#161 Dr. Seuss

What I learned from reading Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination by Brian Jay Jones. ---- [6:32] Both his parents would inspire and encourage Ted’s love for books. Reading was a pastime the entire family took seriously. [9:24] Ted came to appreciate the considerable discipline and commitment it took to hone expertise. [10:15] He was an inspiration. Whatever you do, he taught me, do it to perfection. [10:53] No matter what discipline you are in there’s a common denominator in how we approach our craft. The attention to detail, the level of commitment. Those things are the same across the board. That is my message. Don’t look at what I did but how I did it. The how. And then you can transfer that over to any profession and any discipline. —Kobe Bryant. [20:07] Unlike many of his classmates, Ted wasn’t entirely certain what to do next. [22:51] You’re not very interested in the lecture she told him plainly —then leaned in and pointed at one of his drawings. I think that is a very good flying cow. [23:04] Maybe the most important thing anyone ever said to him: You’re crazy to be a professor she told Ted. What you really want to do is draw. [23:48] Ted’s notebooks were always filled with these fabulous animals. So I set to work diverting him. Here was a man who could draw such pictures. He should earn a living doing that. [26:57] I don’t know. But I know one thing. My policy is to laugh my god damned head off. Occasionally I depress myself and work myself into one of those delightful funks. And I seek out subway tracks on which to toss myself. And then it strikes me as very comical and I laugh instead. [30:08] The money he earned through his advertising work would buy him his artistic freedom. What would eventually become the Dr. Suess empire would be laid on a foundation built and paid for with Standard Oil money. [33:01] To his increasing distress, the responses were all negative. He would later recall being rejected by 27 publishers. [45:12] We can live on $100 a week. If I could get $5,000 a year in royalties I’d be set for life. [46:58] If you want to write good books spend a little time studying the bad ones. [48:02] Your capacity for healthy, silly, friendly laughter was smothered. You’d really grown up. You’d become adults. Adults—which is a word that means obsolete children. [49:28] Even after 9 books he still wasn’t earning enough from them to make a living. [54:29] I’m subversive as hell! I’ve always had a mistrust of adults. And one reason I dropped out of Oxford was that I thought they were taking life too damn seriously, concentrating too much on nonessentials. [1:02:47] For me, success means doing work that you love, regardless of how much you make. I go into my office almost every day and give it 8 hours. Though every day isn’t productive of course. [1:03:08] All he wanted was for people to read:The more that you read, The more things you will know. The more that you learn,The more places you’ll go. ---- 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?

  Hi there. A real quick update before jumping into today's episode. As a way to incentivize people to switch to the annual plan, I actually have another podcast feed that I'm calling Founders Postscript. It's a feed for all the books that I read that don't fit on Founders. So any book that's not a biography, basically. Those are obviously going to stay on this feed. It does not cost any additional money. I am not selling it. I'm merely using it as an added benefit for those that are either already on an annual plan or are willing to switch from the monthly option to the annual plan. The annual plan is the best way to support founders. If you're already on the annual plan and you want access to the Founders Postscript feed, just email me [email protected] and I'll get you access. If you switch, if you're on the monthly plan,

• 0:45David Senra?

  if you switch to the annual plan, I should get an email indicating that you switched. And in that case, I will email you. If you don't hear from me within, let's say, 48 hours, feel free to email me as well. This is optional. You do not have to do it if you don't want to. I'm just trying to figure out an added benefit because annual plan is the best way to support founders. So it's in my interest to incentivize you to do so. And if I can give you a little bit of extra work for doing so, I think that's a good trade. I will probably add a book or two a month on the feed. Right now, there's already two books on that feed. I'm working on two other ones. That's it. If you have any questions, obviously, email me. Thank you very much for listening and thanks for the support. Dr. Seuss is a classic American icon.

• 1:28David Senra?

  Whimsical and wonderful, his work has defined our childhoods and the childhoods of our own children. The silly, simple rhymes are a bottomless well of magic. His illustrations are timeless favorites because, quite simply, they make us laugh. The Grinch, the Cat in the Hat, Horton, and so many more are his troupe of beloved and uniquely Seussian creations.

• 1:53David Senra?

  Theodore Geisel, however, had a second, more radical side. He had a successful career as an advertising man and then as a political cartoonist. His personal convictions appearing not always subtly throughout his books. Geisel was a complicated man on an important mission. He introduced generations to the wonders of reading while teaching young people about empathy and how to treat others well. Agonizing over word choices and rhymes, touching up drawings, sometimes for years, he upheld a rigorous standard of perfection for his work. Geisel took his responsibility as a writer for children seriously, talking down to no reader, no matter how small.

• 2:38David Senra?

  And with classics like "Green Eggs and Ham" and "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish", Geisel delighted readers while they learned. Suddenly, reading became fun. That was from the back cover of the book I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodore Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination, and it was written by Brian J. Jones. So this is another example of a book that I didn't even know existed, and shame on me for that, because Brian J. Jones actually wrote one of my favorite books that I've read for the podcast and just in general. It's the biography of George Lucas. It's called George Lucas: A Life. I think I covered it back, maybe on Founder's Number 35, in case you haven't already listened to that. Fantastic book. I highly recommend reading it as well.

• 3:21David Senra?

  But a listener, actually, is the one that told me about this book. And I immediately, once I realized it was written by Brian J. Jones, ordered it. And I grew up on Dr. Seuss, so it was just a perfect way to figure out the man behind, the person behind, the author. And I want to jump right into the book. There's a lot to cover. I want to talk about the influence of his parents, because I thought it was very interesting what they did, and there's just some really good ideas that positively influenced his life. So his mother's name is Nettie. His father is going to be referred to as T.R. throughout the book. But this is about, first, the influence of his mother, then I'll get to the influence of his father. So it said, "Nettie, too, would directly influence Ted's ear for the beat and intonation of words.

• 4:03David Senra?

  As she put her son to bed each evening, Nettie would chant a refrain she had often used to sing behind the counter at the Seuss Bakery to inform patrons of the day's pie flavors." So let me stop right there. On her side of the family, they owned a bunch of bakeries. On his father's side, they were German brewers. That'll come into, that's important for the story later on because his father was running a very successful brewery and then prohibition took effect in the United States and that he had to change careers when Ted was a child. All right, so it goes back to her coming up with a song at her bakery so they could tell the customers the pie flavors and it says, "Apple, mince lemon, peach, apricot,

• 4:44David Senra?

  pineapple, blueberry, coconut, custard, and squash," at which point she would playfully squash a giggling Ted down into his mattress. Now, this is the important part, this is the reason I'm reading this paragraph to you. "Ted later credited his mother for the rhythms in which I write and the urgency with which I do it," and I underline that second part twice, "the urgency with which I do it." Ted is a workaholic, as we'll see later on. He fell into the career of Dr. Seuss rather reluctantly. There's a lot of surprises in the book, that's probably the biggest one. It took him an extremely long time, multiple decades, and at the same time pursuing other

• 5:24David Senra?

  careers before he finally discovered and had his monumental success of becoming Dr. Seuss, which was interesting to me, is the last numbers I've seen, he sold something like 600 million copies of his books. I looked at data for a few years ago, as of, I think, 2018, he was still selling about 4 million books a year, which is just insane when you think about it. But let me go back to, before I lose my train of thought here, "the urgency with which I do it." So not only his schedule, which I'll go into later on, is he'd work eight hours a day, every day, no matter what, but he also took him in an unbelievable, you know, you pick

• 6:07David Senra?

  up a Dr. Seuss book and it seems like, oh, I could write this and, you know, it seems really simple. It's not. He would write 1,000 pages just to get a book down to 60 pages. This editing and this constant revision, I think, is one key insight to the biography of Dr. Seuss, is how he approached his work, because we could take that same idea that he took for children's book, children's books, and apply it to whatever it is that we're doing today. So let me go back to this. "Both Nettie and T.R.," that's his father, "would inspire and encourage Ted's love for books." Now, remember what it said on the back cover, his main goal. When he finally fully embraced being a children's author is to get people excited about reading. It's something that he was, one of his, he was an introvert by nature.

• 6:51David Senra?

  One of his true passions was reading. He'd sit in his office and read constantly all day long. He loved history. He loved biographies, of course. But he, and he was distraught at the idea, at the time he was writing, when he was writing, I think he's almost 50 years old, maybe over 50, when he writes Cat in Hat. And the main goal, the main motivation behind that book is the fact that the literacy rates for American children were plummeting. And he thought that was a tragedy. And the reason I bring that up to you is because his parents instilled in him as a child, the importance of reading. I think this is a good idea. And so it says, "They both inspired and encouraged Ted's love for books. Reading was a pastime the entire family took seriously, leaving well-thumbed books casually

• 7:34David Senra?

  on side tables and the pages of the newspaper folded carefully over the arm of a chair. Teaching a child to read is a family setup," Ted said later. "It's the business of having books around the house, not forcing them. Parents should have 20 books stacked up on tables or set around the living room." I have way more than that. "The average kid will pick one up, find something interesting, and pretty soon they're reading." And this is also an idea that I've intuitively picked up because I've read, my favorite way to read a book is obviously a, you know, physical copy. There's nothing that can beat that. But I've read entire books, some of which, for this podcast, on my phone through the Kindle app. And that's actually an idea I got from Elon Musk because it's the way, you know, he's busy all the time.

• 8:19David Senra?

  He says he's read entire books on his iPhone. So I started doing that. And when you're highlighting and taking notes, it's extremely fast. But then I realized, like, from my daughter's perspective, is what does she see? She sees her father sitting there looking at his phone. And kids naturally imitate what their parents do. So then what? She's just going to look at a device? No, I'd much rather have her pick up a book. All right, so let's get back to his father. So it says, "He was a level-headed man who imparted to his son both a sense of discipline and a foundational decency." This is a really important idea that Ted's about to share with us, something that he's reflects back on. He lives, I think he's 87 years old. He gives this long interview right before he dies. In his office, this idea from his father, which he's learning, what is he, five, 10 years old maybe at this time?

• 9:03David Senra?

  Younger than 10, is still with him. So it says, "While Ted would never be a good shot with a rifle, or even fully understands his father's obsession with marksmanship." So his father worked all the time in the brewery. The one thing he would do when he wasn't spending time with his family is he would compete in, he was in like this club for marksmanship, like to shoot guns and show how precise he could be. But this is the part. So it says, "Ted came to appreciate the considerable discipline and commitment it took for his father to hone such an expertise. Ted remembered," oops, I skipped a page. Let me read that again. "Ted remembered watching each morning as his father held his rifle steadily over his

• 9:46David Senra?

  head for 10 minutes, strengthening his arms and shoulders and thus ensuring the barrel of his rifle never faltered in the slightest when he aimed and shot. He was an inspiration," Ted said warmly. Later on, he dedicated one of his books, I think he wrote, was it 60 books? 40? A lot of books. One of his books he dedicated to his father, said it's the finest man he ever knew, echoes what we learned from that biography of Teddy Roosevelt I did a few weeks ago. He said the same thing about his father. All right, so he says, "He was an inspiration," Ted said warmly. "Whatever you do, he taught me, do it to perfection." That's a direct quote from his father. "Decades later, even after he had become one of the most famous and successful writers

• 10:28David Senra?

  in the world, Ted still hung one of his father's paper-shooting targets in his office," check this out, "with multiple bullseyes shot out at its center. A constant reminder to do the work necessary to achieve excellence, regardless of the task." So that last line there says, "A constant reminder to do the work necessary to achieve excellence regardless of the task." When I read that, the note I scribbled down is this quote that I listened to over and over again, comes from Kobe Bryant. It's one of the last interviews he gave before he passed away. And he says, "Whatever you do, do it to," oh, excuse me, that's a quote from Ted's dad. This is Kobe.

• 11:08David Senra?

  "No matter what discipline you are in, there's a common denominator in how we approach our craft. The attention to detail, the level of commitment, those things are the same across the board." That's my message. Don't look at what I did, but how I did it. The how. And then you can transfer that over to any profession and any discipline. And what Kobe is saying, 40 years, or maybe, was that 30 years after Dr. Seuss dies, is the same thing that Ted learned from his father in the early 1900s. A constant reminder to do the work necessary to achieve excellence regardless of the task. I love that.

• 11:52David Senra?

  Going back to another really smart idea that his mother had is just she pumped him up. And she says, "My mother overindulged me and seemed to be saying, 'Everything you do is great. Just go ahead and do it.'" Now, think about that perspective of a mother. When you see a lot of dysfunctional families, it's the opposite. They tell their kids how stupid they are, how they're never going to live up to their expectations. This is terrible, terrible parenting. And I think about that all the time because when you read biographies, many, many decades after usually their parents have passed on, they still talk about their parents. Right before they're dying, their memories are a lot, not only are they looking back at their own life, but they talk about their parents over and over again. It's extremely important.

• 12:36David Senra?

  And then when I read that, I have a series of quotes, videos, some clips from podcasts I always reference over and over again. Sometimes you need extra motivation, you want to draw strength, maybe you're experiencing periods of doubt like everybody does. And one of this, when I read this sentence, it made me think, I have a clip of Kanye West I think of all the time that I love, even to the point where I can imitate what he says. And in the clip, I think he's on like a Tonight Show kind of interview, and he's going off on one of his crazy rants like he always does. But he says, "My mother made me believe in myself. No matter how many people tell me, 'Stop believing in yourself.'" That's how, like, his annotation as well. And I think what Kanye's mother did for him is the same thing that Dr. Seuss's mother's

• 13:20David Senra?

  doing that did for him. "Everything you do is great. Just go ahead and do it." All right, so more memories and advice from his father. When he wasn't tailing along after his father in the workshop, Ted just plain loved listening to his father talk, whether he was dispensing advice or telling stories. Ted remembered the two of them lying on their backs in the field directly behind their house on the night of April 20, 1910, talking in hushed tones as they scanned the sky for Halley's Comet. Other times, they would take long walks together while T.R. entertained his son with stories of life in a brewery. This is hilarious. T.R. would get considerable mileage out of a story about a local attorney he had hired to collect brewery debts.

• 13:59David Senra?

  The man was a modest and quiet-- he was a modest and quiet young man named Calvin Coolidge. How funny is that? Perhaps some of Coolidge's famously silent demeanor had rubbed off on T.R. as well. This is advice he gave to his son. "You will never be sorry for anything you never said." I don't actually know if that's true, but I understand what he's trying to teach his son there. So now this is about Ted in high school. He's, like a lot of people we study on the podcast, self-taught. He's not really interested in formal education. He's a terrible student. For Ted, school was something to be endured, not mastered. So he had a love of drawing. His mother let him draw on the walls.

• 14:43David Senra?

  She encouraged him to pursue things he was interested in. So he's submitting a lot of cartoons to the high school newspaper, said he would submit several cartoons to the recorder, and most of which are unremarkable. Now, why are they unremarkable? Because like everybody else, he's influenced and he copies the people around him, especially when he's first starting out. Everybody does this. So it says Ted seemed to be aping the styles he saw in comic strips. His drawing would improve over the next three years, though Ted would have very little formal art instruction. As his work evolved, Ted would continue to be more influenced by the comic pages than by formal instructions. So he says that over and over again. Ted's high school art, while competent-- this is so important, because of course, no one starts out being really great at what they do.

• 15:28David Senra?

  You have to work at it, right? Ted's high school art, while competent, would give very little indication of the unique and whimsical style to come. So it's around this time Ted's a teenager, and this is when they lose the family business. On January 17, 1920, prohibition officially went into effect under the sledgehammer weight of the 18th Amendment. For his efforts to keep Springfield Brewery solvent, T.R. was promoted to president of the company, occupying his new office the very week the sale of intoxicating liquors became illegal. That was it for Springfield Breweries. My father was rather angry about that turn of events, Ted said with considerable understatement. For weeks, T R sat in the, in the living room, head in hand, muttering, "Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch." He became very cynical, said Ted.

• 16:13David Senra?

  He didn't know what to do with himself. For more than a year, T R would mourn the loss of the industry he had grown up in. His father was, so T R's father, Ted's grandfather, was also in the business. He actually sold two breweries and then started investing in real estate as well. The grandfather. T R would mourn the loss of the industry he had grown up in, dutifully reporting to work and sitting at his desk in his offices, even as the company was picked to pieces around him, its assets slowly liquidated. Okay, so even though his family was having financial trouble, it was very important for, for them to send Ted to college, so he goes to Dartmouth. This is really, this is the beginning of something that's really, really surprising when analyzing the career of what soon to become, well, not soon, because it's multiple

• 16:57David Senra?

  decades of what will become, one day, the career of Dr. Seuss. And the note I left myself is, finding his true passion, yet not doing it for a living? Question mark. And it's something he loved to do, and yet it was, it's like, it's sitting there right in front of your face. I guess the lesson here is like, analyze how you like spending your time, and then maybe you can find a profession and a discipline in there, because Ted loved what he, like, he's going to find his true love of writing cartoons. He did not think he was going to be a children's author. I'll tell you the surprising reason he picked that genre in a little bit. But he loved cartooning, he loved writing, writing humor, he wanted to be funny, and

• 17:38David Senra?

  yet, he thinks he's going to be an English professor, and he hates the subject. It's very bizarre, so let me get into that in a little bit. It was a floor mate, meaning somebody in the dorm, who helped Ted find his true passion. So he started working at this, this college, it's like a humor magazine called Jack-o'-laner. Sometimes they refer to it as Jack-o'. Ted knew where his people were and what he wanted to do. I think my interest in editing the Dartmouth humor magazine began that, that week. Ted began submitting cartoons to Jack-o', to Jack-o', and when the first issue of the fall semester was published in late October, Ted found to his delight that he had four cartoons featured inside. And before I go into this next paragraph,

• 18:21David Senra?

  remember that that idea of something smacking you right in the face and not even realizing it, or sitting right before you, not even realizing when he meets his wife. Because that's the statement that she makes may be the most important advice he ever gets from another human being in his life. I'll get there in a minute. Going back to this, he starts freelancing for Jaco, and then he's so good at it, he does so many of them, they invite him to be on the staff. So it says, "The work was good enough that in January 1923, Norman McLean, the editor at the time, offered Ted an official spot on Jaco as a member of the art staff. Ted's name would now officially appear in the magazine's masthead. And as far as Ted was concerned, he was on his way to the editor's chair."

• 19:02David Senra?

  And this is where we get his dedication and professionalism, his work ethic. As a result, he's just outworking everybody else in the staff. Ted is talking about the editor, what the editor's opinion was of him. "He found that it was a workhorse," Ted said later. "And so we used to write practically the whole thing ourselves every month." And so let's go back to this idea about, this is so important. Because think about, he's graduating from college, just to point the story, and he's not sure what he wants to do in life. He becomes one of the most iconic writers in history, one of the best-selling writers. That is so far in the future, but at the present day, it's unsure.

• 19:47David Senra?

  "I don't know what I'm going to do." The thing he loved in college, he was a terrible student, a terrible student. The thing he loved most was cartooning, writing humor. And he still thought, "Oh, no, you know, this is just like a side thing. I'll just, you know, this is not really, this is not going to be my career." So it says, "On June 23, 1925, Ted graduated from Dartmouth. Unlike many of his classmates, Ted wasn't entirely certain what to do next. He had no family business to return to and wasn't sure his English degree would be good for much of anything. With a shrug then, he decided to head for graduate school to get his doctorate in English, a subject he didn't even like." How many people do this? Now, the good thing is Ted eventually writes this course, right?

• 20:31David Senra?

  The reason I bring this to your attention is think about all the people you know in your life. Look around. So many people, just, they don't like what they're doing. Maybe they were influenced by parents. Maybe they were copying other people around them, whatever it was. But this idea is like, with a shrug, he decided to head to graduate school to get a doctorate in English. Why would you do that? You hate it. With a vague ambition of becoming an English professor. The story right there, the important lesson is, he winds up, he saw, he thought, later in his life, there's a fork in the road and he decides to go straight. Most people just pick, they, they sit on the well-worn tracks. Okay, I can go left or right. No, there's way, there's unlimited opportunity in front of you. You just can't copy what everybody else is doing. And again, Ted doesn't get there on his own.

• 21:15David Senra?

  His wife Helen, it winds up being, like I just said, she gives him the most important advice. She's like, you're not even paying, they're gonna go to Oxford, that's where they meet, I'll get there in a minute. But she's like, you're not even paying attention to the lecture. All you do is draw all these cartoons all day in class and you're really good at it. Why aren't you doing this? And then the light bulb goes off in his mind, he's like, oh, I don't know. That seems to be a good idea, maybe I'll do that. And it still takes multiple decades to get there. So, again, very, a lot of surprising things in, in, um, in this book. Uh, one of the surprising things is on the very next page, he's at Oxford, his, one of his professors is J.R. Tolkien. Uh, unfortunately, it didn't take Ted long, long to realize that he was in over his head. As a mediocre student who had struggled to attain a C in general English, um, at Dart,

• 22:00David Senra?

  at Dartmouth, a deep drill into Germanic, I don't even know what that word is, at Oxford, uh, even if taught by the brilliant new professor J.R. Tolkien, was bound to be a struggle. So it's at one of these classes that he meets Helen and he says, this is Ted talking about, he says, he's talking about, you know, instead of taking notes, the pages are full of, you know, these weird creatures. You've probably seen a Dr. Seuss book, you know, the, they don't look like, they're animals, they don't look like animals, how animals look in real life, right? It says, "I think this demonstrates I wasn't very interested in the subtle niceties of English literature. As you go through the notebook, uh, there's a growing incidence of flying cows and strange beasts. And finally, at the last page of the notebook, there are no notes on English literature at all. They're just strange beasts.

• 22:44David Senra?

  In fact, the flying cow in Strange Beasts were what caught the eye of a young woman seated next to him in a lecture, who watched closely as Ted did everything in class but take notes. You're not very interested in the lecture," she told him plainly, then leaned in and pointed at one of his drawings. I think that's a very good flying cow. And now we get to the point where I wrote, this is my own note, maybe the most important thing anyone ever said to him. What Helen saw in Ted was both talent and potential, both of which, as far as she was concerned, were being wasted on English literature. "You're crazy to be a professor," she told Ted flatly. "What you really want to do is draw." Now, this is Ted at 23, going back to this.

• 23:29David Senra?

  He's terrible at being a student, so he drops out, does not get his graduate degree. "His year at Oxford had been a bust, and his plans for a teaching career had dissolved with his unattained doctorate. His future was uncertain, and his prospects for employment were cloudy at best." Helen, however, typically thought she knew exactly what Ted should do. "Ted's notebooks were always filled with these fabulous animals," she said. "So I set to work diverting him. Here was a man who could draw such pictures. He should earn a living doing that." Okay, so after he leaves Oxford, he has to go back home. No money, no prospects, doesn't know what to do. He's still 23 years old.

• 24:12David Senra?

  This reminds me, if you remember, if you've read Shoe Dog, and if not, if you've listened to, I think it was Founder's Number 10, when I covered Shoe Dog. This is very similar to Phil Knight. He gets back from the Army. I think he's 24. You know, he's looking, he's sitting in his childhood room. He's like, "This is my life? I should be a man now, a full adult. Why do I feel this way? Why am I so unfulfilled? Why am I full of uncertainty and doubt?" And he goes from this run, and during this run, the opening of Shoe Dog is one of the best openings of any book I've ever read, because it's the inner monologue of Phil Knight deciding, "I'm going to pursue my crazy idea." And his crazy idea was the thesis he wrote at Stanford Business School about, hey, why are we letting Adidas and other German companies are dominating athletic shoes?

• 24:57David Senra?

  What if I can import, the same thing, import Japanese running shoes as a way to compete with them, as they did with, I think, cameras and other electronics at the time? Anyways, it's fantastic. If you haven't read the book, highly recommend it. Just one of the best autobiographies you're going to find. But anyways, Ted's feeling the same way. Again, if Ted, Ted didn't know Phil Knight, they're separated by a half a century. And yet, this is why, like, I feel so many historical figures in history also did what we're doing, which is reading and studying biographies, because it's the same feelings. We all go through the same things, right? So it says, "Ted was back living under his parents' roof again, and he wasn't happy about it." You can switch out Ted for Phil in that picture, or in that sentence, rather.

• 25:41David Senra?

  "Well, with no job, no teaching certificate, and few prospects, Ted really had little choice but to return bunking in his second-floor bedroom and setting up a drawing board and a typewriter. At age 23, he certainly didn't want to be there. He was determined to make it as an illustrator, and that meant pounding out endless letters to book and magazine publishers in New York, sending around samples of his work, and endlessly pitching one idea after another." Very similar to the book, this is a very similar scenario to what we just covered a few weeks ago, Charles Schultz, the cartoonist of Peanuts, doing the same thing. And he also experienced exactly what Ted's gonna experience here. "Ted explained that he'd been tossed out of the offices of two publishers, two movie

• 26:23David Senra?

  studios, three advertising agencies, and the offices of Life and Judge magazines. While he was in the city, he had dinner with five Dartmouth classmates." This is like, he's already being stabbed in the chest, right? Now, somebody's turning the knife. This is the dinner. "A gathering that depressed him, as all five had real jobs and appeared to be on their way to real careers. As for his own prospects, he was playing it by ear. 'What comes up will come up, and will determine my future life,' he said. 'I rather think it will be freelancing for a while,' he continued. 'I don't know, but I know one thing. My policy is to laugh my goddamn head off.

• 27:05David Senra?

  Occasionally,' now, these are heavy sentences here, 'occasionally I depress myself and work myself into one of those delightful funks, and I seek out subway tracks on which to toss myself.'"

• 27:21David Senra?

  And then it strikes me as very comical, and I laugh instead. Despite his darkening spirits, his persistence paid off. In early summer, an editor of the Saturday Evening Post purchased one of his cartoons. They gave him $25, which should be equivalent to about $350 today. It wasn't a princely sum, but when pulled with his savings, it was enough that he could announce to his parents that he was moving immediately to Manhattan. Okay, so he's freelancing. He also starts doing works for Judge magazine. Now, this is another surprising, like I said earlier, there's a bunch of surprising things I didn't know going into the book. This is another surprising thing. His first career is in advertising. He works in advertising for 17 years.

• 28:05David Senra?

  It gives him the financial freedom to pursue cartooning and writing his own books on the side. And it happens, it's like a lucky break. It wasn't something he was expecting to do, I guess is a better way to put it. A cartoon appeared in the January 14, 1928 issue of Judge that Ted would rightly say changed my whole life. In the cartoon, a knight sits upright in a canopy bed, armor stacked on the floor next to him, as a Susian dragon pokes his head menacingly under the canopy, very nearly in the knight's lap. "Darn it all, another dragon," says the knight. "And just after I'd sprayed the whole castle with flint..."

• 28:47David Senra?

  So I guess flint was a very successful insecticide company at the time. And as an insecticide joke, it was hardly a thigh slapper. But while writing the gag, Ted had fussed over which of the two major brands of insecticide to use for his punchline. In the end, he had simply flipped a coin. "It came up heads for flint," said Ted. It would be the luckiest coin toss of Ted's life. That issue of Judge was picked up in a beauty salon by the wife of Lincoln Cleves, who was the executive in charge of the flint insecticide account for an advertising firm. Mrs. Cleves brought Ted's cartoon.

• 29:26David Senra?

  To the attention of her husband and suggested they should bring Ted in to talk about creating more flit ad campaigns. In an era where most print ads were heavy with text or featured large photographs of the product, Ted's flit advertisement didn't look like any other ad. There's a lesson there. They were intentionally funny, a nearly foreign concept in advertising at the time. Now, Standard Oil owns the company that produces flit, the insecticide, right? So it says, "The flit campaign would prove so popular, in fact, that Ted would work for them for the next 17 years. That toss of a coin determined my whole career," he said later.

• 30:09David Senra?

  "More important, the money Ted earned through his advertising work would buy him his artistic freedom. What would eventually become the Dr. Seuss empire would be laid on a foundation built and paid for with Standard Oil money." So he says he can do like his advertising work. I think it's like in three months, he can do a year's worth of work. They have the same tagline. We learned this with the two books I did on David Ogilvie, you know, that if you have a campaign that works, don't change anything. I think he was running the same Dove soap campaign at the time he published one of the books for like 20 something years. So Ted benefited from that. In his spare time, he starts to write, he starts illustrating books.

• 30:51David Senra?

  And this is his first book, but he learns a very, very important lesson here. He is the illustrator, not the writer. Now, why is that important? So it says, "February 1931 would also see the publication of Boners, the first mainstream book to feature cartoons by Dr. Seuss. Boners was a collection of unintentionally funny bits of student writing, featuring nuggets like a polygon is a dead parrot lifted from the real exams and term papers. Ted was brought in by Viking Press to produce 20 cartoons and given prominent credit on the book's cover and spine, a sure sign of his growing name recognition. To Ted's surprise, Boners was an immediate hit, selling out of six printings in four months and pushing its way onto the New York Times Bestseller List." And then this inspired them to do a follow-up, only two months after the release of the

• 31:36David Senra?

  first volume. "Sales were brisk and reviewers were particularly effusive about Ted's cartoons. The drawings by Dr. Seuss are hilarious," wrote the New York Times, while another reviewer called the cartoons "simply swell." Now, here's the important lesson, though. Ted saw none of the profits from it. As the artist for the book, Ted had been work for hire and he'd been paid a flat fee. In most cases, it was the writer with his royalties who made far more from a successful book than the work-for-hire illustrator. It was at this point Ted later explained that he came to realize there was no sense in just illustrating books. That's what he thought he was going to do his whole life. I'll just be the illustrator. This changed that. To make any real money in publishing, he'd have to be both the writer and the artist.

• 32:21David Senra?

  So he makes the decision, okay, I'm going to be a writer. Now, why children's book? This is another surprising thing. "The exclusive nature of his contract with Standard Oil," he explained, "forbade me for doing an awful lot of stuff. Writing and illustrating children's books, however, wasn't a forbidden activity. I would like to say I went into children's book work because of my great understanding of children," Ted said. "In truth, I went in because it wasn't excluded by my Standard Oil contract." So think about how crazy that is. He is by far, I would say, the most successful children's author in history, right? And yet, he fell into it by accident. Now, here's another crazy

• 33:02David Senra?

  thing. No one wanted to publish his first book. To his increasing distress, the responses were all negative. Ted would later recall being rejected by 27 publishers. No one was biting. While editors knew the Dr. Seuss name, it wasn't enough to overcome some initial skepticism. And think about this crazy-- think about why he's being rejected. This is a crazy sentence. "The main reason they gave was there was nothing similar on the market. So of course it wouldn't sell. Can't get to the top by trying to fit in. Of course it can't be like everything else. Come on." Ted decided he was done with it. After one last rejection, he was walking up Madison Avenue with his book tucked under one arm. Another strange twist of fate here. Determined

• 33:47David Senra?

  to burn the book in the incinerator when he got home. The walk back uptown would lead to one of the luckiest breaks of his career. "I'm a great believer in accidents," Ted later said. "Everybody gets into things accidentally." He certainly did, right? He ran into Mike McClintock, a fellow Dartmouth man, who asked him what he was carrying. Oh, just a book no one will publish, Ted told him. I'm lucky at home to burn. Mike told Ted he'd just started a job as a juvenile book editor for Vanguard Press and asked Ted if he'd like to come inside to show his book to the Vanguard president, James Henel. This is happening right in front of the office. They just happen to run into each other as this guy's coming into the office, right? So he went inside, Ted said, and he took me to the president of Vanguard Press.

• 34:31David Senra?

  That guy, I'm not gonna, James, I'm just gonna call him James because I probably pronounced his last name wrong. James was a publishing crusader, unafraid to embrace one of Vanguard's founding philosophies of publishing unpublishable books. Right place, right time, right person, right? The entire meeting, from first hello to the signing of the contract, took 20 minutes. Now, how did his first book do? He is 33 years old by the time he publishes this first book, okay? The story of Dr. Seuss's career is one of patience. And the note I left myself here is, he could have quit here. There's so many times where Ted just deciding, hey, I'm gonna give up. Why does John Rockefeller, Steve Jobs, they talk about the importance of persistence. I think Steve Jobs says something, I don't know how to quote in front of me, but it's

• 35:16David Senra?

  like, I'm convinced half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the unsuccessful ones is just pure perseverance. Half! He's saying half of what makes you either successful or unsuccessful is just, are you gonna give up or not? Ted doesn't give up. He attempts to at some, in many cases, but he just keeps going along. It would take a while, the name of the book is, I saw it on Mulberry Street, it would take a while before Mulberry Street would sell through its initial print of 15,000 copies. By 1943, it had sold 31,000 copies. A respectable number, to be sure, but that would only earn about 3,500 royalties. So let me give you, let me put this into proper, like, scale and perspective here, right?

• 36:01David Senra?

  So it takes several years to sell 31,000 copies. His big break is Cat and Hat, which I think happens about 17 years after where we are in the story. That sells 3 million copies. I think, I want to say either in the first year or the first three years. You know, so tens of millions total. So orders of magnitude larger and more successful than his first book, right? And this is $3,500 he made in royalties over seven years. Can't support himself on that, right? It was clear he hadn't yet found a new full-time profession. But even Ted wasn't sure he wanted to be seen solely as a writer for books for children. Writing for children, he said, was not a sign of going forward.

• 36:42David Senra?

  This was a step down, a loss of face, literary slumming, he said. Most children's books, which he's credited with changing, he continued, insulted the intelligence, not only of the child, but also the people who wrote them. And yet Ted was on the leading edge of authors creating a new generation of respectable children's books, moving away from generic books heavy on morality or steeped in fairy tales. This is both of, he was very explicit about wanting to avoid both moral tales and fairy tales. He did not want to, another smart idea he has is I'm just not gonna, I'm not gonna go into a new profession and just do what everybody else does. It doesn't make any sense. They're already doing it. And toward creator-driven stories centered on character and identified with an author's particularly artistic

• 37:28David Senra?

  style or point of view. Now, here's the crazy part. I keep saying that, but there's just, his whole life is crazy. It takes, he's almost 50 years old before he can do it. Cat in the Hat is what allows him to work as a child's author full-time. He's been drawing cartoons since he was a child. When he's 23, his wife Helen pushes him in that direction. He doesn't, he's not allowed to do it full-time for almost three decades. In the interim, he's, has this advertising career. He makes a ton of money doing that, don't get me wrong. Then he's so distraught at what he's seen happen in World War II. Even though he's in his late 30s at the time, he tries to join the army. And they're like, no, dude, you're way too old.

• 38:10David Senra?

  Then they look at his resume of sorts and his skill set is like, oh, okay. He does the same thing that Walt Disney does. And Disney had to do it by force, obviously. He said, he's hired to make propaganda films for the United States. So they move him out to California. And this is the reason I included this in the podcast. It's extremely important because he starts working under this guy named Frank Capra, who was he? He won a bunch of Academy Awards. I think he was a director. Frank Capra is in his 40s at the time. And so even when Ted's about to die, he says, like, you know, what do you credit? Like, how did you learn to write books and do everything you're doing? He's like, what was the most important part of your life?

• 38:52David Senra?

  He's like, working under Frank Capra because Frank taught him storytelling. So this is what he learned from serving under Frank Capra during World War II. Ted was in awe of Capra's ability to distill a script down to its essence. Remember, he read 1,000 pages just to get down to 60, right? He would bring Capra his first draft of a script for a film. This is such a good idea. Then watch with near reverence as Capra slowly went through it with a pencil. The first thing you have to do in writing is find out if you're saying anything, he told Ted. And Capra would carefully go through Ted's script, underlining the places where he advanced the story.

• 39:35David Senra?

  The rest he left unlined. Most of the first draft would be returned to him with little or no underlying. But Capra taught me conciseness, said Ted. I read a lot of books. There's a lot of people that could benefit from what Capra is teaching Ted here. Think about that. I'm only going to underline where you're actually advancing the story. Conciseness. I just got done reading two books that are 100 pages and you wouldn't believe how much information is in them. And it's by Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History. And I think the greatest minds and ideas of all time. They're on the Founder's Postscript feed. But, um. This idea that you don't need, you know, there's some books, one of my favorite books

• 40:20David Senra?

  I've read for the podcast, Enzo, the biography of Enzo Ferrari, I think, is it 900 pages? It's either 700 or 900. It's the longest book, not including the, all the Warren Buffett shareholder letters. I don't, you know, that's not a biography, so I'm not gonna, I'm gonna exclude that. That was much longer. It's like reading a textbook. But it's a fantastic book. But there's, my point here is, I think, especially with people being more reluctant to read, because reading's now competing with so many other things for your attention, is there's a, there's a ton of, there's a market for 100-page books, 200-page book. You know, it doesn't have to be, for some reason, they all seem to settle in this area of like 300, 400. Probably, my guess, just based on my own experience, probably 300

• 41:04David Senra?

  to 500 pages is the most common length of a book. But this idea of conciseness, I think part of what makes books so valuable is the fact that, you know, go in the back, look at their selected bibliography. They read 15, 20, 30 books to put into, into a single book, right? They're distilling down the main ideas into their essence. I love this idea. I guess this is my long-winded way to tell you is like, there is a lot of value in distilling and condensing ideas down, so we can actually carry these ideas with us throughout our entire lives. And that's what Capra is teaching Ted with The Art of Storytelling. Get rid of the stuff that's not advancing your story. Most of the drafts would, first drafts would be returned to him with little or no underlying.

• 41:46David Senra?

  But Capra taught me conciseness. I learned a lot about the juxtaposition of words and visual images. The tight storytelling discipline instilled by Capra would be formative in shaping Ted's future art. Tight storytelling discipline, that's a great, sent a great few words there. And I'm surprised that Ted, now knowing what I know about him, used the word juxtaposition there. He hated, again, I think this had to do with, he said he took some classes at Oxford, where, you know, they'd spend two weeks on the first two pages of a book. And, you know, you have to go through, what does this word mean? And they'd have to figure, they have to look it up in the dictionary, and then they'd go to the source. And he's like, use simple language. Why are you making the reader do more work than they have to?

• 42:32David Senra?

  It's a genius idea there. Let me clarify it. Not genius in just the statement. It's the application. It's simple, but not easy. Right? So I'm going to fast forward. He learns a ton through Kappa. The war is over. But this is, this sentence is, I'm going to read the sentence to you and I'll read my interpretation of why it's so important for us to understand this. Dr. Seuss was home from the war and very uncertain about what to do next. He is 41 years old and he's still not successful. Like he's moderately successful in the sense that he can provide for his family. He never has kids of his own. His wife has, she had polio when she was younger. She has health issues and I'll get to just this shocking way her life ends.

• 43:14David Senra?

  But she had to have her ovaries removed, so there's no children of his own. But you know, he could still support himself, his wife. But he's not, you know, he's not anywhere close to Dr. Seuss at all. And he's 41. And so of course, if you feel that you're muddling around, what's going to happen? You have uncertainty creep in and you're going to start doubt that you're on the right life path. And this is where, this is what I meant earlier when I said like, the path of Dr. Seuss, he kept trying to have other careers, sometimes out of necessity. So he had to be an ad advertising person because that's how he paid his bills. Right? But he's like, hey, I'm going to, he made a bunch of movies with, with experienced Hollywood people. He's already out in LA. Let me start writing movie scripts. I'm going to, I'm not going to do children's books at all.

• 43:57David Senra?

  This is, he so says, Ted thought he might perhaps quit writing children's books altogether in order to reinvent himself as a film writer, director, editor. And the Academy Award won by Hitler Lives did much to make him attractive to more than a few movie studio executives. So this is very funny. They do a movie as part, it's funded by the US government. I think, I can't remember the name of it now, and I should know. Oh, it's Your Job in Germany is what it was. So because you couldn't copyright that, somebody else, some other movie makers took the film, even though it was great. They took, they hired their own actors, added a little bit, but essentially it's the same film. They rebrand it and reshoot it as Hitler Lives and it wins the Academy Award.

• 44:41David Senra?

  But Ted couldn't get any credit from that because it's something the government, then he didn't work on the Hitler Lives movie. So he's like, wait a minute, my work I just did just won an Academy Award under some other name. So maybe I have some talent here. He winds up writing a bunch of scripts. I don't know if he's a producer, but the first three projects he works on, they wind up winning Academy Awards, which is also surprising. But again, I want to reiterate my main point, so I don't go off on tangents here. He's very uncertain about what he wants to do. He winds up talking to a publisher. And this is how, he's 41 years old. This is what he tells her. "We can live on $100 a week. If I could get $5,000 a year in royalties, I'd be set up for life." So he still has not hit that.

• 45:21David Senra?

  He's been trying to pursue this career as an illustrator or writer for, let's see, 18 years at this point. And that's it. "I just want to earn a living doing what I love. I want to be in my studio all day. And this is just $100 a week. Can I do that?" And he still hasn't achieved that. So he's like, "Okay, well, maybe I can do movies." Now, here's a problem, the flaw that he didn't see with it. He is not meant, he's like a solo person. You know, he could sit in his office all day, or his studio all day, write, draw, make his own books, send it off to his editor, his publisher. You know, he works with people, but on a very little basis. He's an introvert at heart. He eventually quits, even though he had a success in Hollywood. He quits because he'd set a story up.

• 46:03David Senra?

  This reminds me of, you know, George Lucas especially. Why he did the crazy things he did in his life, if you've read the book or listened to the podcast, is because he was obsessed with control and he wanted independence. He hated executives, taking his story and just saying, you know, "You have to cut four minutes here." He's like, "Why?" "'Cause I said so." That's not going to work for personality types of people like George Lucas. It does not work for Dr. Seuss. They wind up mutilating one of his movies. He's like, "That's it. I'm done working. I can't work. You guys move too slow." And then there's 17 people making decisions and there's nobody that has ownership of it. So I'm going to skip over a lot, a larger part of that. Randomly in the book, he's got a good idea. Again, going back to the Kobe idea, "Don't study what, study how."

• 46:48David Senra?

  So he says, "If you want to write," this is Ted's advice for us. "If you want to write good books for children, spend a little time studying the bad ones." And that's a main idea we've seen throughout these books, that you can learn a lot by seeing something done the wrong way. So one thing I also enjoyed about this book is we see Ted, he thinks a lot about why he's doing what he's doing. And in that, he reveals some, I would say, some flaws in human nature that are almost exclusively relegated to adults. And so this is Ted on what kids get right. And I think there's some good lessons in here for us. Ted informed his readers that he was writing for kids by choice, and for a very good reason. This

• 47:29David Senra?

  is a direct quote from him. "There's something we get when we write for the young that we can never hope to get in writing for ancients. Have you ever stopped to consider what has happened to your sense of humor?" Now going back to the author. "Adults," Ted argued, "had not only lost their sense of humor, but their sense of wonder and their giddy love of nonsense. Children," he maintained, "never let their laughs go out on a string, worrying about what their employers, or neighbors, or critics might think is funny." Back to Ted. "Your capacity for healthy, silly, friendly laughter was smothered," Ted said,

• 48:11David Senra?

  admonishing adults everywhere. "You really, you really grown up. You had really grown up. You had become adults. Adults, which is a word that means obsolete children." Okay, so now I'm fast forwarding in the story. This is so important. Ted is 48 years old, and yet Dr. Seuss is still not convinced this could be a career. He winds up getting with his, I guess, manager agent is the role she plays. Her name is Phyllis Jackson. She becomes very important to his career. "Ted settled into a seat across from Jackson and went into his spiel. It had been seven years since I gave up being a soldier. Now

• 48:52David Senra?

  I'd like to give up movies, and advertising, and anything that means dueling with vice presidents and committees. What he really wanted to do," he told her, "was stay in San Diego and write children's books full-time. All he needed to earn," he assured her, "was $5,000 a year. But was such a career even possible?" he asked.

• 49:17David Senra?

  And she's one, she helps influence him. So, yes, it's very possible. She talks about, you know, everybody's coming home from the war. They're having a bunch of kids. The market for children's books is about to expand rapidly. So, he says, after nine books, Ted still wasn't earning enough from them to make a living. Again, I go back to the importance of perseverance that all the founders and people on the podcasts that we study, how important they constantly talk about perseverance. He could have gave up after nine books and we would have never known his name. There would be no biography about him, no success, nothing. His life is completely different, but he didn't. It's very important to understand these people were not, he's not born Dr. Seuss. He had multiple decades of transforming himself into it. That's why I love the title, Becoming Dr. Seuss.

• 50:00David Senra?

  I've read, what, four biographies on Steve Jobs by now? If you could only read one, I'd read the one with the title, Becoming Steve Jobs. Very similar to what Brian J. Jones did here, the author of that book, and I can't remember, I think there's two authors. I just can't remember at the time, at the moment. They did. They tell how Steve Jobs became Steve Jobs. This book is how Dr. Seuss became Dr. Seuss. It's so interesting and important, and they're able to do it in, you know, just a few hundred pages. Let me go back to this. After nine books, Ted still wasn't making enough for a living. What he really needed was a blockbuster, a book that sold hundreds of thousands of copies and was popular enough to send readers looking through his entire work. Now, that's what Phyllis Jackson's telling him, right?

• 50:42David Senra?

  You need to have a breakout hit because that breakout hit will sell, so you get more royalties. But more important, what do people do? And this is something I failed to do on this book. I can't believe I read George Lucas's, the biography of George Lucas and didn't order Brian J. Jones. He wrote a book on, a biography on Dr. Seuss, obviously, I don't want to hold him in hand. Jim Henson, the creator of Muppets. I'll probably read that book, too. But what people normally do is they find a writer and they go through their back catalog, right? So, that's what her point here is, like, you need a breakout hit and then it's going to, the rising tide is going to lift all boats. And that's exactly what happens when he writes Cat in the Hat. So, now, this is Dr. Seuss at 50. Ted turned 50 years old. Looking back over his half-century, Ted was generally priest.

• 51:22David Senra?

  He and Helen were living a good life in their handpicked location, that's in Southern California. They still enjoyed each other's company after nearly 27 years of marriage. There had been some bumps professionally, but all in all, he was having a respectable, successful career. He was one of the best-known children's authors working and remained hopeful he was only a book or two away from being able to write children's books full-time. Think about that.

• 51:47David Senra?

  50 years old, and I'm still hoping I can do this full-time. Before I get to the Cat in the Hat, there's just a random quote from him that I just think is a good idea. It says, "Throughout his life, Ted would maintain a regular work schedule, sitting at his desk all day even if stuck for an idea. For me, success means doing work that you love regardless of how much you make. I go into my office almost every day and give it eight hours, though every day isn't productive, of course." This is very similar to what George Lucas did when he was writing Star Wars. He didn't enjoy the process of writing Star Wars. He said, "Okay, you have to work eight hours. You can sit at your desk and you can do two things. You can write, or you can do nothing. But you're not going downstairs, you're not going to watch TV, you're not doing, you're writing, or you're doing nothing." Now, here's what's interesting. We're getting into the Cat in the Hat.

• 52:32David Senra?

  There was a prompt for the Cat in the Hat. There was a guy who was designing, um, he wanted to sell books to schools to increase literacy, right? And the way to do that is for, when you're designing books for young, you have to use very simple words. So this is very interesting. He says, "But there was a catch. To write a book for first graders, Ted would be restricted to a word list of 350 words or less. And the preferred number was closer to 225." So this is the prompt. He originally wrote The Cat in the Hat for schools. His publisher is going to give the rights to schools to the guy that gave Ted the prompt, right? But he's going to reserve the right to sell it to bookstores, which is where Cat in the Hat becomes more successful, to his publishing firm, which is Random House, right?

• 53:17David Senra?

  So it says, "Could Ted write a story for first graders that they couldn't put down using 220, a vocabulary of 225 words or less?" So it has to be like very common, eat a cat hat, right? It winds up being extremely agonizing and very difficult. He winds up doing this later for, I think, somebody bet him that he couldn't do it with 50 words. And he did for Green Eggs and Ham. Okay, so it says, um... Ted left without making any promises, but he told Spalding, this is the person giving the prompt, he would take the word list home and play with it. So that book obviously becomes massively, massively successful. That is the first time he's able to say, okay, I'm doing this full time. From there, he starts writing one Dr. Seuss book per year.

• 53:59David Senra?

  So he starts being way more productive because he can do it full time, right? So he's writing, while he's writing, he just published one of his books called On Beyond Zebra. He makes up like a bunch of alphabets. Anyways, that's not the point. The reviewer is talking about what he doesn't like about Dr. Seuss. And this is Dr. Seuss's philosophy and it's something I love. He is a misfit through and through. And I love what he says here. So the reviewer is saying, you know, you're adding letters, you're making up letters to the alphabet, stop doing that, you know? And it says, Dr. Seuss, stop doing it. He's going too far. He's subversive. Ted gleefully agreed. I'm subversive as hell, he roared. I've always had a mistrust of adults.

• 54:41David Senra?

  And one reason I dropped out of Oxford was what I thought, was I thought they were taking life too damn seriously, concentrating too much on non-essentials. So first, subversive, let's go to the dictionary for that. Seeking or intended to subvert an established system or institution. So he flipped, he talks about, you know, at that time, when he was writing children's book, it was like the see Jane and Dick books. It's like Dick hits a ball, Jane runs fast. He's like, you're treating, you're treating kids like they're stupid, like you're talking down to them. They don't want to read about that. They want to read fantastic crazy stories is what I'm doing. But I love this, what he says. He's like, I thought they were taking life too damn seriously, concentrating too much

• 55:26David Senra?

  on non-essentials.

• 55:29David Senra?

  Okay, so he becomes world famous over the next few years. He starts his own imprint under Random House, takes on a partner, winds up, it's actually the founder, one of the founders of Random House's wife. They try to start an imprint. That's just not a good idea because Ted's not the kind of person where he can work, like he has to, he's very, he has to have things his way. And he thinks, you know, I know about writing children's books, so my opinion's more valuable. That partnership's gonna dissolve. But here's, this is where the story turns, right? And, you know, you don't read books just like an acad- at least I don't. I don't read books in like an academic sort of way. Just like, yes, there's information in there that are, that's useful, that's gonna be helpful in my life, right? But I

• 56:12David Senra?

  enjoy it. You, you, you get into the story, you, you, you relate to the, to the characters in the book, right? This is not bland stuff we're reading here. And so this is where my impression of him turns. And it's personal reasons. And I'm, again, I don't, I don't think I should judge people, especially if they're much older and further down the line than I am. But his wife is very sick. She winds up, um, she's got all kinds of health issues. Uh, she winds up being temporarily paralyzed. Remember, she had polio when she was younger. She had a bunch of issues. She, she gets diagnosed with another rare disease later on where she becomes, like, she becomes paralyzed. And, um, from the neck down, takes three years of physical therapy to be able to walk, talk, and, and, and think again,

• 56:56David Senra?

  and communicate. And Ted, they, they wind up meeting and becoming really good friends with another married couple. And Ted calls this guy his best friend, and he starts sleeping with his wife. And there's like hints that stuff is going on. People talk about it. But look, this, I just put dirty. This is, he, he publishes a book, right? He says, "Most readers, however, paid scant attention to Ted's dedication page, which, which proclaimed the book was for his neighbors, Mitzi Long and Audrey Diamond of the Mount Soledad," that's where he lives, "lingual laboratory." So it's like a tongue-in-cheek joke there, right? "Ted and Audrey's devotion." Audrey Diamond is the one he's having an affair

• 57:40David Senra?

  with. "Ted and Audrey's devotion was there in plain sight, if one knew where to look." Now, why am I bringing this up? Because when his wife is 69 and Ted is 64, Audrey's like in her 40s, she's much younger, um, his wife finds out about the affair. And she kills herself. So it says Helen was dead at the age of 69. Before going to bed the night before, she had downed a handful of barbiturates. The bottle was still on the nightstand, then penned a final note, which she placed neatly on the bedside table. Her final suicide note is just a letter to Ted. I'm gonna read it to you here. I cannot believe this was published in the book.

• 58:21David Senra?

  I can't believe, I think of like, what do you do when you're watching a great movie, reading a great book? You put yourself in the character's shoes, right? Like, what would I do if that happened to me? There's no way in hell, if my wife ever committed suicide because I was threatening, I guess, to leave her, you know, they've been married for 40 years at this point, would I share that note with anybody? I just can't believe that we're privy to this information. Okay, so it says, "Dear Ted, what has happened to us? I don't know. I feel myself in a spiral, going down, down, down, into a black hole, from which there's no escape, no brightness.

• 59:00David Senra?

  And loud in my ears, from every side, I hear, failure, failure, failure. I love you so much. I am too old and enmeshed in everything you do and are, that I cannot conceive of life without you. My going will leave quite a rumor, but you can say I was overworked and overwrought. Your reputation with your friends and fans will not be harmed. Sometimes, think of the fun we had through the years." And Ted didn't see this coming. He was distraught. He said, "I didn't know," I think the quote at the time was like, "I didn't know if I

• 59:43David Senra?

  should kill myself, burn my house down, or go away somewhere far and get lost."

• 59:51David Senra?

  And this winds up fracturing their friend group. A lot of people blame him for his wife's death. And partly because he gets remarried really rapidly. And so, this is Ted writing to a friend around this time. Writing to his friend in late May 1968, Ted assured his old friend that, "I have not flipped my lid. Let me put it out, flat on the line, without any comment or begging for understanding." On the 21st of June, Audrey is going to Reno to divorce her husband. Audrey and I are going to be married about the first week in August. I'm requiring two daughters, ages nine and 14. I'm rebuilding the house to take care of the influx.

• 1:00:34David Senra?

  I'm 64 years old. I'm marrying a woman 18 years younger. This is not a sudden nutty decision. This is an inevitable, inescapable conclusion to five years of four people's frustration. All I can ask you is to believe in me. So, the four people being, obviously, the two married couples. All right, so let me go back to his professional life, because I find personal life, obviously, very distasteful. It's definitely a plot twist there. So, this is how Ted ran his business's imprint. He says, "There was many times that," it's called Beginner Books, "that Beginner Books authors didn't or couldn't maintain the high standards he expected, severely testing his patience and forcing him to limit the imprint to four books a year so he could spend more time with each.

• 1:01:19David Senra?

  I know that I'm not going to get more than four good ones," he said. "I take my four authors and my four illustrators and push them and push them and push them. We really had to beat up on them to get things to the kind of quality that you wanted." And, of course, from a multi-decade career, he's going to have a lot of interesting ideas. This is one of them. I'm going to paraphrase. "I decided to be a child. Still, he understood why kids tended to gravitate towards him. My books don't insult their intelligence. Maybe it's because I'm on their level. When I dropped out of Oxford, I decided to be a child, so it's not some condescending adult writing."

• 1:02:01David Senra?

  When warmly reminded that Bennett Cerf, or I think it's Cerf, that's the founder of Random House. Had once declared Dr. Seuss to be Random House's one true genius. And they had an all-star cast of writers when he said this, Truman Capote, all these people. But he says, you know, there's only one genius on our staff, or one genius that we have signed, and that's Random House, that's Dr. Seuss. So he says, "When warmly reminded that Bennett Serf had once declared Dr. Seuss to be Random House's one true genius, Ted was typically dismissive. 'If I were a genius, why do I have to sweat so hard on my work?' he mused. 'I know my stuff always looks like it was rattled off in 23 seconds, but every word

• 1:02:43David Senra?

  is a struggle, and every sentence is like the pangs of birth.' He continued to work at his desk eight hours a day, seven days a week. 'If I didn't, I'd become a bum. Retirement's not for me. For me, success means doing work that you love, regardless of how much you make. I go into my office almost every day and give it eight hours, though every day isn't productive, of course.'" So then it talks about his motivation, and it's just a very simple sentence. "All he wanted was for people to read." And I just wrote my note, one-word note on that page, "Same." And he gives his reason in one of, I mean, it's in a bunch of his books, but this is from his book, "I Can Read With My Eyes Shut," he says.

• 1:03:27David Senra?

  And again, same is what I wrote on this page, too. "The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go." And then this part, note to self, you need to avoid this mindset. "Despite all his success, even despite a Pulitzer Prize, Ted still believed his work wasn't being taken seriously. He badly wanted to be regarded as a great artist, on the same level as Picasso, and not a novelty act, relegated to the realm of children artists or entertainers. And as he would often derisively remark, he wasn't Walt Disney." I don't know how you could possibly diss Walt Disney either. That's insanity. "Still hanging on the wall of Ted's studio is one of his father's target-shooting bullseyes, put there, he said, to remind me of perfection."

• 1:04:12David Senra?

  Ted is in his late 70s now. "He would never feel he had achieved such a state, largely because criticism from highbrows devastated him." He scarcely realized that in the long run, their opinions mattered little when it came to artistic legacy. So the note I left is you need to avoid this mindset. Instead of focusing on the millions of people who love his work, he focuses on those that don't do the opposite. And this is a little bit about his last book, which I didn't know. It's one of my favorite. I didn't know this was his last book. He's in his 80s, I think 85 when he finishes his book. It's remarkable. Ted would spend much of 1988 and early 1989 at his desk, working slowly on the book he would come to call,

• 1:04:56David Senra?

  "Oh, The Places You'll Go."

• 1:05:00David Senra?

  And then I just want to, it's amazing how he stuck to this idea over a long period of time. And he says, "You have to put in your hours and finally make it work."

• 1:05:14David Senra?

  And I'll close here, in the last few months of his life, he knew he was dying. He refused, he had cancer. He smoked every day. It was spreading everywhere. He's like, "I'm not doing any more treatments. Put a bed in my studio." He's surrounded by his work. He has this beautiful view of the Pacific Oceans and the mountains in Southern California. And it says, "Dr. Seuss had taken his own unique blend of discipline and coordinated chaos to create something entirely new. Books that not only helped kids read, but were also books they liked to read and wanted to read. For Ted and for Dr. Seuss, that love of reading would always be more than enough. I think I proved to a number of millions of kids that reading is not a disagreeable task," he said.

• 1:05:59David Senra?

  "I think I've helped kids laugh in schools as well as at home. But the best thing about my books might be that I've never found a child who felt compelled to read them. Ultimately," said Ted, "I'd prefer they forgot about the educational value and say it was a lot of fun." And as for becoming Dr. Seuss, Ted was content with his legacy. Dr. Seuss, from the moment of his inception, had always been there for one reason. "Just to spread joy," said Ted, who then broke into a wry smile. "How does that sound?"

• 1:06:36David Senra?

  That sounds good to me. That is a life well-lived. That is 161 books down, 1,000 to go. If you want to buy the book using, if you use the link that's in the show notes, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. Thank you very much for listening, and I'll talk to you again soon.