Ten thousand hours. That’s what we’re told. Ten thousand hours of practising a discipline – whatever it is – before you achieve anything like ‘expertise’.
It’s an arbitrary number, of course – the same one, as it happens, as your optimum daily step count. A nice round number – a lot, but manageable. The specificity makes it sound more authoritative. Vague advice – ‘walk a lot to stay healthy’, or ‘do something regularly for a long time if you want to be really good at it’ – invites the response ‘yeah, but how much?’ Make it specific, and we go mad for it. Ten thousand. That’ll do nicely. And if you do the 10,000 and things still don’t work out for you… well, them’s the breaks.
I don’t suppose Charles M Schulz (the name feels somehow naked without that middle initial, I’ve found) had any such specific goal in mind when he embarked on his drawing career. He just loved making comic strips, and wanted to do it as well as possible. And when he was relatively young, he got the chance to do it every day and to earn some money thereby. He was clearly good at it, and getting better. By 1953, if you factor in the pre-Peanuts years, he must have racked up something in the region of the necessary 10k in his pursuit of cartoony excellence.
Every successful comic strip has its own distinctive visual style – you would recognise a Calvin and Hobbes or a Bloom County or a Far Side at ten paces, even if their principal characters were absent – and by now the economy, space and deceptive simplicity of Peanuts really drew the eye, even in the crowded environment of the funny pages of a 1950s newspaper.
As well as the visual fingerprint, Schulz’s philosophy was becoming clear, and it set the strip apart from the competition. There are strips from 1953 that stick in the mind for their ability to highlight subtle, eternal human truths.
Charlie Brown listens to a piece of music with Violet – “I’ve never heard another song that depresses me the way this one does … (beat) … play it again, will you?”
Ah, the timeless, universal power of wallowing.
In another, Linus, still at the sitting-and-crawling stage of babyhood, struggles with his building blocks. He wants to balance one on the other, but they refuse to do his bidding. Frustration, despair, then triumph as he finally manages it. How proud he is, and how proud his older sister will be when she sees what he has done.
But his older sister is Lucy – indifferent, heedless Lucy. She comes in and tidies them away, not even acknowledging her baby brother’s achievement. And, you might ask, why should she? All he’s done is balance one block on another. What kind of achievement is that? The last panel merely shows Linus, sitting alone and sighing.
That strip goes out to anyone who has ever created anything at all – whatever it is, the time and effort you put into it will far outstrip the time, attention and value placed on it by anyone else.
1953 also sees a proper changing of the guard, hinted at in the previous year. Shermy, Patty and Violet – three-quarters of the original human cast – are beginning to fade, their bland ’straight guy’ energy gradually yielding to livelier characters brimming with potential: fuss-budget Lucy, Beethoven-mad Schroeder, budding philosopher and Snoopy-baiter Linus. And of course Snoopy, bit by bit becoming an indispensable cast member, albeit not yet walking on his back legs.
Tropes that would become familiar are being developed. Lucy loves Schroeder (“Do you believe in love at twenty-third sight?”), who in turn is putting in a good portion of his 10,000 hours, pounding tirelessly away at his toy piano. A particularly nice manifestation of his serious attitude to music comes in one Sunday strip. We see him working out – lifting weights, skipping, shadow boxing, pounding the streets – then filling up with a nourishing breakfast, before marching determinedly to the piano, where he takes on Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata. Schulz’s choice of piece – he was an enthusiast but not a musician – is a knowing in-joke: the Hammerklavier is notoriously virtuosic and not for the faint-hearted.
While others in the strip develop in their own way, Charlie Brown is settling down into ‘loser’ mode. He loses at marbles, he loses at croquet, he loses at baseball, he loses at football. And in particular he loses at checkers. 1953 sees Lucy notch up her 10,000th consecutive win against him. She gloats. Of course she does. But Charlie Brown has the perfect riposte, one that could only come from someone who has put serious time and effort – 10,000 games, in fact – into the Noble Art of Losing.
“You think you’re so smart… I’m the first person to LOSE ten thousand checker games in a row”.
All hail the great loser.