me until last year to realize what an odd statement that really is. Now, the reason I think this is so important, because he's comparing and contrasting the way he feels about his work to the way I think most people feel about their work, right? It's like, oh, why don't you just work in these little short bursts, then you have to do anything for a while? All right, so he says, "It took me until last year to realize what an odd statement that really is. You don't work all of your life to do something, so you don't have to do it."

• 21:27David Senra?

  I could talk about Beethoven knocking out a few Fast Symphonies so he could take some time off, or Picasso grinding out a dozen paintings so he could go away. But the comparison would obviously be pompous. So this idea, that's the most important sentence, and I'll read it again. "You don't work all of your life to do something, so you don't have to do it." Okay, so this is a little bit about where his ideas come from. He's talking about the character Snoopy, and then his brother Spike, and where Spike lives. So I omitted that, but he says, "But I didn't get my idea of his surroundings from childhood memories. Mine is just a cartoon desert. A made-up place." He grew up, obviously, in Minneapolis. It was cold, and it snowed all the time. And Spike lives in a desert. So he's like, "I just made that up." And this is the important part.

• 22:11David Senra?

  "Most comic strip ideas are like that. They come from sitting in a room alone and drawing seven days a week, as I've done for 40 years." Now, there's two things that those two sentences made me think of. Let me grab, one comes from another book, one second. Okay, so this is from the book Distant Force, which is on Henry Singleton. I think I covered it, maybe, early 100s and founders. You can find it, though. It's called Distant Force. This is Arthur Rock. Arthur Rock was a venture capitalist. He was one of the first investors into Apple, and he invested in Teledyne, which is the wonderfully successful company that Henry Singleton founded. But he says something that's very interesting, and it's going to echo what Charles Schultz, just the same advice. He's like, "That's not where you get ideas. You get ideas from sitting in a room alone, doing the work." Right?

• 22:56David Senra?

  So he says, "Henry reminds me of de Gaulle. He has a singleness of purpose, a tenacity that is just overpowering. He gives you absolute confidence in his ability to accomplish whatever he says he's going to do. Yes," this is the important part, "yes, he is rather aloof, operating more or less by himself and dreaming up ideas in his corner office." That's exactly what Charles Schultz just told us. Right? "Let me tell you this: that corner office produced a cornucopia of ideas." You could say the exact same thing about Schultz's studio. "That Schultz's studio produced a cornucopia of ideas."

• 23:32David Senra?

  Now, that also made me think of this line. It's from the song called "Power" by Kanye West. It's off of his album, in my opinion, one of the greatest hip-hop albums of all time, my dark twisted fantasy, my beautiful dark twisted fantasy. And he says, "I just needed time alone with my own thoughts. I got treasures in my mind but couldn't open up my own vault. My childlike creativity, purity, and honesty is honestly being crowded by these grown thoughts. Reality's catching up with me, taking my inner child, I'm fighting for custody." And I think what Kanye's saying in that song, what Charles Schultz is saying in that essay, and what Arthur Rock is saying about Henry Singleton is the exact same thing. That there's value in shutting yourself off from the world and focusing on the unique

• 24:14David Senra?

  ideas that your mind will inevitably create if given the time. Shut out the world for a little bit, not forever, you're gonna wind up being like Howard Hughes, peeing in a bunch of jars and growing out your hair and fingernails. You don't want to go to that extreme. But there is value in just being alone with your own thoughts for an extended uninterrupted periods of time. You're gonna produce and tap into things that you did not know were even there. Okay, so going back to the book, this is funny, given the fact that in that line, I didn't even put that together till now, that Kanye talks about my childlike creativity is honestly being crowded by these grown thoughts. Because the next essay, he's writing when he's 73, and it's called "Don't Grow Up."

• 24:58David Senra?

  So there's just, the next few pages, this is gonna go on for a while, it's just random advice and observations from 73-year-old Charles Schultz. All right, let's go. "An astounding thing has been happening to me in the last couple of years. People come up to me and say, 'Are you still drawing the strip?'" I want to say to them, "Good grief. Who else in the world do you think is drawing it? I would never let anybody take over. And I have it in my contract that if I die, then my strip dies." People also ask me if there's any message or a theme to peanuts. I suppose it might be that Charlie Brown, in spite of always losing, never gives up. It's interesting, Charlie Brown never gives up. And if you can work on the same thing for 50 years, clearly you can say the same about

• 25:43David Senra?

  yourself. But really, I never think about that. I just think, and this is what I mean about this theme that goes all over and over in the book, just stick to the basics. Stick to the basics over a long period of time and everything else will take care of itself. But I never really think about that. I just think about how I'm going to get two or three more good ideas, and I draw from day to day. You see, I work just as hard now, if not harder than I ever have. I think I'm more particular about what I do. My drawing is so much better now, in spite of the fact that I keep reading in articles that I'm not as good as I used to be, and that some people even say that I should quit now before the strip deteriorates. But that's nonsense. I think if a person maintains decent health and can handle the grind, then this is one

• 26:28David Senra?

  of those professions where you should get better all the time. So he's 73. I think he dies, he dies five years after he's writing these words. I also have a great fear of becoming boring. There are a lot of boring people around. You and I talk about this double entendre, avoid boring people. I think it's just great advice. There are a lot of boring people around, and unfortunately, I think older people can become boring very easily. The way to prevent all that is by maintaining an interest in others and forgetting about yourself. I have found that simply asking other people about themselves can be quite fascinating. I gave a lecture once to a group of high school students, and I said, go, and this is just really great advice from an older gentleman, "Go home tonight and ask your

• 27:13David Senra?

  parents where they met. Ask your dad what he did in the war. Ask your mom if she went to the high school prom. Talk to your grandmother. And don't just let things die. Pursue the questioning. Do it now before it's too late." It's this kind of thinking that promotes cartoon ideas. Anybody can think of shallow cartoon situations, but I'm always trying to pursue something a little bit deeper. I suppose we're all at the mercy of the medium in which we work, and a comic strip doesn't give you that much room for a topic like death, but it can be there if you work at it. I think you also have to make an effort to stay open to the world. I read a lot.

• 27:57David Senra?

  I don't read simply for research or to get ideas. I read because I enjoy it. Let me just stop and interrupt there real quick. It's interesting that he talks about because he never went to college, he was insecure. Even when he's an adult, you know, oh, this person has a college degree that I'm talking to, they must be smarter than me. So he talks about constantly reading and trying to do, like pursue self-education. I thought that was just really great advice. And then obviously, you know, the idea that just because somebody went to college and the other person didn't, that the person who went to college is de facto smarter is ridiculous. Going back to this, maybe the real secret to not getting too old is to not grow up. I'm not a complete grown-up, really. Remember, he's 73 when he's writing this.

• 28:40David Senra?

  I find that I still feel out of place most of the time. This is more of his Charlie Brown tendencies that never went away. At different times, I've had trouble traveling and I've become almost agoraphobic. I'm always insecure. I think I'll always be an anxious person. Somebody asked me in an interview recently, what are you anxious about? And I said, if I knew, I wouldn't be anxious anymore. I have some very good friends in different professions, and I was just with four or five of them a couple of weeks ago. One of them was having a birthday, and we all went out to lunch. And I suddenly realized that I felt a little bit out of place. See, I'm not a businessman. I don't know anything about financial affairs, or banking, or what attorneys do, or things like that.

• 29:23David Senra?

  All I know is cartooning, golf, hockey, books and reading, and a few more things like that. So it's a joy to me when I find somebody that I can relate to. So I want to stop there because this is also, sometimes it's beneficial when you see, you can step outside of yourself, and you see, you have a 73-year-old man right now, one of the most successful people that has ever lived, and he's talking about still being insecure. So when I see stuff like that, let's say I'm going to experience something like that, I have to pause, step out of myself, like, this is not unique to me. This is part of the human condition, the human experience. Do not, like, you can't live too much in your, I'm talking to myself now, you can't live too much in your mind. You've got to step out of these things.

• 30:06David Senra?

  And what I also found is interesting is like, he has no reason to be insecure. Listen to what he's saying.

• 30:12David Senra?

  See, I'm not a businessman. I don't know anything about financial affairs. At this point that he's writing this, he's making forty to fifty million dollars a year. You obviously know a hell of a lot. Forty to fifty million dollars a year, the cumulative earnings of Peanuts is well over a billion dollars. And again, I bring that up is because, one, it's weird that he's insecure. He's like, I don't know anything about financial matters. But, two, I think he hits on this, all I knew was cartooning. Again, I go back to the Alan Watts quote where he talks about, you know, anybody can be interested in something. If you're interested in something, there's chances are that other people are too. Well, he's not, Alan Watts was giving advice on like work, not necessarily how to produce a business, but this idea.

• 30:56David Senra?

  Charles Schultz is extremely interested in cartooning. Guess what? I think the book says something like ninety, at the time he's writing, I think this is in nineteen sixties, nineteen seventies. Ninety to a hundred million Americans were reading the comics every week, which is insane. So I just like that idea. You don't have to be a financial wizard, but if you know something, if you're interested in something, and you can attract other people, like minds that are also interested in that, you can build a career of that. And it's essentially unlimited opportunities to pursue that way, to pursue that, using that method, just based on what your own, you just happen to be interested in. And I go back to that Jeff Bezos quote, where he's like, you know, we don't choose our passions, our passions should choose us. Like, why am I selling a billion dollars a year in Amazon stock and funding Blue Origin? He's like, well, I was five years old, I was obsessed with rockets.

• 31:41David Senra?

  Well, Charles Schultz, his passion found him. At six years old, he starts getting into cartoons. It's not like you're sitting down and having deep thoughts at six years old. It's like, oh, I might pursue this as a career. It's like, no, it just, it chose you. I just think that's really good advice from two really smart people. It's like, okay, well, what am I naturally interested in? Going back to this, I think life is a total mystery. I have no idea why we're here, where it all came from, or where we're all going. And I don't think anybody knows either. But here's one of the things that helps me personally to survive. Years and years ago, I was living in Minneapolis. I met a man who played, played the viola? I thought this said violin. I hope that wasn't a spelling error.

• 32:24David Senra?

  I assume there's an instrument called the viola, who played the viola for the Minneapolis Symphony. And in one of our talks, he said to me, "You know, playing the viola, to me, is a lot like religion." And I thought, "That's nonsense. What does he mean by that?" But as the years went by, I could almost say that drawing a comic strip for me became a lot like a religion, because it helps me survive from day to day. It's an interesting thought. I always have this to fall back on. When everything seems hopeless and all of that, I know I can come to the studio and think, "Here is where I'm at home. This is where I belong, in this room, drawing pictures."

• 33:08David Senra?

  Okay, so that's the end of this essay. He's doing, there's another, there's a Q and A. So it's questions about reading that children frequently ask. And I'm just gonna do some highlights here. This is gonna be quick. Here's one question. "How does reading help you, help with your career or hobbies?" His answer, "Reading helps me to gain knowledge that helps me in creating my comic strip." Number, well, the numbers don't matter. Another question. "What is your favorite book as an adult?" One favorite is "My Last Million Readers" by Emil Guevar? It's, I don't know how to pronounce that last name. It's a biography. And I actually looked for this. I might read it, if I can find it. I think it was out of stock, but I have to check again. "One favorite is 'My Last Million Readers' by Emil something."

• 33:53David Senra?

  "I like this book because it relates stories of early newspaper wars and beginnings of careers of various newspaper columnists and cartoonists." And the last question, "What advice would you give to our class about reading?" "Read, read, read. The more you read, the easier reading will become. The more you read, the more knowledge you will gain. And finally, reading is enjoyable. There are so many places you can visit, experiences you can experience, and people you can meet, all through reading." Okay, so there's another essay where he goes into great detail about how to develop a comic strip. Really, this is on how to develop any kind of work. So it says, "One of the hardest things for a beginner to do is merely get started on his first set of comic strips." It is a, it's strange that most people who have ambitions in the cartoon field

• 34:37David Senra?

  are not willing to put in the great amount of work that many other people do in comparable fields. So he's saying it's strange that cartoon, potential cartoonists won't put in the work. That applies to every single other domain. Humans are, by nature, most of us are extremely lazy. And so just one way to have a massive advantage is just not be lazy. So it's strange that most people who have ambitions are not willing to put in the great amount of work that many other people do in comparable fields. Most people who have comic strip ambition wish to be able to draw only two or three weeks' material and then have it marketed. They are not willing to go through many years of apprenticeship. Remember, he was drawing for years before he ever started to do it as a career.

• 35:18David Senra?

  Very few cartoonists are willing to draw set after set of comic strips just for the experience. He's saying they want to rush through, right? We seem to have a tendency to believe that all we have to do is perfect our lettering, our figure drawing, and our rendering, and then we are all set to go. Nothing could be further from the truth. One of the main things to avoid is thinking too far ahead of yourself. Try to think of your daily episodes without concentrating too heavily on the overall theme of your comic feature. The system that I've recommended will also assure you of going in whichever direction your thoughts tend to take you. So the note left to myself on this page, a way to summarize what I'm learning by reading

• 36:01David Senra?

  this, is actually, I need to quote Henry Singleton. And it's kind of echoing what Charles Schultz is saying here. "My only plan is to keep coming to work every day. I like to steer the boat each day rather than plan way ahead into the future. I know a lot of people have very strong and definitive plans that they worked out on all kinds of things, but we're subject to a tremendous number of outside influences, and the vast majority of them cannot be predicted. So my idea is to stay flexible." So Charles Schultz is going to show up, he's going to work every day, but he's going to be flexible. And over time, like I said before, I think it's actually echoing Bill Walsh's, the title of his autobiography, the one I, I think it was Founder's 106, something like that,

• 36:44David Senra?

  but it's "The score will take care of itself." "The characters that you start out to draw today may not be the same characters that you end up drawing a month or a year from now. New personalities will come along that you never thought of creating at the beginning." So he's talking about personalities. Characters really could be a metaphor for ideas. So new ideas will come along that you never thought of. And frequently, these new personalities, new ideas, will take you to completely different places. "In regard to the characters themselves, it is not advisable to worry too much about the development. Let them grow with your ideas." This is all different ways to say the same idea, right? "You must be patient." And developing your strip and not look too far ahead. That's exactly what Singleton just said. Be perfectly content to work on the single strip that is now in place,

• 37:28David Senra?

  now in front of you on your drawing board. Okay, that's the end of that essay. There's only one sentence from this next essay that I highlighted, and I think it's fantastic. "I grew up with only one real career desire in life, and that was someday to draw my own comic strip." This goes more into his schedule, the way he sets up his work, and it's actually titled creativity, so how he gets his ideas. "Surroundings play a definitive role in my kind of creativity. I have found from experience that it is best to work in one single place and have a regular routine. I feel more comfortable in a small, plain room than I do in a fancy studio. I have never had anyone work as an assistant on the actual comic strip or comic pages, partly because I feel there would not be much for them to do.

• 38:13David Senra?

  The drawing is relatively simple because of the style I have adopted, and I have too much pride to use anyone else's ideas." And this goes back to just, you know, keep it simple, stupid. Go back to the basics. "There are days when I would like to draw something very philosophical and meaningful, or something to touch the hearts of everyone, and I find it absolutely impossible. One solution I use at these times is simply go back to the basics. Cartooning is, after all, drawing funny pictures. That's something a cartoonist should never forget. If a cartoonist remains with his own medium, if he does not let himself become carried too far afield and always remember that his business is to draw funny pictures, then I believe he will have a minimum of bad days."

• 38:58David Senra?

  Then he talks a little bit about why he feels cartooning is such a reward. "The most wonderful part of the business is knowing that you are reaching people and communicating with them. This is what makes cartooning such a rewarding profession." So when I read that, actually, my favorite quote, if you're thinking about, it's a quote from Richard Branson, and it's just the best description of what a business actually is that I've ever heard. And he says, "A business is simply an idea to make other people's lives better." So in the case of Charles Schultz, he really likes cartooning. But his cartoons, there's people that wrote to him that have been reading his cartoons for 40 years on a weekly basis. And they talk about the impact they have in their life, how they identify with certain characters' personality, all this other stuff.

• 39:41David Senra?

  So, again, his idea is, I'm gonna pursue something I love, and at the same time, I get to pursue what I love, I also get to make other people's lives better, even if it's in a small, you know, a very tiny way. I think he says on, it takes 16 seconds a day to read a comic strip. Now, he talks a little bit about why he feels he succeeds. He's writing this when, I think he's almost 60. If you should ask me why I've been successful at Peanuts, I would have to admit that being highly competitive has played a strong role. I must admit that I would rather win than lose. In the thing that I do best, which is drawing a comic strip, it is important that I win. I still enjoy, so the summary here is, I succeed because I'm competitive and I love

• 40:26David Senra?

  what I do. I still enjoy going to work each day, though friends who know me well can testify to the fact that I never actually use the term "work." If I have to say that I will not be free to do something on a certain day, I will always put it, "I have to go to the studio and draw funny pictures." Again, goes back to, he does not overcomplicate things. Like, back to the basics. Well, I go to work every day and I draw funny pictures. And I do that every day over a long period of time. It could be a superstition, but I guess it is really that I don't want anyone to think that what I do is that much work. It is one of the few situations in life where I feel totally secure. This goes back to his, talks about, he has a hard time traveling, he just calls himself

• 41:09David Senra?

  agoraphobic, you know, his studio, he likes it because he's in complete control. When I sit behind the drawing board, I feel that I am in command. I am comfortable in my studio, and I'm reasonably proud of many of the things that I've drawn. I think that I've done my share toward contributing to the advancement of our profession, and this also makes me proud. We have covered the world with-- this is interesting, that he's talking about the criticism he gets because Peanuts was so heavily merchandised, which that's where a lot of his money comes from. We have covered the world with licensed productions, everything from sweatshirts to lunchboxes to toothbrushes, and have been criticized many times for this, although for reasons that I cannot accept. So we also see a fierce independence of mine in that statement, right?

• 41:52David Senra?

  My best answer to such critics is always that the feature itself has not suffered because of our extracurricular activities. I have drawn every one of the 10,000 strips that have appeared, and I've thought of every idea. Not once did I let our other activities interfere with our main product, which is the comic strip. It has always been a mystery to me how we can be accused of over-commercializing something that is basically a commercial product. But it really does not matter what you are called or where your work is placed, as long as it brings some kind of joy to some person, someplace. It's another great sentence. To create something out of nothing is a wonderful experience.

• 42:33David Senra?

  To take a blank piece of paper and draw characters that people love and worry about is extremely satisfying. I hope very much that I will be allowed to do it for another 25 years. Interesting, he wrote those words in 1975. His last strip appears 25 years later, in 2000. The next essay is all about developing careers in cartooning, but he says something that's fantastic. He says, "Beyond this lies one of the great truths of artistic endeavor: the value of a single creative mind turning out a piece of work. Invariably, there is one creative mind responsible for each successful comic strip." So that's, again, he's talking about comic strips.

• 43:15David Senra?

  If you think about it, founders is all about the power of the individual. The focus is-- you could easily, I could be reading histories instead of reading biographies of individuals, I could read biographies of companies, right? But the focus for this podcast, the focus is on the individual as opposed to the company. The company doesn't exist without the individual. The individual comes first invariably. There is one creative mind responsible. I love that. Even the cases where we may have an artist/writer collaboration, we are still far away from the complicated team efforts that are necessary in other entertainment endeavors. So he's talking about why, you know, he'd much rather draw a cartoon than say work on a movie or television, having to work with, you know, hundreds of people to get an idea where he can

• 43:58David Senra?

  just go in when he pleases, as he pleases, and create something directly from his mind to his hand. He finds that very, very satisfying. So when he's 36 years into his career, he writes an essay that I think he's eminently qualified to write. It's called "On Staying Power." How are you still doing the same thing? And I'm just going to give you the main, to me, the main takeaway happens in two paragraphs. And it's asking ourselves, like, what are we uniquely? What are you uniquely qualified to do? "To have staying power, you must be willing to accommodate yourself to the task. I have never maintained that a comic strip is great art. It simply happens to be something I feel uniquely qualified to do."

• 44:42David Senra?

  One of my favorite quotes comes from S.J. Perlman. "I don't believe in the importance of scale. To me, the muralist is no more valid than the miniature painter. I think the form I work in has its own distinction, and I would like to surpass what I think I have done." Okay, so this next essay, at this point, he's been working on Peanuts for 45 years. He's giving like a keynote address to the National Cartoonist Society Convention. So there's a couple of things I'm going to highlight in here. The first, we see this again, never forget what it's all about, stick to the basics. I'll read this to you now. He is the most widely syndicated cartoonist, this is the introduction to him. "He is the most widely syndicated cartoonist ever with more than 2,300 newspapers.

• 45:23David Senra?

  He has more than 1,400 books published, selling more than 300 copies." This is bananas. This is what I was just, the success this guy had is just mind blowing if you think about it. The financial success, the amount of people that read his, read his comic strips, the amount of people who bought his books, it's just absolutely insane. "This all began a few months ago when he was going to meet with me and my wife Karen at his studio. I had expected to meet Charles Schulz for about 15 minutes. I had expected that we would have a couple of photos taken, and then we would be shuffled out the door. Instead, he spent the whole day with us." During the course of that day, I began to get to know Sparky. And what impressed me about him was, after all of his accomplishments, is he is still

• 46:06David Senra?

  a cartoonist who is doing his daily cartoon. He's sticking to the basics. He goes into work every day like us beginners. And what really impressed me about him was the passion and dedication he has for the work and enthusiasm he has for his work. This is something some of us, I think, lose at times. We all want to become rich and successful, and sometimes we lose sight of the fact that what it is really... Let me start this over again. "We all want to become rich and successful, and sometimes we lose sight of the fact that what it is all really about is cartoon art." So now we get into some highlights from his speech. There's two things happening on this page.

• 46:50David Senra?

  One is he's warning us about the people to watch out for, and then also about the importance of gratitude. This is first, the people to watch out for. I've always had a good relationship with the men who were the sales managers and the salesmen, and the men who were the presidents of the syndicate. Now, I think it's important for all of us, and all of you, to establish those relationships, the business relationships side of cartooning, right? But it's not a business of slinging ink. It's a deadly, serious business. And someplace up there in these large corporations, there are some people that you will never know exist. They don't care anything about you. So watch yourself. They don't even read the comics. They could not possibly care less about what happens to you.

• 47:34David Senra?

  They're like the man who owns a theater and doesn't really care about the actors. He likes the bottom line, and that's it. Those are the people to watch out for. The older you get... Well, it took me 40 years to discover that. And now on gratitude. I was talking to a friend the other day and I said, "You know, cartoonists have nothing to complain about. This is all we ever wanted to do all of our lives and we finally have a chance to do it. We can live any place we want to. We can work any hours we want to. And they send us money." And another piece of advice from the same speech is, I would summarize this is, "You should aim to please yourself." I never give my work to somebody else and say, "What do you think about that?" I just don't trust anybody.

• 48:16David Senra?

  If I think it's funny, or if I think it's silly, I send it in because I'm just trying to please myself. I never try to please a certain audience. I think that's disastrous. There's no way in the world you can anticipate what your reader is going to like or dislike." And kind of an extension of that you should just be trying to please yourself is, you know, don't really listen to, if you believe in what you're doing and you love what you're doing, you know, critics don't really know, they can't possibly know your work better than you know it. I used to have in the early days of Founders, like this, almost every single book, there was like this section I called "Critics don't know shit." This is a very example of this. So he's talking about, you know, this other guy's insulting him. And he says, "20 years ago in an interview, Al Cap said, 'Peanuts has just about run

• 49:00David Senra?

  its course now. Little kids talking like adults.'" Little kids don't talk like adults. Adults don't even talk like that. So he's just criticizing, you know, Charles Schultz's life work. And he says, "Anyway, that was 20 years ago and since then I've added 1,500 newspapers." And finally, I'll close on this. This is Charles Schultz as an older, successful gentleman, just telling us to carry on with your daily work. Every profession and every type of work has its difficulties. And one of the most difficult aspects of creating a comic strip is attempting to sustain a certain quality of day-to-day schedule that never ends. Trying not only to maintain that level, but to improve the features as the months go

• 49:40David Senra?

  by, in spite of the problems one may be having in one's life, makes cartooning a very demanding profession. I believe the ability to sustain a certain quality in spite of everything is one of the elements that separates the good features from the weaker ones. I went through one strange phase in my life where I became quite disturbed by dreams, which occurred to me irregularly over a period of several weeks. I would find in my dreams that I was crying uncontrollably, and when I awakened, I was extremely depressed. Naturally, it is not easy to disregard something like this, to forget it all and start thinking of funny cartoons, for the daily pressures of life affect us all.

• 50:23David Senra?

  I've talked to many people who have agreed that they find themselves feeling angry throughout much of the day. The mere routine of having to deal with customers or company people in superior positions is enough to make the working day difficult. Sometimes, simply reading the morning paper or watching the news is enough to discourage anyone. We become angry with ourselves, with our family, our fellow workers, with people we meet in stores, and of course, with the government. It takes a good deal of maturity to be able to set all this anger aside and carry on with your daily work.

• 51:04David Senra?

  And that is where I'll leave it. This was an absolutely fantastic little book. It's 170-something pages.

• 51:14David Senra?

  There's a lot in here. I'm going to reference this, I think, a lot in the future. There's a lot in Schultz's career that I personally find aspirational. All right, so I'll leave that here. If you want to buy the book and support the podcast at the same time, there's a link in the show notes. You can buy this book or any of the 100 in, let's see, if you count bonus episodes, I think we're up to 159 books. It's more than that, maybe 160, something like that. But anyways, the link's there. If you buy a book using that link, I get a small percentage of sale, and it's a way to support the podcast at no additional cost to you. That is 154 books down. We all secretly know it's more than that, but that's what I'm sticking to. So 154 books down, 1,000 to go. Next week, little preview. It's coming very soon.

• 51:59David Senra?

  I already started reading it. I just got the book today.

• 52:03David Senra?

  It's called Invent and Wonder: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos. So if you have not already listened to my two, I've actually did three podcasts on Jeff Bezos. I did every single shareholder letter, which is in this new book Invent and Wonder. I did the Everything Store and then I did, I think it's the Space Barons. It's the two different strategies that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are utilizing to accomplish very similar goals. So I would jump into those if you want. You have a few days. I'm going to try to get that podcast out as soon as possible. It's a brand new book. I pre-ordered it, got it the day it came out. Usually, you know, most of the books that we cover on the podcast are very, very, very old. So this is actually unique, but again, I think he's just a fountain of good ideas.

• 52:47David Senra?

  So anyways, 154 books down, 1,000 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon, very soon.