I wanted to start this post by talking about how I started a cartoon series called #cartoonButt last year but as it turns out I started it sort of mid-to-late year, 2013 (The first installment is here if you’re interested). I didn’t do many, and I realize that you need to stick with something for a while to accurately gauge how successful something is but the extreme lack of interaction / response they received was disheartening at best. While I realized that most of my content would mostly only be appreciated by those closest to us (or at least people that knew us) I thought I did an alright job of making them general enough for them to be appreciated as comics. The whole purpose of them, really, was to be seen and because I enjoy doing them. Anyway – the response was quiet enough to talk me into giving it up after about 10 or 12 installments.

Bummer.

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook you know that I’m a pretty big fan of The Art of Manliness. Offering up great articles such as Thinking On Your Feet: How to answer Difficult Questions, Men & Dating: Why The Pick-Up Scene Gets It Wrong, and my personal favorite series, Lessons in Manliness From Viking Mythology, AOM gives guys a pretty well-rounded resource for all things manly. While usually long reads I find their writing to be spot-on and they tackle just about any subject you can imagine and even some you can’t. Either way: I’m a big fan.

Earlier this week I received from their newsletter an article called Stop Hacking Your Life. The author goes into detail about how we, as a society, have become so dependent on researching how to better our lives, making them easier, faster, more efficient, etc. We spend so much time preparing for obstacles that we often never get through the experiences that we’d learn more from anyway. While I don’t want to review the article in full, I want to elaborate on a single point it made about reassessing why we do certain things and how we gauge the success of something:

In our society we’re taught that faster is always better and with the mindset that has evolved out of social media we strive for (read: “are starving for”) instant gratification. How many RTs did I get? Did anybody Like my photo? I know personally if I don’t get x amount of likes on an Instagram post I feel like I’ve messed up, or even worse, I’m UGLY. It’s honestly a pretty pathetic state to be in but it’s what we have, I suppose.

What we also have now is the assumption that if something doesn’t take off right away then it isn’t worth doing. I’m guilty of looking up to my elders and envying what they have and being hard on myself for not having the same things or not having experienced as much without stopping to realize that they’ve been at it way longer than me – they’ve put their time in, they’ve bled over it, sweated over it, cried over it. I’m only 30 years old – not so “young” anymore but young enough to still be considered early in the game. The article forced me to stop and consider some of these things a little more and as a result I’ve had my eyes open to my poor attitude when it comes to personal projects, hobbies and even my professional life. If something is worth doing we’re likely not going to even know it right away – we just have to do what we feel is the right thing, whether it sees instant success or not.

As anti-climatic as this may be, with that in mind I’ve decided to bring back #cartoonButt! This edition is dedicated to mine and Erin’s beloved Knoxville Ice Bears who just last night pulled a 3-2 victory over Mississippi to take game one of the SPHL President’s Cup finals! Game two, and hopefully the final game of the series, happens Saturday night at the Knoxville Civic Auditorium and Coliseum. Come hang out at the pre-game tailgating event in the parking garage and afterward as we hope to be celebrating until the wee hours of the morning!

Enjoy #cartoonButt: You’re Wrong

And with that, #cartoonButt is back and so is my creativity.