The other day I was watching a documentary about Ted Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss.
For me Ted Geisel is up there with Steve Jobs. He’s someone I really look up to.
Essentially, he started creating amazing cartoon ads for many different companies.
In this documentary I found out that he really didn’t enjoy making those illustrations for companies.
He really did what he had to do to make money to live before he got his big break in children’s books.
The interesting thing about Ted Geisel is that he didn’t really even care for kids that much. He didn’t ‘hate’ kids, he just didn’t love them.
He combined his passion for writing and his passion for illustrating and it unfolded into children’s books.
One day his friend made a bet with him that he couldn’t write a book in less than 300 words.
Ted Geisel ended up writing it in about 250 and it was actually Cat in the Hat.
The same sort of thing happened when he wrote Green Eggs and Ham – he used lot of the exact same words and just repeated them often.
How do you apply that to your business and life? To challenge yourself in unique ways and look at things from a different perspective.
Ted always worked tirelessly at finding the right words and was never satisfied until is was perfect – meticulous attention to detail does pay off.