When people say to me, “You have a great imagination”, it’s not always meant as a compliment.

I remember many grade-school teachers commenting passive-aggressively when a student demonstrated a command of their imagination. “Oh, that’s very imaginative,” when really they wanted to ask, “Why did you have to do something so different?”

I was stunned at how closed off, and uninventive, a person in my teacher’s position had become.

One parent teacher night, while I was asked to wait in the hallway, I overheard my teacher say to my parents: “Your son has quite the imagination. He’s always drawing and telling stories, and prefers art to math. This isn’t good. You should have a talk with him about the choices he’s making for his future.”

I was in grade five.

Fortunately, my parents told that teacher to get stuffed and continued to encourage my creative proclivity.

“Get your head out of the clouds,” I heard others’ parents say, “How will you make a living? …Engineering is a real profession.” The greatest engineers have very active, practical, imaginations; their head-in-the-clouds goals in many cases call for painstaking application of as-yet-untried solutions.

Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell and Jonas Salk had great imagination. But very few people I have encountered attribute the theory of relativity, the invention of the telephone or the development of the first polio vaccine to one’s imagination. But these dreamers sensed what makes the impossible possible.

And artists from all disciplines live in the abstract world of their imagination. Abstract thoughts and ideas can scare people. Composers heard music to which other musicians were deaf. Think of Debussy or Bartok, Mingus or Bird. Artists, painters – say, Picasso or Pollack, Kandinsky or Klimt – saw what the ordinary eye of their times was blind to.

Cohl, Melies and McKay pioneered animation, but the vision of Disney and Fleischer took animation to a whole new level. McKay and Caniff made art out of comic strip. Kirby set the bar for super heroes, and Zappa’s freeform improvisation challenged what people thought about rock.

Imagine a world without Walt Disney, Akira Kurosawa, Rembrandt, Charles Shultz, John Coltrane, Egon Schiele, The Beatles, or Jim Henson.

These artists have inspired, touched millions of people around the world in very personal ways. They’ve made people’s lives richer by sharing their imagination. And many of them were rewarded handsomely, enabling them to continue to create art and inspire.

But very few of these creative people had easy lives. Charles Shultz, the creator of Peanuts, certainly didn’t. Charlie Brown is in all of us, but if he had listened to his teachers in school, Schultz would have crawled into a hole and disappeared. Instead, he persevered through adversity and became a global phenomenon.

Don’t let anyone deter you from a life in the arts and don’t be distracted from your artistic goals. However, remember that each person who has succeeded before you has done so through hard work. No one is born with skill, you develop it; after you develop it, you refine it, and then you refine it some more. Be patient, be practical, perform due diligence; not everyone is going to make a million dollars. Live within your means. Pay your bills.