What Can You Build in the Next 14,600 Days?

What does it mean to have a “career”? For the past 100 years or so, it’s meant finding a company that will pay you a fair wage to do the same thing over and over again for 40 years.

No one seems to want one of those anymore. In fact, the word “career” seems to elicit more of a gag reflex now than feelings of pride.

But I’m a hold out. I want a career – a great one. I think that when you decide to dedicate your life to something and spend 14,600 days doing it over and over again, it doesn’t really matter what it is – you can accomplish something amazing and amass a body of work that truly changes things.

I want a career like Garry Trudeau, author of the classic comic strip Doonesbury. One day, Garry sat down to doodle on a piece of paper, and today, 40 years and 14,600 comic strips later, he still hasn’t stopped.

A few weeks ago, I saw Garry on The Colbert Report promoting his new book, 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective – a collection of comics celebrating the “cast” of the strip which spans an amazing 40 characters and three generations. It’s ten pounds – a serious volume of work!

The interview is filled with political satire (just like every Colbert interview), but it’s worth watching for a glimpse at what kind of amazing impact a real career can have on a person, an industry, and an entire culture:

Way to go, Garry. You sat down for 14,600 days in a row and created something that changed the way we’ll look at comedy forever. Here are a few other things I noticed in the interview that are worth noting for your next 14,600 days:

There’s never been a recycled strip. Garry’s career has been based on new ideas every day for 40 years, not reproducing the same, tired product day in and day out. As a result, he has the same passion and interest for his work today as he did years ago.

The comic started with one character but, 40 years later, it has as many branches as an old growth tree. He had no idea what it’s potential was when he started, but he enjoyed it, so he kept at it and built into the most substantial strip in history.

Doonesbury was supposed to be a sports comic that ran for six weeks, but since Trudeau allowed it to evolve with his interests, it followed his passions over time to become the political and cultural cartoon it is today. No career survives without change.

Trudeau was a terrible drawer when he started, but rather than allowing that to hold him back, he used it as a selling point, calling his work “the urgent scribblings from someone on the front line of the counter-culture.

His long-term dedication to his career expanded the field of comics and opened new doors for other great comic writers to build on his own work. Without Doonesbury, there’d be no Mallard Fillmore.

Kudos, Garry. You saw the potential in sticking with a great idea for the long-term, avoided the pitfalls of monotony, and created a body of work that changed the way we look at comics, enabling and inspiring other great artists around the world.

I can learn a lot from that. If you’re like me and get itchy feet every time you stick to something too long, maybe you can learn something, too. Give yourself the space to explore something new every day, but think about where you’re headed. Give your life a theme, and see where it takes you.

What about you? What kind of career will you create? What legacy will you leave? You’ve got 14,600 days to build it.

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Image by: Loozrboy