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Ted Geisel

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2021-01-04

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2021-01-04

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1. “Ultimately, said Ted, I'd prefer they forgot about the educational value and say it was a lot of fun. And as for becoming Dr. Seuss, Ted was content with his legacy. doctor Seuss from the moment of his inception had always been there for one reason. Just to spread joy, said Ted, who then broke into a wry smile. How does that sound That sounds good to me. That is a life well lived. That is 161 books down 1,000 ago. If you want to buy the book, if you use the link that's in the show notes, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. Thank you very much for listening, and I'll talk to you again soon.”

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2. “If I were a genius, why do I have to sweat so hard at my work? he mused. I know my stuff always looks like it was rattled off in twenty three seconds, but every word is a struggle, and every sentence is like the pangs of birth. He continued to work at his desk eight hours a day, seven days a week. If I didn't, I'd become a bum. Retirement's not for me. For me, success means doing work that you love, regardless of how much you make. I go into my office almost every day and give it eight hours, though every day isn't productive, of course. So then it talks about his motivation. And it's just a very simple sentence. All he wanted was for people to read. And I just wrote my note one word note on that page. Same.”

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3. “And of course, from a multi-decade career, he's going to have a lot of interesting ideas. This is one of them. I'm going to paraphrase, I decided to be a child. Still, he understood why kids tended to gravitate towards him. My books don't insult their intelligence. Maybe it's because I'm on their level. When I dropped out of Oxford, I decided to be a child, so it's not some condescending adult writing. When warmly reminded that Bennett's serf, or I think it's Surf, that's the founder of Random House, had once declared doctor Seuss to be Random House's one true genius. And they had an all-star cast of writers when he said this, Truman Capodi, all these people. But he says, you know, there's only one genius on our genius that we have signed, and that's random house. That's Dr. Seuss. So he says, when Warmly reminded that Bennett Surf had once declared Dr. Seuss to be Random House's one true genius, Ted was typically dismissive.”

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4. “I am rebuilding the house to take care of the influx. I am sixty four years old. I am marrying a woman eighteen years younger. This is not a sudden nutty decision. This is an inevitable, inescapable conclusion to five years of four people's frustration. All I can ask you is to believe in me. So the four people being obviously the two married couples.”

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5. “And Ted didn't see this coming. He was distraught. He said he didn't know. I think the quote at the time was like, I didn't know if I should kill myself, burn my house down, or go away somewhere far and get lost. And this winds up fracturing their friend group. A lot of people blame him for his wife's death, and partly because he gets remarried really rapidly. And so this is Ted writing to a friend around this time. Writing to his friend in late May 1968, Ted assured his old friend that, quote, I have not flipped my lid. Let me put it out, flat on the line without any comment or begging for understanding. On the 21st of June, Audrey is going to Reno to divorce her husband. Audrey and I are going to be married about the first week in August. I am requiring two daughters.”

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6. “This is Dr. Seuss's philosophy and is one something I love. He is a misfit through and through. And I love what he says here. So the reviewer is saying, you know, you're adding up letters to alphabet. Stop doing that. And he says, Dr. Seuss, stop doing it. He's going too far. He's subversive. Ted gleefully agreed. I'm subversive as hell, he roared. I've always had a mistrust of adults, and one reason I dropped out of Oxford was what I thought was I thought they were taking life too damn seriously, concentrating too much on non essentials. So first, Subursev, let's go to the dictionary for that. Seeking are intended to subvert and establish system or institution. So he flipped, he talks about at that time when he was writing children's book, it was like the C Jane and Dick books. It's like, Dick hits a ball. Jane runs fast. He's like, you're treating kids like they're stupid. Like you're talking downtown. They don't want to read about that.”

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7. “Before I get to the cat in the hat, this is a random quote from him that I just think is a good idea. It says, throughout his life, Ted would maintain a regular work schedule, sitting at his desk all day, even if stuck for an idea. For me, success means doing work that you love regardless of how much you make. I go into my office almost every day and give it eight hours, though every day isn't productive, of course. This is very similar to what George Lucas did when he was writing Star Wars. He didn't enjoy the process of writing Star Wars, but he said, okay, you have to work eight hours. You can sit your desk and you can do two things. You can write or you can do nothing. But you're not going downstairs. You're not going to watch TV. You're not going to writing or you're doing nothing. Now here's what's interesting. We're getting into the cat hat. There was a prompt for the cat and hat. There was a guy who was designing, he wanted to sell books to schools to increase literacy, right? And the way to do that is when you're designing books for young,”

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8. “Here. It's like you need a breakout hit, and then it's going to the rising tide is going to lift all boats, and that's exactly what happens when he writes cat in the hat. So, no, this is Dr. Seuss at 50. Ted turned 50 years old. Looking back over his half century, Ted was generally priest. He and Helen were living a good life in their hand-picked location that's in Southern California. They still enjoyed each other's company after nearly 27 years of marriage. There had been some bumps professionally, but all in all, he was having respectable, successful career. He was one of the best-known children's authors working and remained hopeful he was only a book or two away from being able to write children's books full time. Think about that. 50 years old. I'm still hoping I can do this full time.”

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9. “Ted settled into a seat across from Jackson and went into his spiel. It had been seven years since I gave up being a soldier. Now I'd like to give up movies and advertising and anything that means dueling with vice presidents and committees. What he really wanted to do he told her was stay in San Diego and write children's books full time. All he needed to earn, he assured her, was five thousand dollars a year, but with such a career even possible, he asked.”

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10. “Think is funny Back to Your capacity for healthy, silly, friendly laughter was smothered. Ted said admonishing adults everywhere. You really grown up, you had really grown up. You had become adults. Adults, which is a word that means obsolete children. Okay, so now I'm fast forwarding the story. This is so important. Ted is 48 years old, and yet doctor Seuss is still not convinced this could be a career. He winds up getting with his, I guess, manager agent is the role she plays. Her name is Phyllis Jackson. She becomes very important to the career, to his career.”

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11. “So, one thing I also enjoyed about this book is we see Ted, he thinks a lot about why he's doing what he's doing. And in that, he reveals some, I would say, some flaws in human nature that are almost exclusively relegated to adults. And so this is Ted on what kids get right. And I think there's some good lessons in here for us. Ted informed his readers that he was writing for kids by choice. And for a very good reason, this is a direct quote from him. There's something we get when we write for the young that we can never hope to get in writing for ancients. Have you ever stopped to consider what has happened to your sense of humor? Now going back to the author. Adults, Ted argued, had not only lost their sense of humor, but their sense of wonder and their giddy love of nonsense. Children, he maintained, never let their laughs go out on a string, worrying about what their employers or neighbors or critics might think.”

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12. “Ownership of it. So I'm going to skip over a larger part of that randomly in the book. He's got a good idea again going back to the Kobe idea. Don't study what. Study how. So he says if you want to write, this is Ted's advice for us. If you want to write good books for children, spend a little time studying the bad ones. And that's a main idea we've seen throughout these books, that you can learn a lot by seeing something done the wrong way.”

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13. “Year in royalties, I'd be set up for life. So he still has not hit that. He's been trying to pursue this career as an illustrator, a writer, first eighteen years at this point. And that's it. I just want to earn a living doing what I love. I want to be in my studio all day. And this is just $100 a week. Can I do that? And he still hasn't achieved that. So it's like, okay, well, maybe I can do movies.”

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14. “Can't get to the top by trying to fit in. Of course, it can't be like everything else. Come on. Ted decided he was done with it. After one last rejection, he was walking up Madison Avenue, with his book tucked under one arm, another strange twist of fate here, determined to burn the book in the incinerator when he got home. The walk back up town would lead to one of the luckiest breaks of his career. I'm a great believer in accidents, Ted later said. Everybody gets into things accidentally. He certainly did, right? He ran into Mike McClintock, a fellow Dartmouth man, who asked him what he was carrying. Oh, just a book no one will publish, Ted told him. I'm lucky at home to burn.”

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15. “He makes a decision okay, I'm going to be a writer. Now, why children's book? This is another surprising thing. The exclusive nature of his contract with Standard Oil, he explained, forbade me for doing an awful lot of stuff. Writing and illustrating children's books, however, wasn't a forbidden activity. I would like to say I went into children's books work because of my great understanding of children, Ted said. In truth, I went in because it wasn't excluded by my standard oil contract. So think about how crazy that is. He's by far, I would say, the most successful children's author in history, right? And yet he fell into it by accident. Now, here's another crazy thing. No one wanted to publish his first book.”

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16. “The drawings by doctor Sooths are hilarious, wrote the New York Times, while another reviewer called the cartoon simply swell. Now here's the important lesson though. Ted saw none of the profits from it. As the artist for the book, Ted had been work for hire and he'd been paid a flat fee. In most cases it was the writer with his royalties who made far more from a successful book than the work for higher illustrator. It was at this point Ted later explained that he came to realize there was no sense in just illustrating books. That's what he thought he was going to do his whole life. I'll just be the illustrator. This changed that to make any real money in publishing he'd have to be both the writer and the artist.”

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17. “So Ted benefited from that in his spare time. He starts illustrating books. And this is his first book, but he learns a very, very important lesson here. He's the illustrator, not the writer. Now, why is that important? So it says, February 1931 would also see the publication of Boners, the first mainstream book to feature cartoons by Dr. Seuss. Boners was a collection of unintentionally funny bits of student writing, featuring nuggets like a polygon is a dead parrot, lifted from the real exams and term papers. Ted was brought in by Viking press to produce 20 cartoons and given prominent credit on the book's cover and spine, a sure sign of his growing name recognition. To Ted's surprise, Boners was an immediate hit selling out of six printings in four months and pushing its way onto the New York Times bestseller list, and then this inspired them to do a follow up only two months after the release of the first volume. Sales were brisk and reviewers were particularly effusive about Ted's cartoons.”

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18. “Concept in advertising at the time. Now standard oil owns the company that produces Flit, the insecticide, right? So it says the Flip campaign would prove so popular, in fact, that Ted would work for them for the next 17 years. That toss of a coin determined my whole career, he said later. More important, the money Ted earned through his advertising work would buy him his artistic freedom, what would eventually become the doctor Seuss Empire would be laid on a foundation built and paid for with standard oil money. So he says he can do like his advertising work. I think it's like in three months he can do a year's worth of”

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19. “And as an insecticide joke, it was hardly a thigh slapper. But while riding the gag, Ted had fussed over which of the two major brands of insecticide to use for his punchline. In the end, he had simply flipped a coin. It came up heads for flit, said Ted. It would be the luckiest coin toss of Ted's life. That issue of Judge was picked up in a beauty salon by the wife of Lincoln Cleves, who was the executive in charge of the flint incesside account for an advertising firm. Mrs. Cleves brought Ted's cartoon to the attention of her husband and suggested they should bring Ted in to talk about creating more Flint ad campaigns in an era where most print ads were heavy with text are featured large photographs of the product, Ted's flint advertisement didn't look like any other ad. There's a lesson there. They were intentionally funny. A nearly foreign...”

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20. “His first career is in advertising. He works in advertising for 17 years. It gives him the financial freedom to pursue cartooning and writing his own books on the side. And it happens, it's like a lucky break. It wasn't something he was expecting to do, I guess, is a better way to put it. A cartoon appeared in the January 14, 1928, issue of Judge. That Ted would rightly say changed my whole life. In the cartoon, a knight sits upright in a canopy bed. Armor stacked on the floor next to him as a Susian dragon pokes his head menacingly under the canopy, very nearly in the night's lap. Darn it all another dragon, says the knight, and just after I'd sprayed the whole castle with flit. So I guess Flit was a very successful insecticide company at the time.”

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21. “And then it strikes me as very comical, and I laugh instead. Despite his darkening spirits, his persistence paid off. In early summer, an editor of the Saturday evening post purchased one of his cartoons. I gave him $25, which to be equivalent to about $350 today. It wasn't a princely sum, but when pulled with his savings, it was enough that he could announce to his parents that he was moving immediately to Manhattan. Okay, so he's freelancing. He also starts doing works for Judge Magazine. Now this is another surprising, like I said earlier, there's a bunch of surprising things I didn't know going into the book. This is another surprising thing.”

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22. “He was in the city, he had dinner with five Dartmouth classmates. He's already being stabbed in the chest, right? Now somebody's turning the knife. This is the dinner. A gathering that depressed him as all five had real jobs and appeared to be on their way to real careers. As for his own prospects, he was playing it by ear. What comes up will come up and will determine my future life, he said. I rather think it will be freelancing for a while, he continued. I don't know, but I know one thing my policy is to laugh my goddamn head off. Occasionally now this are heavy sentences here. Occasionally I depress myself and work myself into one of those delightful funks and I seek out subway tracks on which to toss myself.”

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23. “the cartoonist of peanuts doing the same thing and he also experienced exactly what Ted's going to experience here Ted explained that he had been tossed out of the offices of two publishers two movie studios three advertising agencies in the offices of life and judge magazines”

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24. “Again, if Ted didn't know Phil Knight, they're separated by half a century. And yet this is why I feel so many historical figures in history also did what we're doing, which is reading and studying biographies, because it's the same feelings. We all go through the same things, right? So it says Ted was back living under his parents' roof again, and he wasn't happy about it. You can switch out Ted for Phil in that picture, or in that sentence rather. Well, with no job, no teaching certificate, and few prospects. Ted really had little choice but to return bunking in his second floor bedroom and setting up a drawing board and a typewriter. At age 23, he certainly didn't want to be there. He was determined to make it as an illustrator, and that meant pounding out endless letters to book and magazine publishers in New York, sending around samples of his work, and endlessly pitching one idea after another, very similar to the book. That's a very similar scenario to what we just covered a few weeks ago, Charles Schultz.”

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25. “From the army, I think he's 24. You know, he's looking, he's sitting in his childhood room. He's like, This is my life. I should be a man now, a full adult. Why do I feel this way? Why am I so unfulfilled? Why am I full of uncertainty and doubt? And he goes from this run and during this run, the opening of Shoge is one of the best openings of any book I've ever read because it's the inner monologue of Phil Knight deciding I'm going to pursue my crazy idea. And his crazy idea was the thesis he wrote at Stanford Business School about, hey, why don't we letting Adidas and other German companies are dominating athletic shoes? What if I can import the same thing, import Japanese running shoes as a way to compete with them as they did with, I think, cameras and other electronics at the time? Anyways, it's fantastic if you haven't read the book. I highly recommend it. Just one of the best autobiographies you're going to find. But anyways, Ted's feeling the same way.”

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26. “Now, this is Ted at 23 going back to this. He's terrible. Being a student, so he drops out, does not get his graduate degree. He jeered at Oxford, had been a bust, and his plans for a teaching career had dissolved with his unattained doctorate. His future was uncertain, and his prospects for employment were cloudy at best. Helen, however, typically thought she knew exactly what Ted should do. Ted's notebooks were always filled with these fabulous animals, she said. So I set to work diverting him. Here was a man who could draw such pictures. He should earn a living doing that. Okay, so after he leaves Oxford, he has to go back home, no money, no prospects, doesn't know what to do. He's still 23 years old. This reminds me, if you remember, if you've read Shoe Dog, and if not, if you've listened to, I think it was Founders number 10 when I covered Shoe Dog. This is very similar to Phil Knight.”

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27. “What Helen saw and Ted was both talent and potential, both of which, as far as she was concerned, were being wasted on English literature. You're crazy to be a professor, she told Ted flatly. What you really want to do is draw.”

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28. “Interested in the subtle niceties of English literature. As you go through the notebook, there's a growing incidence of flying cows and strange beasts. And finally, at the last page of the notebook, there are no notes on English literature at all. They're just strange beasts. In fact, the flying cow and strange beasts were what caught the eye of a young woman seated next to him in a lecture who watched closely as Ted did everything in class but take notes. You're not very interested in the lecture, she told him plainly, then lean in and point it at one of his drawings. And now we get to the point where I wrote this is my own note. Maybe the most important thing anyone ever said to him.”

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29. “That seems to be a good idea. Maybe I'll do that. And it still takes multiple decades to get there. So, again, there are a lot of surprising things in this book. One of the surprising things is on the very next page. He's at Oxford. One of his professors is JR Tolkien. Unfortunately, it didn't take Ted long to realize that he was in over his head. As a mediocre student who had struggled to attain a C in general English at Dharmouth, a deep drill into Germanic, I don't even know what that word is, at Oxford, even if taught by the brilliant new professor J.R. Tolkien, was bound to be a struggle. So it's at one of these classes that he meets Helen, and he says, this is Ted talking about. He says he's talking about, you know, instead of taking notes, the pages are full of, you know, these weird creatures. You've probably seen a Dr. Seuss book. You know, they don't look like they're animals. They don't look like animals, how animals look in real life, right? It says, I think this demonstrates I wasn't very...”

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30. “With a vague ambition of becoming an English professor, the story right there, the important lesson is he winds up, later in his life, there's a fork in the road and he decides to go straight. Most people just pick, they sit on the well-worn tracks. Okay, I can go left or right. No, there's unlimited opportunity in front of you. You just can't copy what everybody else is doing. And again, Ted doesn't get there on his own. His wife Helen winds up being, like I just said, she gives him the most important advice. She's like, you're not even paying, they're going to go to Oxford. That's where they meet. I'll get there in a minute. But she's like, you're not even paying attention to lecture. All you do is draw these cartoons all day in class, and you're really good at it. Why aren't you doing this? And then the light bulb goes off in his mind. He's like, oh, I don't know.”

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31. “This is not going to be my career. So it says on June 23rd, 1925, Ted graduated from Dartmouth. Unlike many of his classmates, Ted wasn't entirely certain what to do next. He had no family business to return to and wasn't sure his English degree would be good for much of anything. With the shrug then, he decided to head for graduate school to get his doctorate in English, a subject he didn't even like. How many people do this? Now the good thing is Ted eventually writes this course, right? The reason I bring this to your attention is think about all the people you know in your life. Look around. So many people just, they don't like what they're doing. Maybe they were influenced by parents. Maybe they were copying other people around them. Whatever it was. But this idea is like with a shrug, he decided to head to graduate school to get a doctorate in English. Why would you do that? You hate it.”

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32. “As a result, he's just outworking everybody else in the staff. Ted is talking about the editor, what the editor's opinion was of him. He found that it was a workhorse, Ted said later. And so we used to write practically the whole thing ourselves every month. And so let's go back to this idea about this is so important. Because think about he's graduating from college, this point of the story. And he's not sure what he wants to do in life. He becomes one of the most iconic writers in history, one of the best-selling writers. That is so far in the future. But at the present day, it's unsure. I don't know what I'm going to do. The thing he loved in college, he was a terrible student. A terrible student. The thing you love most was cartooning, writing humor. And he still thought, oh no, you know, this is just like a side thing. I'll just, you know, this is not really.”

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33. “Of the fall semester was published in late October, Ted found to his delight that he had four cartoons featured inside. And before I go into this next paragraph, remember that idea of something smacking you in the right in the face and not even realizing it or sitting right before you, not even realizing when he meets his wife because the statement that she makes may be the most important advice he ever gets from another human being in his life. I'll get there in a minute. Going back to this, he starts freelancing for Jacko and then he's so good at it. He does so many of them. They invite him to be on the staff. So says the work was good enough that in January 1923, Norman McLean, the editor at the time, offered Ted an official spot on Jacko as a member of the art staff. Ted's name would now officially appear in the magazine's masthead. And as far as Ted was concerned, he was on his way to the editor's chair. And this is where we get his dedication and professionalism, his work ethics.”

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34. “Analyze how you like spending your time, and then maybe you can find a profession and a discipline in there because Ted loved what he was like, he's going to find his true love of writing cartoons. He did not think he was going to be a children's author. I'll tell you the surprising reason he picked that genre in a little bit. But he loved cartooning. He loved writing humor. He wanted to be funny. And yet he thinks he's going to be an English professor. And he hates the subject. It's very bizarre. So let me get into that in a little bit. It was a floor mate, meaning somebody in the dorm who helped Ted find his true passion. So you start working at this college. It's like a humor magazine called Jack O'Lanner. Sometimes they refer to it as Jacko. Ted knew where his people were and what he wanted to do. I think my interest in editing the Dartmouth Humor magazine began that week. Ted began submitting cartoons to Jacko and when the first issue”

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35. “The loss of the industry he had grown up in, dutifully reporting to work and sitting at his desk in his offices, even as the company was picked to pieces around him, its assets slowly liquidated. Okay, so even though his family was having financial trouble, it was very important for them to send Ted to college. So he goes to Dartmouth. This is really the beginning of something that's really, really surprising when analyzing the career soon to become, well, not soon because it's multiple decades of what will become one day the career of Dr. Seuss. And then I left myself is finding his true passion, yet not doing it for a living question mark. And it's something he loved to do, and yet it's like it's sitting there right in front of your face. I guess the lesson here is like...”

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36. “Around this time, Ted's a teenager, and this is when they lose the family business. On January 17, 1920, prohibition officially went into effect under the sledgehammer weight of the 18th Amendment. For his efforts to keep Springfield Brewer solvent, TR was promoted to president of the company, occupying his new office the very week the sale of intoxicating liquors became illegal. That was it for Springfield breweries. My father was rather angry about that turn of events, Ted said. With considerable understatement. For weeks TR sat in the living room, head in hand muttering son of a bitch, son of a bitch. He became very cynical, said Ted. He didn't know what to do with himself. For more than a year TR would mourn the loss of the industry he had grown up in. His father was TR's father, Ted's grandfather was also in the business. He actually sold two breweries and then started investing in real estate as well. The grandfather. TR would more.”

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37. “the people around him, especially when he's first starting out. Everybody does this. So it says Ted seemed to be aping the styles he saw in comic strips. His drawing would improve over the next three years, though Ted would have very little formal art instruction. As his work evolved, Ted would continue to be more influenced by the comic pages than by formal instructions, as to say that over and over again. Ted's high school art, while competent, this is so important, because of course no one starts out being really great at what they do, you have to work at it, right? Ted's high school artwork.”

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38. “He was a modest and quiet young man named Calvin Coolidge. How funny is that? Perhaps some of Coolidge's famously silent demeanor had rubbed off on TR as well. This advice he gave to his son. You will never be sorry for anything you never said. I don't actually know if that's true, but I understand what he's trying to teach us on there. So now this is about Ted in high school. Like a lot of people we study on the podcast, self-taught. He's not really interested in formal education. He's a terrible student. For Ted, school was something to be endured, not mastered. So he had a love of drawing. His mother let him draw on the walls. She encouraged him to pursue things he was interested in. So he's submitting a lot of cartoons to the high school newspaper said he was submit several cartoons to the recorder and most of which are unremarkable. Now, why are they unremarkable? Because like everybody else, he's influenced and he caught.”

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39. “In myself, no matter how many people tell me, stop believing in yourself. That's how his annotation as well. And I think what Kanye's mother did for him is the same thing that Dr. Seuss's mother is doing that did for him. Everything you do is great. Just go ahead and do it. All right, so more memories and advice from his father. When he wasn't tailing along after his father in the workshop, Ted just plain loved listening to his father talk, whether he was dispensing advice or telling stories. Ted remembered the two of them lying on their backs in the field directly behind their house on the night of April 20th, 1910, talking in hushed tones as they scanned the sky for Haley's comment. This is hilarious. Tier would get considerable mileage out of a story about a local attorney he had hired to collect brewery debts. The man was a modest and quiet.”

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40. “They're never going to live up to their expectations. This is terrible, terrible parenting. And I think about that all the time because when you read biographies, many, many decades after usually their parents have passed on, they still talk about their parents right before they're dying. Their memories are a lot. Not only are they looking back in their own life, but they talk about their parents over and over again. It's extremely important. And when I read that, I have a series of quotes, videos, some clips from podcasts I always reference over and over again. Sometimes you want to need extra motivation. You want to draw strength. Maybe you're experiencing periods of doubt like everybody does. And one of this, when I read this sentence, it made me think I have a clip of Kanye West, I think of all the time that I love, even to the point where I can imitate what he says. And in the clip, I think he's on like a tonight show kind of interview. And he's going off on one of his crazy rants like he always does. But he says, my mother made me believe.”

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41. “Are the same across the board? That's my message. Don't look at what I did, but how I did it, the how. And then you can transfer that over to any profession and any discipline. And what Kobe is saying, 40 years, maybe was that 30 years after Ted after Dr. Seuss dies, is the same thing that Ted learned from his father in the early 1900s. A constant reminder to do the work necessary to achieve excellence regardless of the task. I love that. Going back to another really smart idea that his mother had is just she pumped him up. And she says, my mother overindulged me and seemed to be saying everything you do is great. Just go ahead and do it. Now think about that perspective of a mother when you see a lot of dysfunctional families. It's the opposite. They tell their kids how stupid they are, how we're going to...”

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42. “Decades later, even after he had become one of the most famous and successful writers in the world, Ted still hung one of his father's paper shooting targets in his office. Check this out with multiple bullseyes shot out at its center. A constant reminder to do the work necessary to achieve excellence, regardless of the task. So that last line there says Constant reminder to do the work necessary to achieve excellence regardless of the task. When I read that, the note I scribbled down is this quote that I listened to over and over again comes from Kobe Bryant. It's one of the last interviews he gave before he passed away. And he says, whatever you do, do it to stay. That's a quote from Ted's dad. This is Kobe. No matter what discipline you are in, there's a common denominator in how we approach our craft. The attention to detail, the level of commitment.”

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43. “Ted came to appreciate the considerable discipline and commitment it took for his father to hone such an expertise. Ted remembered that again. Ted remembered watching each morning as his father held his rifle steadily over his head for 10 minutes, strengthening his arms and shoulders and thus ensuring the barrel of his rifle never faltered in the slightest when he aimed and shot. He was an inspiration, Ted said warmly. Later on he dedicated one of his books. I think he wrote was it sixty books a lot of books. One of his books he dedicated to his father said it was the finest man he ever knew echoes what we learned from that biography of Teddy Roosevelt I did a few weeks ago. He said the same thing about his father. All right, so he says he was an inspiration, Ted said warmly. Whatever you do, he taught me do it to perfection. That's a direct quote from his father.”

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44. “In his office this idea from his father, which he's learning, what is he five, ten years old maybe at this time, younger than ten, is still with him. So it says, while Ted would never be a good shot with a rifle or even fully understands his father obsession with marksmanship, so his father worked all the time in the brewery. The one thing he would do when he wasn't spending time with his family is he would compete and he was in like this club for Marksmanship, like to shoot guns and show how precise he could be. But this is the part. So it says...”

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45. “And this is also an idea that I've intuitively picked up because I've read my favorite way to read a book is obviously a physical copy. There's nothing that can beat that. But I've read entire books, some of which for this podcast on my phone through the Kindle app. And that's actually an idea I got from Elon Musk because it's the way he's busy all the time. He says he's writing tire books on his iPhone. So I started doing that. And when you're highlighting and taking notes, it's extremely fast. But then I realized from my daughter's perspective, what does she see? She sees her father sitting there looking at his phone and kids naturally imitate what their parents do. So then what she's just going to look at a device, I'd much rather have her pick up a book. All right, so let's get back to his father. So says he was a level-headed man who imparted to his son both a sense of discipline and a foundational decency. This is a really important idea that Ted's about to share with us, something that he's reflects back on. He lives, I think he's 87 years old. He gives this long interview right before he dies.”

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46. “They both inspired and encouraged Ted's love for books. Reading was a pastime the entire family took seriously, leaving well-thumbed books casually on side tables and the pages of the newspaper folded carefully over the arm of a chair. Teaching a child to read is a family setup, Ted said later. It's the business of having books around the house, not forcing them. Parents should have twenty books stacked up on tables or set around the living room. I have way more than that. The average kid will pick one up, find something interesting, and pretty soon.”

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47. “Let me go back to this. Both Netty and TR, that's his father, would inspire and encourage Ted's love for books. Now remember what he said on the back cover. His main goal when he finally fully embraced being a children's author is to get people excited about reading. It's something that he was an introvert by nature, one of his true passions was reading. He'd sit in his office and read constantly all day long. He loved history. He loved biographies, of course, but he was distraught at the idea at the time he was writing, when he was writing, I think he's almost 50 years old, maybe over 50 when he writes cat and hat. And the main motivation behind that book is the fact that the literacy rates for American children were plummeting. And he thought that was a tragedy. And the reason I bring that up to you is because his parents instilled in him as a child the importance of reading. I think this is just a good idea. So it says.”

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48. “The last numbers I've seen, he sold something like 600 million copies of his books. I looked at data for a few years ago as of I think 2018 he was still selling about 4 million books a year, which is just insane when you think about it. But let me go back to, before I lose my train of thought here, the urgency with which I do it. So not only his schedule, which I'll go into later on, is he'd work eight hours a day every day no matter what. But he also took him in an unbelievable, you know, you pick up a Dr. Seuss's book and it seems like, oh, I could write this in really simple. It's not. He would write a thousand pages just to get a book down to 60 pages. So this editing and this concept revision, I think is one key insight to the biography of Dr. Seuss is how he approached his work because we could take that same idea that he took for children's book, children's books, and apply it to whatever it is that we're doing in a day.”

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49. “The pie flavors, and it says apple mince lemon, peach, apricot, pineapple, blueberry, coconut, custard, and squash, at which point she would playfully squash a giggling ted down into his mattress. Now this is the important part. This is the reason I'm reading this paragraph to you. Ted later credited his mother for the rhythms in which I write and the urgency with which I do it, and I underline that second part choice, the urgency with which I do it. Ted is a workaholic, as we'll see later on. He fell into the career of Dr. Seuss rather reluctantly. There's a lot of surprises in the book. That's probably the biggest one. It took him an extremely long time. Multiple decades, at the same time pursuing other careers before he finally discovered and had his monumental success of becoming Dr. Seuss, which was interesting to me.”

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50. “Ideas that positively influences life. So his mother's name is Netty. His father is going to be referred to as TR throughout the book. But this is about first the influence of his mother, then I'll get to the influence of his father. She said, Netty too would directly influence Ted's ear for the beat and annotation of words. As she put her son to bed each evening, Netty would chant a refrain she had often used to sing behind the counter at the Sus Bakery to inform patrons of the day's pie flavor. So let me stop right there. On her side of the family, they owned a bunch of bakeries. On his father's side, they were German brewers. That'll come into, that's important for the story later on because his father was running a very successful brewery and then prohibition took effect in the United States and that he had to change careers when Ted was a child. All right, so it goes back to her coming up with a song at her bakery so they could tell the customers”

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