You never ever do a thing for the reward you think you'll get. You never do it so that somebody tells you it was good, or writes about it. You do it because you care about creating something good.

This is what splits the world, from what I've seen. Most of the world would rather be seen doing something wonderful than doing it. The rest are the people who I like, and who incidentally do things that I like. I don't know how it is for you, but if I ever thought the meaningfulness of my work depended on somebody else telling me it was good, I would shoot myself in an instant and never think twice about it. I sometimes feel that the kids who go on shooting sprees are the ones who don't get that other people don't matter.

You could trace everything I do to the people who have inspired me. First and foremost among everything, that means you'd trace it back to Bill Watterson of Calvin & Hobbes fame. I read his comics when I was four and they inspired me. I laughed. I wept. Often I would weep laughing. I got the Complete Calvin & Hobbes for Christmas, which included hundreds of ones I'd never read before, and I found myself laughing and crying again. It's something truly magnificent, and, furthermore, it was the first masterpiece I ever came across as a kid.

Bill Watterson didn't make Calvin & Hobbes so I would tell him it was good, or so I'd write this. He didn't do it to become famous. He did it because he figured if he was going to make a comic, he was going to make it as good as he possibly could make it. He drew hilarious pictures time and time again because he never let himself repeat something he'd done, and he never let himself settle for something that wasn't hilarious. Same goes with writing. When he drew the to-me-iconic picture of the dead bird that starts 6-year-old Calvin thinking about the meaning of life, he did it because it fit with the characters and expanded his world. His thoughts were first and foremost on his creation.

That's why I say focus on quality. The OP thinks I'm saying it so that the "intellectuals" will judge him better. He misses the point just as much. My point is that you do things because you think they're good. You do it for the sake of doing a good job. The only penalty for your not going a good job is that you'll have done a bad job - and for me, and for a lot of others, that's enough.

Harry Potter Revisited got 113,000 views in 4 years. 220 people wrote to tell me what they thought about it - and none of them mattered. The ones who liked it liked it for what was good. The ones who didn't didn't like it for what wasn't. It most likely inspired nobody. It wasn't anything more than amusing to people who were old enough to have a really firm grounding in comedy. The only comments I ever cared about were the few people who got addicted to Newgrounds after watching the video. Introducing those people to something new was a nice feeling.

On the other hand, when I published my novel last year, I got less than 6,000 views on Scribd. A handful of sales. By a metric, that matters far less than the video that gave me Internet fame. On the other hand, my CA borrowed my copy of the book, read it through in a weekend, and, handing it back, told me that I'd described the ways she felt about things and had never told people. And tonight, my girlfriend told me that her mother, while reading, kept nudging her on the plan and saying, "I know how this feels! This is exactly what it's like!"

So, I managed to use words and reach out to people, which isn't easy to do. (I'd argue it's harder than almost anything else in the world.) That's the achievement, for me. It's knowing that I did something well.