Dig, if you will, this picture, dear reader: a young George Bernard Shaw, not yet the bearded curmudgeon of literary lore, but a wiry, 23-year-old pencil-pusher slogging away at the Edison Telephone Company in London.  Imagine him there, surrounded by the tooth-grinding monotony of wires, switches, and the soul-leeching buzz of early telephone service.  A job, I assume, about as thrilling as counting bricks in a foggy Victorian alleyway.  On July 5, 1880, something snapped – or clicked, or fizzled out – in his brain.  Whatever precarious sense of duty had tethered him to the earnest farce of gainful employment finally gave way.  He quit.  Walked out.  Cashed out his chips at the table of conformity to chase something far riskier than money or approval – writing.

This is not the kind of decision that lands gently (trust me).  It’s not slipping out the backdoor when no one’s looking.  No, no.  It’s a fuck-you saunter through the front, telling the world’s expectations to go pound sand.  And by “world’s expectations,” I mean anyone who’s spent a sweaty afternoon rehearsing their speech about how “art is a hobby, but a job brings security.”  Shaw, at least in this moment, would’ve laughed –  a messy and slightly manic laugh, I’m guessing – because security was the first thing to go when he took that flying leap into the abyss.

And what came next?  Oh, not instant glory, dear reader – don’t kid yourself.  This isn’t the bootstrap myth.  Shaw spend years clawing through failure with the desperate glee of a man who’d rather starve on his own terms than dine under someone else’s thumb.  He wrote terrible novels, the kind of unreadable fare that gathers layers of dust and rejection letters in equal measure.  But the man was relentless, armed with a mind like a scalpel and a tongue like a firecracker.  He crawled through the trenches of anonymity and despair, fueled by a cocktail of frustration, defiance, and, one assumes, a staggering amount of tea.

Fast forward forty-five years – and yes, it took decades of swinging and missing – when Shaw won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925.  A whole-ass Nobel for the guy who once penned plays that couldn’t even get past the front desk of production companies.  By then, he’d carved his niche as a sharp-tongued satirist who weaponized wit to skewer society’s sacred cows.  Politics, classism, the absurd rules of social theater – it was fodder for his ceaseless critique.  Pygmalion, one of his best-known works (and the reluctant donor of DNA to the musical My Fair Lady), went on to crystallize his legacy, a shrewd commentary dressed up as comedy.

But there’s the thing.  Shaw’s story isn’t the kind of sanitized parable that inspirational keynotes trot out to peddle grit and perseverance.  His was a messy, stubborn, gloriously unhinged trajectory – because quitting your job to “become a writer” is only romantic on the far side of success (again, trust me).  When you’re actually in it, it’s doubt, debt, and existential dread served cold.  Yet Shaw felt that burn, waded through the wreckage, and stuck it to the grind.  Shaw’s life is the dare most are all too gutless to take.  Quit the job.  Starve a little.  Craft something that snarls at the world’s dumb rules.  And maybe, just maybe, forty-five years later, they’ll hand you a medal for proving them all wrong.  But hey, even if you don’t?  At least you’ll have some good stories to tell.

N.P.: “Knocking Me Out” – WellBad