Interview With Invisible Mentor Sean Ward, Entertainer & Comic Artist Part Two

Interviewee Name: Sean Ward

Company Name: SeanWard.net

Website: http://www.seanward.net/

Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Sean Ward: I’m an artist and an entertainer from Toronto, Canada and I’m doing stuff that I always dreamed and swore that I was going to be doing and I just have a lot of fun. I’m trying to make and retain products both in print and stuff to watch that I hope people can watch and enjoy so it gives them a tickle and gets them thinking about certain ideas that are going to lead to joy and a better world.

Avil Beckford: How do you integrate your personal and professional life?

Sean Ward: I’m the wrong person to ask that because I don’t do a good job maintaining that work-life balance at all. I think that phrase is a handy one for people who somewhere along the line got caught in that trap, that what you do for money is somehow separate from that person who is doing it and that you can keep your life separate. Everything that we do during the day shapes us and turns us into who we are, who we’re going to be and I think a lot of people have this attitude that they can resist this force and they can’t. I think that a lot of people take comfort in the idea that they can resist that force and lead them to a place of feeling that they can get around to it later, the whole business of improving yourself and trying to shape the world.

My personal and professional life are so entwined and so the same thing that they are pre-integrated. Even if I’m going to sit down and watch a TV show or watch a movie or something, the selection of what I’m going to watch when I’m relaxing is something that I need to watch for work for one reason or another. It’s research, or giving me stuff that I can use in my work so I’m always on the clock until something else distracts me for a while.

Avil Beckford: What’s a major regret that you’ve had in life?

Sean Ward: I try not to mess around with the word or the concept of regret, but I guess the only thing I could say to get close to a regret would be not getting started earlier. That applies both to the very beginning of my career when I was out working jobs that had nothing to do with anything that I wanted to do with my career. Then I had that realization that time was going by and I needed to start putting work into fulfilling all these promises that I was making to myself while I was growing up.

I wish I had started that process earlier and also the process of getting up and going again after I had that tumble that I described. In either case not getting started earlier would be the major regret.

Avil Beckford: What are five life lessons that you have learned so far?

Sean Ward:

1. Always present an attractive package to the outside world. That is to say, take an interest in fashion, take an interest in getting to be a people person. I realized a long time ago this whole notion of first impressions are very powerful and the fact that something that counts for so much is under our control so easily is very invigorating and inspiring to me. So always dress sharp.
2. Don’t be late for anything because when you’re late people make assumptions about what that means about you even though you try to tell yourself that it doesn’t.
3. None of the things going around us actually matters in the grand scheme of things so what we are here to do is to have fun and make stuff whether literally or figuratively will somehow make the world a better place. So put a value on what we are doing here.
4. No one is going to take as much interest in what you’re doing as you’re going to have to and that goes for everybody. Partners are great when you need them but at the end of the day, you’ve got to be your own best partner.
5. Nobody is watching as closely as you think they are. Everybody is too interested in what you are doing so do what you want to do and fail in a spectacular fashion because no one is paying attention and nobody cares.

Avil Beckford: When you have some down time, how do you spend it?

Sean Ward: Music is a big thing for me so listening to music on my iPod when I’m taking my dog for a walk or chilling out and catching up on some of my TV programs.

Avil Beckford: What process do you use to generate great ideas?

Sean Ward: It’s all about me having classic spiral bound notebooks. The 400 page ones, I have to have one of those close by because writing stuff down and drawing diagrams around stuff is how I think and I often notice a really big improvement in the quality of the ideas that I’m having, and how easily they come since getting another book. I have a trunk in my mother’s attic with 15 volumes of these notebooks that I have been keeping over the years. But late last year and early into this year moving around the way that I was doing, I didn’t have one of these notebooks on the go so now that I’ve got another one I’m noticing a really big improvement right away on the quality of the ideas that I’m having and how speedily they come. So the process is to get out the 400-page notebook and start writing down and doodling.

Avil Beckford: What’s your favourite quotation and why?

Sean Ward: “If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do and in my art or music then in that respect you can call me that. I believe in what I do and I’ll say it” by John Lennon. At the time the quotation was slipped to me, I was having a really difficult time with people misunderstanding and mischaracterizing me and what I was doing and as coming from ego, as being very self-centered, as being egotistical I think people were catching my hard sell in the very showy way that I was selling myself and selling what I was doing and without knowing much about it. It was easy to write me off as being that way. The people who actually got into the work realized that I was only shouting as loud as I was because I was that excited to get the word out about these things that I thought I had discovered and that I thought I knew and was trying to share in the work. That quote got slipped to me by a girl who buys my books regularly. I wrote the quote with a marker on a t-shirt, and wore it a lot of the days when I was selling at the corner. It helped me stay positive and hopeful and still having fun in the face of people not wanting to buy a book, not wanting to stop and talk whatever, calling me names on the Internet.

Avil Beckford: How do you define success?

Sean Ward: How I define success changed recently. I would have said before that money doesn’t matter, passion is what matters. Living grandiose and making art is what’s important. But I’m also seeing now that there are other world events that are of concern that have to be taken more seriously than I had taken them in the past so I would say that now, success is the sum total of how the work you are doing is affecting people and what they are getting out of it. So if you take stock of audience reaction to the work that you’ve done and the feedback is indicating to you that people are getting from it what you want them to get from it then that’s successful, on whatever scale and it’s just a matter of blowing it up to take it to greater heights so you don’t have to take the rinse and repeat philosophy. If you’ve got something that you’re putting out on offer to get three people to check it out and you find that one person who is into it, success is what happens when you make a point to go out there and find the other people like that one in three who will be into it, and not get bogged down that the two out of three didn’t care for it.

Avil Beckford: In your opinion what’s the formula for success?

Sean Ward: Start right away, stay busy, and let your work speak for itself and maintain faith. It’s time plus effort is what equals your reward.

Avil Beckford: What are the steps you took to succeed in your field?

Sean Ward:

• The first step is the hardest which is making the decision to get going and take it ultra seriously because a lot of times people put it off and when they do get into it they dabble so it’s really important for me to take the first step of taking things very seriously and saying, “This is what I’m going to do, no matter what.” This isn’t what I’m going to do ONE day, it’s what I’m doing TODAY. That was the first big step that I took.
• In a lot of ways in my darker moments I feel down about my compulsions, and the ways that I’m weird and the things that keep me feeling that I’m separate from my fellow man. There was never a point where I felt I should stop drawing comics and stop making videos and go try be a banker or whatever, I’m not cut out for that. I’m the kind of person where I get thinking about something, or get it in mind to do something and then I just have to do it, and it doesn’t matter what challenges are in the way, or how difficult my life around it is going to be to get it done.

I just got to do it and that’s always the way for me to get things done. That’s really the steps that I have taken, have been to get moving number one. Number two was to find good mentors who could arm me with both information and inspiration. So to find people who have that success attitude to surround yourself with, and finally to be out where people who can learn from, and try to work that into your art somehow.

Avil Beckford: What advice do you have for someone just starting out in?

Sean Ward: The big trick is to get down and do it. We can spend forever learning how to do it, and learning about the technical side of it, whatever it is, but there is no substitute for getting down to work on it, so that is the advice that I always have for young artists, anybody whoever, going back to the beginning of my career, anybody who treated me with that respect, looking at what I do with that reverence, that they are asking me, as if I’m an authority, what advice I would have for them. Well the first question is, “What are you doing right now?” You get people who want to be a movie director, but they are learning all they can about lighting or whatever, people who want to be a comic book artist they’ve got a part-time job at a record shop. The advice is to get moving, get out of your own way.

Avil Beckford: If trusted friends could introduce you to five people that you’ve always wanted to meet, who would you choose? And what would you say to them?

Sean Ward:

1. Charlie Chaplin: As big a Beatles fan as I am, the way that I see it, Charlie Chaplin invented the template for the art that he did in the business even more to a greater degree than the Beatles did. With that in mind, Charlie Chaplin would be the number one person that I’d want to meet because he did it. What I’d say to him, “This is how I see your career trajectory and what fascinates me about it Mr. Chaplin is how if all this would have taken place today going from the short subject films that don’t have a plot really all the way up to multi-reel pictures and on into feature films it’s fascinating how you career trajectory, if it happened today would have played out the same way.” If Charlie Chaplin hadn’t happened in the early 20^th Century, it would fly the exact same way on the Internet and his career would have been the same. So to find out what his secret was to that is what I’d say to him.
2. Paul McCartney: Even though John Lennon gets the props as the creative genius, the true A-Artist of the Beatles, Paul McCartney was the one who understood that it’s not just about making work that shakes things up or is radical, there is a consideration to be made for what the audience will be receptive to. So it’s actually Paul’s tempering influence on John was a big part of why the Beatles were able to be as huge as they were. If it was left up to John he would have been content to try and piss off everybody that he could everywhere he went so I would try to say something to Paul to get the secret of how he was able to have such a keen eye and ear of what was going to be a hit and how to package it.
3. Hugh Hefner: Another one of our great 20^th Century success stories. He created an empire.
4. Jesus Christ: What we attribute to be his ideas and concepts played and continues to play such a huge and defining role in our lives and in the culture. It’s unarguable as to who is the number one force that has shaped the culture that we live in as much as we try to reject and resist the crap that Christianity had piled on top of it. The message itself is timeless, what the Guy was about, revealed itself to be the truth again, again and again. Whatever form it shows up in, whether we want to attribute it to another person or another prophet, it’s the same idea expressing itself again and again. That’s just the Guy who expressed it for this part of the world and this culture.
5. Walt Disney: He was an artist who designed a business and an industry from scratch out of nothing, but his own sweat and ideas

Avil Beckford: Which one book had a profound impact on your life? What was it about this book that impacted you so deeply?

Sean Ward: I had a book recommended to me again by a girl who was buying comic books from me on the street back when that was what I was doing. She hit me to that book called Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, and I’ve always been, especially in my adult years, the kind of person who is always watching for coincidences, and believing that mysterious forces are putting sign posts along the way for us and putting things in places where we’re going to need them later, and that these mysterious forces are responsible for a lot of what we can easily dismiss as coincidence. I would say that sometimes it’s easier living if I would let things go and chock it up to coincidences but I’m so apt to wonder the meaning of this, that and the next thing. I can literally drive myself crazy with it.

But when this book came on to my radar, I had never heard about it, never seen it in a bookstore, nothing. That same day, I went into the Beatlemania Shoppe, a store that sold everything that you can think of with Beatles on it, and I was using the back room of the store as the place where I stashed my little podium and all the gear I use for selling comics on the street. So the guy who ran the store, Peter Maniaci who I told you about earlier, his accountant Ron maintained an office also in the backroom in the store.

There was a big stack of books, old beat up paperbacks, on top of Ron’s filing cabinet that were never there before so I said, “Hey Ron, what’s up with the books?” And he said, “Oh I’m trying to get rid of them. I’m going to take them to a used bookstore and try to sell them.” So I started going through the books and he had a copy of Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill in this pile of books. Never heard of this book before, never knew it existed and all of a sudden the same day that this girl recommended it to me making it sound good, here it is in this pile of books in Ron’s office.

So I said, “Hey do you mind if I take this one before you get rid of the pile?” And he said, “Sure take it.” And I took it and that copy of the book is now so beat up, so dog-eared because I’ve read it so many times. I have bought it as a gift for so many different people for so many different occasions. And the reason why it stands out, and the reason why it’s the one that I single out was because it gave form to so many things that I felt like I knew already in terms of knowledge that I came into this world with but it hadn’t yet found a way or encountered a way to communicate things. It sort of made me feel that a lot of the ways that I was living my life were destined and preordained on high and here is this book that’s like helping me get in touch with these things that were already living very deep inside of me. I’m probably talking really esoteric and strange but this is where I go with these things.

Think and Grow Rich  laid out a blueprint and instruction manual for conducting oneself in the world and it’s helped me. And even though I have gone to other books and got interested in other authors who writes these kinds of things, other approaches to that kind of material, it always ends up going back to that book as the one that is the most right, and the one that is most accurate, and the one that is least filled with the author’s personal bias.

After reading this book, getting along in the world was a lot easier after that.

Avil Beckford: If you were stranded on a deserted island, what are five books that you would like to have with you and why?

Sean Ward:

1. Think and Grow Rich because it’s not just about how to be successful at a business venture, it a blueprint for how to monitor your head and keep it screwed on from day-to-day living in the world.
2. Fantastic Four / Iron Man: Big in Japan (Fantastic Four (Marvel Paperback)) is a graphic novel from a few years ago, which was released from Marvel Comics. On the surface it’s about Ironman and Fantastic Four having to deal with an invasion in Japan kind of like Godzilla style monsters, but what’s lurking behind that is a really astute, entertaining and enlightening deconstruction of both comics as a medium but also art itself. For something masquerading as junk food pop entertainment to be so thick and charged with this really esoteric and insightful stuff was nothing short of a revelation to check that book out.
3. The One Minute Millionaire: The Enlightened Way to Wealth because it’s one of those books that teaches you how to live, how to think, and how to conduct yourself day today in the world.
4. The Bible but not just the Bible it would have to be a particular translation of the Bible that I enjoy. It’s a modern day translation and they have done a good job without losing the deeper meaning. And it was that translation of the Bible coming into my possession that got me really excited about those concepts, those characters and that kind of thing.
5. Charlie Chaplin My Autobiography by Charles Chaplin and that’s before even any of those books Think and Grow Rich type of books came into my head, when I was a teenager I found a beat up copy of the hardcover of Charlie Chaplin’s autobiography in a used bookstore, and bought and devoured it. Thinking back on it now, and knowing who I was at the time I had that book, I’m kind of surprised that I read the whole thing because it was a big, heavy, thick book about this world that I had no connection to in the late 1800s and early 20^th Century. The guy’s story was so inspiring, there is so much to his family history that rang through with me that I could relate to, and then the whole thing of learning how huge his success was and getting those details of how he made it happen was very eye opening, was very inspirational and I was very sad to report that I no longer own that book.

Avil Beckford: What one music CD and movie would you like to have with you (on the deserted island) and why?

Sean Ward: For my CD I will take the Beatles One because it has the hits and if you’re going to have nothing else to listen to, why not listen to the best music ever recorded. For the movie I would have to take 2001 A Space Odyssey.

Avil Beckford: What excites you about life?

Sean Ward: The trajectory that we are on, the point in history that we’re at, this kind of feeling that we’re the underdog in a movie and rooting for us to succeed in the face of these challenges that we’re facing. That’s what excites me about life, the louder it gets, the more colourful, the more pumped full of stimuli we are, the more interesting that story gets. I just feel in so many ways really deeply, passionately lucky to be alive right now, to be born and be here for this show, I love it. It excites me to be here when so much is moving and changing so fast.

Avil Beckford: How do you nurture your soul?

Sean Ward: I do that in a few ways. Number one is to do work that is an outlet for these kinds of things that I think about and that I feel and to try and do right by my work, and to try and do right by my soul and keep them as tied together as I can. I place a very high value on my alone time, being an artist, an entrepreneur I spend so much time alone I think it would be interesting to see some kind of study on the amount of time on average people spend by themselves because most people they go to work someplace where there are other people there, and they go home and most people have a family, so they’ve got a spouse, they’ve got kids, or they still live with their parents, that’s probably the norm so for someone to spend so much time alone as I do, probably they’d be a little bit crazy and the reason why I feel like I don’t relate well to my fellowmen. But at the same time I wouldn’t trade it for anything because it allows me to keep certain parts of the inside of me quiet, and focused and listening. So I try to nurture my soul by not being caught up in the world of man, to be in it but not of it as they say. I try very hard to perpetuate love and acceptance that the great literature espouses.

Avil Beckford: If you had a personal genie and she gave you one wish, what would you wish for?

Sean Ward: I would wish for some kind of property or compound like a place where my family could go and be and not ever have to worry about paying rent or mortgage, or having any responsibility. I’ve had this picture developed over the last few years of trying to set my family up and being able to know that they are just not taken care of and looked after, but to know that they are happy and having fun and know that they have resources available to them to improve themselves and stimulate their soul, their imagination. My one wish is to know that that’s there for them.

Avil Beckford: Complete the following, I am happy when…..

Sean Ward: I’m happy when I’ve just released a new product in the world. That’s probably the greatest feeling. That high that comes after releasing work and before you’ve had the chance to start taking it apart seeing what you can do better next time, that’s a beautiful moment and there is no substitute for it. And that comes into the importance of getting down to work and cultivating your talents as quickly as possible as you can because you want to get to that feeling as quickly as you can.

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