  Looking Back I've been looking into my past, trying to understand my process for work and reward. And I've found some very interesting answers. I've never tried to find the root of my work ethics. I've always had assumptions about them, but never really tried to understand them. Till the other day when I remembered something... interesting. I used to have chores, you know, take out the trash, clean my room, mow the lawn stuff like that.
And I had an arrangement with my parents where I did all of that and they'd give me a small allowance each week. It was pretty good money for a kid. I remember it being like $7 bucks a week or something like that.
And for the first few months it was great, but when our family was getting ready to make the move from Dallas to Colorado, my Mom asked if I wouldn't mind them paying me a lump sum once we finally moved. So I agreed, wanting to help out the family, and I worked and worked for several months. Counting the Gazillions of dollars I was gonna have once we were in the new place. But it never came. What's worse, is once we finally moved there, the school district held me out of classes until midway through the semester, waiting for my family to find a permanent address. And as motivation for me, my Mom offered me $25 dollars for every "A" I got on my report card, if I worked really hard to get caught up. No easy task, considering that the Dallas school district was way behind Denver's. So one day I bring home a report card, my one and only report card ever with straight A's.
But no money. Turns out it was more expensive to live in Colorado than my parents had anticipated. I understand it now.. as an adult. And I don't blame my parents, money really was that tight. But the little kid in me was devastated. And I never really tried to do good in school after that. I mean, stresses at home, and constantly being picked on at school because I was the new kid made it a little easier to shut down.
But looking back on my whole comic book art career, it seems like I've been working in the exact same manner. Not only did I pick a career in which the rewards are months, if not years after the work is done. But on top of that, I put these little road blocks and qualifiers in my way in order to keep the reward just that much farther away. I've never learned to just do something, and be rewarded for it. Everything is this monumental task that I have to overcome, and even if I've surmounted the obstacles, the reward may still never be there. So what does it mean? I don't know really. I guess that I need to retrain myself to take on small, easy to accomplish tasks, and be damn sure that there is a real reward at the end of it.
Which is what I've been trying to do in recent months. I'm just afraid that there have been so many failures over the years. And so many... Disappointments, that I've created a sort of "learned-helplessness" in myself. Where I don't fear deadlines, because there's no point to it anyways, because there's never a reward for accomplishing it. And making other people happy, just isn't enough anymore. Well, at least I'm a little farther down the path to understanding this. --Will 
