How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

by Adams, Scott

  I also have some craziness in my genes. My mother’s father spent some time in the loony bin, or whatever it was called at the time. If I recall, he was the recipient of electroshock treatments. Apparently they didn’t work, because my mother and grandmother later left him forever, taking nothing but the clothes on their backs, as he chased them down the road with a blunt object in his hands and, apparently, homicide on his mind. I couldn’t rule out the possibility that I inherited whatever caused Grandpa to flip out.

  Living as a presumptive crazy person was hard work. When I tried speaking to humans, my vocal cords clenched involuntarily on certain consonants, giving the impression of a very bad cell-phone call that drops every third syllable. Asking for a Diet Coke at a restaurant turned into “… iet oke.” I usually ended up with a sympathetic look and a regular Coke. Or worse, the server would say, “I’m fine. Thanks for asking.” And I would get no beverage at all.

  It was a confounding, maddening problem. I could sing fluently, albeit hideously, which was entirely normal for me. And I could recite memorized pieces without much of a hitch. But I couldn’t produce a normal, intelligible sentence in the context of a conversation.

  Like a stutterer, I learned to avoid problem syllables that would trip me up. If I wanted gum, I knew it would come out as “… um,” so instead I would try a work-around, such as “I want the stuff you chew.” That approach generally failed. People don’t expect riddles in their casual conversations, and no matter how clearly I laid out the clues, all I got in return was a puzzled expression and “Huh?”

  Losing your ability to speak is obviously a social nightmare. It’s so surreal that you feel like a ghost in a crowded room. And I mean that literally; it feels like an actual ghost experience, or at least how you imagine that might be. The loneliness was debilitating. Research shows that loneliness damages the body in much the same way as aging.1, 2 It sure felt that way. Every day felt like losing a fight.

  I learned that loneliness isn’t fixed by listening to other people talk. You can cure your loneliness only by doing the talking yourself and—most important—being heard. For the next three and a half years I experienced a total disconnect from normal life and a profound sense of aloneness, despite the love and support of family and friends. My quality of life was dipping below the point of being worth the effort.

  In the early months of my voice problems I had a more immediate problem than my loneliness. In addition to being a syndicated cartoonist for Dilbert, I was a highly paid professional speaker. And I had an event scheduled in a few weeks, the first since I’d lost my ability to talk. I couldn’t predict whether my voice would work for my canned speech in the same way I could sing or repeat a poem. Would my vocal cords slam shut on stage and stay that way? Would I stand in front of a thousand people and yammer incomprehensibly?

  I informed my client of the situation by e-mail and gave his organization a chance to cancel. They decided to forge ahead and take the risk. I agreed to take the chance too. Luckily for me, I don’t feel embarrassment the way normal people do, which I’ll discuss in an upcoming chapter. The prospect of humiliation in front of a thousand strangers, many of whom would likely be video recording the disaster, wasn’t as much of a showstopper as you might think. It was worth the risk to me because I needed to know what would happen with my voice in that context. I needed to find out the pattern. Would my voice work if I presented a mostly memorized routine in front of a thousand people? There was only one way to find out.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Day of the Talk

  I’d given a hundred similar talks. On some level, every speaking event was the same: Sign the contract. Book a flight. Show up. Make small talk with the organizers. Hit the stage. Make people laugh. Sign some autographs. Pose for pictures. Rush to a waiting car service. Ride to the airport. Fly home.

  This time the small talk wasn’t working. Backstage, minutes before I was introduced to a packed ballroom, the organizers tried to engage me in conversation. I did my best, but they couldn’t decipher much of what I was trying to say. I whispered and gestured and used my work-around sentences, trying to assure them that things would be better onstage. But honestly, I didn’t know that to be true. And I could see the panic in their eyes. The odds were high that I would walk onstage and my throat would snap shut on every third syllable.

  Experts say public speaking is one of the most terrifying things a person can do. That wasn’t generally the case for me. I was well trained, experienced, a natural ham, and my audiences were generally full of friendly Dilbert lovers. But I had never before stood backstage waiting for an introduction while wondering if I possessed the ability to speak.

  This was new.

  As the host launched into my introduction, I climbed the metal steps to the side stage. The sound technicians fiddled with the mixer and prepared to go hot on my microphone. The event organizers faded into the backstage darkness. The audience was restless with anticipation. My introduction seemed to last forever.

  I peeked out to see the audience, to get a feel for the room. These were my people: technical folks and office workers. I took a few deep breaths. The moderator used a joke I’d supplied for my introduction and the audience laughed. They were primed and ready.

  I fidgeted with my shirt to get it tucked in just right. I checked the microphone cord to make sure the excess was neatly hidden under my belt. The moderator raised his voice for effect and bellowed, “Please welcome the creator of Dilbert, Scott Adams!” My heart pounded so hard that I could feel it in my shoes. I walked into the blinding glare of the stage lights. The audience went wild. They loved Dilbert, and by extension they were happy to see me. I crossed the stage and shook hands with the host. We made eye contact and nodded. Everything moved in slow motion. I walked toward the ELMO—a digital video device that would display my comics on the big screens. I placed my materials on the table and took two steps to the side. I put my hands in front of me, fingertips together, as speakers do, while I absorbed the applause and converted it to positive energy. The energy felt good. I was jacked in to the audience, for better or worse.

  In an instant, and right on schedule, my heartbeat dropped to a normal state, just as it had a hundred times before in front of a hundred other crowds. My training was kicking in, and with it came my confidence. In my mind I owned the audience, and they would have it no other way. They had come to surrender, in a sense. All I had to do was show them I knew it. And to do that, I needed to be able to speak.

  I took two deep breaths and looked around. I smiled at the audience. I was happy to be there—genuinely happy. I was born for this. The stage always feels like home.

  I waited for the applause to stop. And when it did, I waited a little longer, as I had learned. When you stand in front of an audience, your sensation of time is distorted. That’s why inexperienced presenters speak too rapidly. I mentally adjusted my internal clock to match the audience’s sense of timing. I also wanted them to wait in silence for a beat or two, to engage their curiosity. I knew from experience that audience members often wonder what the creator of Dilbert will sound like. That day, I wondered the same thing.

  At this point in my story, you might have the following question: What kind of idiot puts himself in a position to be humiliated in front of a thousand people?

  It’s a fair question. The answer is a long one. It will take this entire book to answer it right. The short answer is that over the years I have cultivated a unique relationship with failure. I invite it. I survive it. I appreciate it. And then I mug the shit out of it.

  Failure always brings something valuable with it. I don’t let it leave until I extract that value. I have a long history of profiting from failure. My cartooning career, for example, is a direct result of failing to succeed in the corporate environment.

  I was looking for a pattern with my speech that day. I needed to know why I could speak normally in some situations and not in others. Why does context matter? Is it something about my
adrenaline level, or the tone of my voice, or the region of my brain that I access for memorization? If I could find the pattern, I thought it might reveal a solution to my voice problem. Would my voice be better than normal or worse than normal in front of an audience? I was about to find out.

  I opened my mouth and began to speak. My voice wasn’t good, but it worked, in a raspy sort of way. Most people probably thought I had a cold. I spoke for forty-five minutes, showing comics that had gotten me in trouble and telling amusing anecdotes. The audience ate it up.

  When I walked off the stage, I immediately lost my ability to speak. When the context changed from my memorized speech to normal conversation, my throat locked up.

  Damn, the problem was definitely in my brain.

  For the next three years I looked for patterns that would reveal a solution to my voice problems and free me from my ghostlike social existence. Over the course of this book, I’ll tell you how that search went, because embedded in that story is pretty much everything I know about grabbing failure by the throat and squeezing it until it coughs up a hairball of success.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Passion Is Bullshit

  You often hear advice from successful people that you should “follow your passion.” That sounds perfectly reasonable the first time you hear it. Passion will presumably give you high energy, high resistance to rejection, and high determination. Passionate people are more persuasive, too. Those are all good things, right?

  Here’s the counterargument: When I was a commercial loan officer for a large bank in San Francisco, my boss taught us that you should never make a loan to someone who is following his passion. For example, you don’t want to give money to a sports enthusiast who is starting a sports store to pursue his passion for all things sporty. That guy is a bad bet, passion and all. He’s in business for the wrong reason.

  My boss, who had been a commercial lender for over thirty years, said the best loan customer is one who has no passion whatsoever, just a desire to work hard at something that looks good on a spreadsheet. Maybe the loan customer wants to start a dry-cleaning store or invest in a fast-food franchise—boring stuff. That’s the person you bet on. You want the grinder, not the guy who loves his job.

  So who’s right? Is passion a useful tool for success, or is it just something that makes you irrational?

  My hypothesis is that passionate people are more likely to take big risks in the pursuit of unlikely goals, and so you would expect to see more failures and more huge successes among the passionate. Passionate people who fail don’t get a chance to offer their advice to the rest of us. But successful passionate people are writing books and answering interview questions about their secrets for success every day. Naturally those successful people want you to believe that success is a product of their awesomeness, but they also want to retain some humility. You can’t be humble and say, “I succeeded because I am far smarter than the average person.” But you can say your passion was a key to your success, because everyone can be passionate about something or other. Passion sounds more accessible. If you’re dumb, there’s not much you can do about it, but passion is something we think anyone can generate in the right circumstances. Passion feels very democratic. It is the people’s talent, available to all.

  It’s also mostly bullshit.

  It’s easy to be passionate about things that are working out, and that distorts our impression of the importance of passion. I’ve been involved in several dozen business ventures over the course of my life, and each one made me excited at the start. You might even call it passion. The ones that didn’t work out—and that would be most of them—slowly drained my passion as they failed. The few that worked became more exciting as they succeeded.

  For example, when I invested in a restaurant with an operating partner, my passion was sky-high. And on day one, when there was a line of customers down the block, I was even more passionate. In later years, as the business got pummeled, my passion evolved into frustration and annoyance. The passion disappeared.

  On the other hand, Dilbert started out as just one of many get-rich schemes I was willing to try. When it started to look as if it might be a success, my passion for cartooning increased because I realized it could be my golden ticket. In hindsight, it looks as if the projects I was most passionate about were also the ones that worked. But objectively, my passion level moved with my success. Success caused passion more than passion caused success.

  Passion can also be a simple marker for talent. We humans tend to enjoy doing things we are good at, while not enjoying things we suck at. We’re also fairly good at predicting what we might be good at before we try. I was passionate about tennis the first day I picked up a racket, and I’ve played all my life. But I also knew in an instant that it was the type of thing I could be good at, unlike basketball or football. So sometimes passion is simply a by-product of knowing you will be good at something.

  I hate selling, but I know that’s because I’m bad at it. If I were a sensational salesperson or had potential to be one, I’d probably feel passionate about sales. And people who observed my success would assume my passion was causing my success as opposed to being a mere indicator of talent.

  If you ask a billionaire the secret of his success, he might say it is passion, because that sounds like a sexy answer that is suitably humble. But after a few drinks I think he’d say his success was a combination of desire, luck, hard work, determination, brains, and appetite for risk.

  So forget about passion when you’re planning your path to success. In the coming chapters I’ll describe some methods for boosting personal energy that have worked for me. You already know that when your energy is right you perform better at everything you do, including school, work, sports, and even your personal life. Energy is good. Passion is bullshit.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Some of My Many Failures in Summary Form

  I’m delighted to admit that I’ve failed at more challenges than anyone I know. There’s a nonzero chance that reading this book will set you on the path of your own magnificent screwups and cavernous disappointments. You’re welcome! And if I forgot to mention it earlier, that’s exactly where you want to be: steeped to your eyebrows in failure. It’s a good place to be because failure is where success likes to hide in plain sight. Everything you want out of life is in that huge, bubbling vat of failure. The trick is to get the good stuff out.

  If success were easy, everyone would do it. It takes effort. That fact works to your advantage because it keeps lazy people out of the game. And don’t worry if you’re lazy too. Much of this book involves tricks for ramping up your energy without much effort. In fact, the process of simply reading this book might give you a little boost of optimism. I designed it to do just that. So you’re already moving in the right direction.

  I’m an optimist by nature, or perhaps by upbringing—it’s hard to know where one leaves off and the other begins—but whatever the cause, I’ve long seen failure as a tool, not an outcome. I believe that viewing the world in that way can be useful for you too.

  Nietzsche famously said, “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” It sounds clever, but it’s a loser philosophy. I don’t want my failures to simply make me stronger,* which I interpret as making me better able to survive future challenges. Becoming stronger is obviously a good thing, but it’s only barely optimistic. I do want my failures to make me stronger, of course, but I also want to become smarter, more talented, better networked, healthier, and more energized. If I find a cow turd on my front steps, I’m not satisfied knowing that I’ll be mentally prepared to find some future cow turd. I want to shovel that turd onto my garden and hope the cow returns every week so I never have to buy fertilizer again.* Failure is a resource that can be managed.

  Prior to launching Dilbert, and after, I failed at a long series of day jobs and entrepreneurial adventures. Here’s a quick listing of the worst ones. I’m probably forgetting a dozen or so. I include this section because s
uccessful people generally gloss over their most aromatic failures, and it leaves the impression that they have some magic you don’t. When you’re done reading this list, you won’t have that delusion about me, and that’s the point. Success is entirely accessible, even if you happen to be a huge screwup 95 percent of the time.

  My Favorite Failures:

  Velcro Rosin Bag Invention: In the seventies, tennis players sometimes used rosin bags to keep their racket hands less sweaty. In college I built a prototype of a rosin bag that attached to a Velcro strip on tennis shorts so it would always be available when needed. My lawyer told me it wasn’t patentworthy because it was simply a combination of two existing products. I approached some sporting-goods companies and got nothing but form-letter rejections. I dropped the idea. But in the process I learned a valuable lesson: Good ideas have no value because the world already has too many of them. The market rewards execution, not ideas. From that point on, I concentrated on ideas I could execute. I was already failing toward success, but I didn’t yet know it.

  My First Job Interview: It was my senior year at Hartwick College and I started interviewing for real-world jobs. One day Hartwick hosted a career day on campus. The only company that interested me was Xerox. They were looking for two field salespeople. At the time, Xerox seemed like a good company for the long run. I just needed to get my foot in the door with an entry-level sales job and work my way up. Several of my classmates were interviewing for the same two openings. I was familiar with their academic standings and I knew I had the best grades of the bunch. I figured my academic excellence would be the advantage I needed for a sales position. That is how ignorant I was.