Sometimes in life you end-up living a different dream than the one you expected. That was one of the cool messages I learned from studying Jeff Kinney. More about Kinney in a moment.
Patti and I are lucky to have two cool grand-nephews that we are close to. For the holidays every year we buy them books and we enjoy shopping for them and reading the books. (I’m sure they are now getting to the age where they are thinking, “Oh boy, another book.”)
One of the books we discovered was Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney. As a frustrated cartoonist myself, what caught my eye, other than the title, was the simplicity of his sketches. As someone interested in business, however, what also caught my eye were the 12 books in the Wimpy series and the shelf space the books demanded.
This made me want to learn more about Jeff Kinney and I discovered he is not only a clever writer and cartoonist, he is a successful entrepreneur.
Jeff Kinney. Jeff Kinney, 44, grew up in Maryland and went to the University of Maryland. Always interested in cartooning, in college he published a regular cartoon called Igdoof, which appeared in the college newspaper, The Diamondback.
After college, working as an on-line graphic designer by day, he drew cartoons at night – 1,300 over 8 years. He kept submitting them and was rejected at every turn. His dream of becoming a syndicated cartoonist in daily newspapers for adult readers was starting to fade, but a new dream was about to take its place.
In 2004 Kinney released an on-line version of Diary of a Wimpy Kid and its popularity started to climb. Then in 2006 at a Comic Book convention, he showed an editor for Abrams Books a sample of his Wimpy Kid work and the editor loved it. He told Kinney this was exactly the type of book content they wanted for their young teenage market. Kinney was stunned – all that time he thought his audience was adult.
Kinney as Entrepreneur. In addition to having 150 million copies of the Wimpy Kid series in print, Kinney has also designed and produced three Wimpy Kid films. He also designed a website Poptropica, which is an on-line game for children that includes two islands called “Wimpy Wonderland” and “Wimpy Boardwalk”, where the Wimpy Kid characters are featured.
Kinney has now opened a new café bookstore called An Unlikely Story in his adopted hometown of Plainville, Massachusetts, just north of Providence, Rhode Island. When asked by Rita Braver in a CBS interview about the store’s name and his disappointment of not becoming a syndicated cartoonist, Kinney said, “Well, I feel lucky that I didn’t get the dream — I was denied the dream I went after — because I think this is a better dream. So I’m going to hold onto that.”
Kinney’s lesson is a great one – if you work hard making your dream come true, a better dream might just emerge – one you never imagined.
