AES148 As Good as You Could Be

When I was first introduced to art school, everybody was 20, 22, and 25 years old.

Many of them had graduated from college. So there I was, and I was about half their height. 

And I looked at these guys and I thought… “I can’t compete with these birds!”

So at the end of the first week I went home, I was so disillusioned. I was a failure at 15.

So my uncle, who lived with us occasionally, came up and he said “You look awful.”

“You look like something the dog had under the front porch, what’s the matter?”

I said “I can’t compete with these guys at school, they draw like Leonardo Da Vinci, I’ll never catch up to them.”

I felt like it was the end of the world for me. 

I could draw a little bit, but I couldn’t keep up with the big guys.

I cried out “You can’t make a racehorse out of a pig!”

And my uncle looked at me very gently and he patted me on the knee, and he said…

“No, but you can make a very fast pig.”

And I realized that’s what it was really all about.

I could only be as good as I could be, whatever my limits were.

And I learned a second thing, 

Creative work is never competitive. 

-Chuck Jones-