I’ve lived my life with one all-encompassing mantra: Everything important you need to know in life can be found in The Lion King, Star Wars, or The Simpsons. If you think about it, it’s bloody brilliant, if I may so humbly say myself. Beating yourself up about a bad decision you made years ago? “It doesn’t matter. It’s in the past,” as Rafiki (Robert Guillaume) tells Simba (Matthew Broderick), motivating him to stop running and return home. Trying to get something done? To hell with that. As Yoda (Frank Oz) says in his iconic The Empire Strikes Back quote, “Do… or do not. There is no try.” Wanting to know how to win friends and influence people? You could spend up to $63.98 on the Dale Carnegie book, or remember this one simple (and free) truth from The Simpsons: “You don’t make friends with salad.” In fact, the greatest lesson I’ve learned comes from Dan Castellaneta’s Homer Simpson: “If at first you don’t succeed, give up.”
This Quote From ‘The Simpsons’ Is a Composite
Now I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that not one of you dear Collider readers is thinking, “Well, yes, I can see how that might be life-transforming,” so bear with me. But before we get there, the quote itself. Despite countless websites attributing “If at first you don’t succeed, give up” to Homer, he’s never actually used those exact words. Or if he has, Google and my memory have severely let me down, and as much as I love the show, rewatching 35 seasons worth of episodes — and one movie — to find a needle in a haystack isn’t really feasible. That said, the quote is a composite of the many, many, (far too many) times Homer has said something similar.
In Season 9’s “Reality Bites,” Homer says, “Trying is the first step towards failure,” explaining why he’s so hesitant to put any effort into anything that he’s certain is going to go wrong anyway. Homer’s assuring Bart (Nancy Cartwright) he’s not mad after Bart gives up trying to learn guitar in “The Otto Show” is parenting at its best: “If something’s hard to do, then it’s not worth doing. You just stick that guitar in the closet next to your short-wave radio, your karate outfit, and your unicycle, and we’ll go inside and watch TV” (which we know is the answer to life’s problems, as stated in Season 1’s “There’s No Disgrace Like Home”). His words of wisdom to Bart and Lisa (Yeardley Smith) from “Burns’ Heir” in Season 5 — “Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is never try” — are so profound that the quote made its way into The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations in August 2007. One could literally find similar quotes at least once in each and every season of The Simpsons.
“If At First You Don’t Succeed, Give Up” Is More Than It Sounds
So how do the defeatist and pessimistic words of a lowly nuclear plant worker, one whose grasp on being S-M-R-T is non-existent, teach any sort of lesson, let alone a life-changing one? In my case, the answer is two-fold. Initially, Homer’s dismissal of trying anything gave me definition. When things come easy, they’re not hard to embrace, and ever since I was a child, things came easily, or at least often enough that “average” was always on the table. Spelling was easy. Math was easy. I taught myself how to play drums. Yet the reverse was also very true. If it didn’t come easily, it wouldn’t get tried again. One failed skiing attempt and that was it for skiing. Falling on my butt learning to skate one time, and I’ve never tried again (not easy when you’re Canadian). Failed auditions, once for a junior-high production and another to advance in the university’s drama program, were enough to shut the door on any other attempts. And like Bart, my closet is full of things I meant to try but gave up on. It wasn’t laziness, but it certainly wasn’t effort. It was something indefinable… until Homer Simpson found the words to define it.
I understood myself better than I ever had before, and it was freeing. But at the same time, that definition inspired me to live beyond it. Like George on Seinfeld, I came to the realization that if everything I had done led to my circumstances at the time, by doing the exact opposite, those circumstances would change. I took a chance and asked a beautiful woman out, which has led to 26 years of being together, and counting. I self-published a book of puns, placing confidence in my talents that I would never have dreamed of before. I sought help for my mental health, a move that I will never regret (and strongly encourage you, friends, to do the same if you’re not in a good place).
A random ad appearing on Facebook looking for applicants to write for Collider caught my eye, and instead of assuming that there was no point, I applied, and was rewarded with what I call “the fun job.” And surely there’s more fascinating things in the near future I can’t talk about yet because they haven’t happened, all thanks to merely trying. In the end, perhaps the greatest lesson from The Simpsons isn’t that composite quote from Homer at all, but rather this one from “Lost Our Lisa”: “Stupid risks are what makes life worth living.”
The Simpsons is available to stream in the U.S. on Disney+
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