This cartoon is a failure.
I did it on commission for a book/tape course in Swiss-German culture. The publishers didn’t use it. I believe they thought it was too weird. Which it is. But before you judge it too harshly I’d like to say a few words about failure.
To succeed is to achieve something desired, planned, or attempted. It is the meeting of some set of goals. Conversely, to fail would be to not meet goals. Let’s look at how things can fail.
Say I have an assignment to write a paper on Benjamin Franklin, which is due on Monday. Further, say I don’t write it. That’s certainly failure. I would have missed all the goals of the assignment. Say I write a paper on Benjamin Franklin, but don’t hand it in until Thursday. Here I would have missed the deadline criterion. Or suppose I write a paper on Aretha Franklin. Even if I had written a good paper, I would have failed one of the stated goals. And there may be goals stated not by the teacher, but by the learning institution. For example, I must hand in a paper written by me, not by someone else. Or even unstated goals: the paper should generally not be written in crayon or Sanskrit. Sometimes goals aren’t clear. Say I write a paper on Mr. Franklin’s scientific contributions to society, but the teacher wanted me to write about his political contributions. Did I fail? It is much easier to identify failure when goals are clearly defined.
And what about areas where the goal changes over time? Let’s look at the field of Art; specifically painting. Years ago, the French Academy defined one goal of painting to be the "accurate" representation of reality. The purpose of this definition was to encourage painters to preserve images through time. But with the arrival of photography, painting was no longer the only way to capture specific moments. Photography freed up painters, like Cézanne, to focus on aspects of art other than representation, such as composition. Others used this development as an opportunity to explore new ways of thinking about painting altogether. For example, they struggled over the problems of representing three-dimensional images on two-dimensional surfaces.
But not everyone was willing to change the goals of art along with Cézanne, and he was widely criticized for not being able to draw. In the view of his critics, Cézanne failed at art. In fact, Modern Art has been rife with changing definitions of art; each accompanied by exploratory artists, who were deemed failures by the established set.
And this doesn’t apply only in the field of art. In business, look at Frederick Smith. When he was an undergraduate at Yale, he wrote a paper, which presented a hub-based distribution model for transporting airfreight, and got a C. Undaunted, after graduation he used the same model to build a company called FedEx.
In science, take Albert Einstein. He didn’t think like a typical scientist, and before he became famous, was criticized for it. Or in politics, take Mohandas Gandhi, who reframed the seemingly benign concept of peaceful resistance and used it as a powerful mechanism for civil change.
From all these examples, I distinguish two different types of failure; (1) an indolent failure, where you don’t try or you’re not following directions, and (2) (dare I call it) a noble failure, where you are not constrained by traditional processes, or no longer believe that all of the founding principles or accepted axioms apply.
Here’s where I make my over-generalized statement that blows away any credibility I may have built up: Truly great people forge ahead in their field without being dissuaded by the traditional and accepted ways of doing things. They are able to apply to their work Richard Feynman’s autobiographical koan: "What do you care what other people think?" It is this noble failure that is the source of our greatest human achievements. And I believe it is a great shame that such acts are generally viewed, grouped, dismissed, and confused with indolent failure.
That being said, this cartoon fails because it sucks.