Find your weirdos

A big publisher turned down a draft by Robin Rendle, and the nope didn’t sting the way earlier ones had. That can be negatively framed as cope, but more positively (and, I think, correctly), as a signal to find your weirdos:

Whenever I think about what I want in life I always come back to Tim Burton’s Ed Wood. It’s a movie about a bunch of misfits and weirdos who can’t get a gig in Hollywood and so they make their own films. And they are all very, very bad. But I find Ed Wood hopeful and bursting with optimism because what’s really important isn’t the work or the prestige of being accepted by some Big Name.

Ed Wood’s big idea is that perhaps, instead, we shouldn’t spend our lives begging and pleading for acceptance from folks who just won’t get it.

This also reminds me of Carl Jung’s exhortation, “if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you”.