After you read my column, go and read this piece that friend and fellow Drink at Work Bartender, Ned, sent me earlier today. It’s a short Q & A about what to do when you’re hard work falls flat on a now Twitter-pated fan base.

In a work environment where we rely on things like Twitter for constant grading and placation of our efforts, it’s so easy to become instantly depressed when the virtual world doesn’t care about your hard work. Things are different now and if you let it get you, it really gets to you. Gone are the days of sequestering one’s self to complete a project, only to submit it for consideration of a strategically timed launch to an unsuspecting public. Success seems to come from a viral world now. We’re expected to make our own audiences and customize our work according to their demands. A lot of us have learned to accept it, but it can still drive a sane person to consider a career in insanity.

I’m not saying that before the Internet and social networking there wasn’t public scrutiny. It just seemed a lot more controlled and aptly timed back then. It was much easier for an artist/writer to forget about what people want or think and just do what he does and do it well. These days, people want instant results and the idea that you put in any sort of hard work matters much less to them than how clever they can be with their commentary. And look, that’s fine. It’s where the big civilization ferry has taken us and you either adapt or you die.

But you don’t have to constantly participate. You can adapt to the harshness of social discourse by standing back and refusing to engage until you’re ready. It is still possible to be your own person and still be on Twitter. I’ve tried it and it works. When I transitioned my comics from print to the Internet, I opened the social discourse flood gates by penning blog posts and allowing comments and open forums. I was on Twitter, conversing and arguing with everyone insane enough to start a snarky conversation about the semantics of the fake world that I created. And it nearly killed me, so I quit. I took some time off to try and figure out if it was possible to still do things my own way and still be on the Internet. I still don’t know for sure, but I’m slowly putting stuff out there again, carefully crafting things to my liking, based on no one else’s opinion but my own. We’ll see what happens, but I can tell you that I’m truly enjoying the work again. And I’m happy.

Which brings me back to the piece Ned sent. In the beginning, the Questioner expresses his exhaustion and frustration with his audience’s indifference to his years of hard work. In the short answer given by the author, there’s the usual advice of “having a thick skin” and “getting back on the horse”, but he also offers up “letting yourself fall in love again.” This, in my experience as of late, is the most important advice to remember, if you want to stay happy in your life and career. I’m not talking about success, I’m talking about happy. No matter how big the failure, if you still believe that you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing, let yourself fall in love with your work again. Get obsessed with the excitement of your next big idea. Staying mad and blaming a changing world for failure will taint all of your following work. Trust me, I speak from jaded experience.

Success comes when you don’t look for it and if you can’t stay happy while you’re not looking, do something else.

ROCKS!

- FRS