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

by Adams, Scott

  In practical terms, the reason my dog happily plays fetch three times a day is that she chose an illusion that works. I believe she imagines she can make me play fetch just by visualizing it. You too can sometimes get what you want by adopting a practical illusion. Reality is overrated and impossible to understand with any degree of certainty. What you do know for sure is that some ways of looking at the world work better than others. Pick the way that works, even if you don’t know why.

  The process of writing this book is a good example of what I’m talking about. Writing a book is hard work—far harder than most people imagine, and you probably imagine it to be plenty hard. The way I motivate myself to take on a task this large is by imagining that I have fascinating and useful things to say that will help people. The reality might be quite different. I can’t see the future, so I have the option of imagining it in whatever way gives me the greatest utility. I choose to imagine that the book will do well because that illusion is highly motivating. It increases my energy.

  The worst-case scenario is that I will spend a lot of time writing a book that no one will find useful or entertaining. It wouldn’t be the first time. But because of my imaginary future in which the book is enjoyed by millions, I’m able to find great satisfaction in writing it. No matter what reality delivers in the future, my imagined version of the future has great usefulness today.

  Free yourself from the shackles of an oppressive reality. What’s real to you is what you imagine and what you feel. If you manage your illusions wisely, you might get what you want, but you won’t necessarily understand why it worked.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  It’s Already Working

  You already passed the first filter for success. By reading this book you’ve established yourself as a seeker of knowledge. Seekers obviously find more stuff than the people who sit and wait. Your decision to read this book is confirmation that you are a person of action who has a desire to be more effective. I’m reinforcing that thought to help lock it in.

  You also get some automatic benefits by reading this book and in a sense joining a new group. Specifically, you’re on your way to being one of the people who have read this book. When you define yourself as a member of any group, you start to automatically identify with the other members and take on some of the characteristics of the group.1 The group of people who read books on how to succeed is an excellent group to be in. You’re the people most likely to succeed because you’re putting real thought and research into the mechanics of success.

  You might fairly ask if this is a trivial point. I suppose everyone who reads this book will be influenced in a different way, and there’s no way to accurately measure this sort of thing. But I think you’ve seen examples in your life in which a person changes dramatically upon becoming a member of a group or getting a promotion or anything that redefines a person.

  The most striking example of this effect happened to me. My cartooning skills improved dramatically within a week of United Media’s offering to syndicate Dilbert. The simple knowledge that I had become an official professional cartoonist had a profound effect on unlocking whatever talent I had.

  In my corporate career I often marveled at how people changed as soon as they got promoted from worker bees to management. I saw one of my coworkers transform from a hesitant and unimpressive personality to confidence and power within two months of his promotion. Obviously there was some acting involved, but we are designed to become in reality however we act. We fake it until it becomes real. Our core personality doesn’t change, but we quickly adopt the mannerisms and skills associated with our new status and position.

  So congratulations on being a person who studies the mechanics of success. It’s a bigger deal than you might realize.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  My Pinkie Goes Nuts

  By the early nineties, Dilbert was a modest success, but it was nowhere near the point where I was tempted to quit my day job at the phone company, Pacific Bell. I would wake at 4:00 A.M. to draw before my commute, then work all day in my cubicle prison and come home to draw all night. My time windows for drawing were always compressed, which put a lot of pressure on my drawing hand. The overuse took its toll, and my pinkie finger started to spasm whenever I touched pen to paper, making it nearly impossible to draw.

  I went to see my doctor in the Kaiser health-care system, and he said he might know another doctor in the system who was an expert in this very problem. By wonderful coincidence, one of the world’s most knowledgeable doctors in this specific condition worked for Kaiser, and his office was just down the road from my home.

  Pause for a moment to reflect on that. There were over six billion people in the world, and one of the most published experts in the field worked within walking distance of my home. Never assume you understand the odds of things.

  I met with the doctor and he diagnosed me in minutes. I had something called a focal dystonia, common to people who do repetitive tasks with their hands, primarily musicians, draftsmen, and that sort of job. It wasn’t carpal tunnel. This was different.

  “What’s the cure?” I asked.

  “Change jobs,” he said. “There’s no known treatment.”

  I walked out of the doctor’s office with my life demolished. My dream of being a cartoonist for the rest of my life was over unless I found a way to be the first person in the world to beat a focal dystonia.

  What were the odds of that?

  It took a few days for my baseline optimism to return. My optimism is like an old cat that likes to disappear for days, but I always expect it to return. And frankly, cumulatively the events in my life up to that point gave me a sensation of being exempt from the normal laws of chance, and that is probably the source of my optimism. If you need a more scientific-sounding explanation, perhaps I’m just bad at estimating the odds of things, or perhaps I have selective memory and forget the things that don’t work out. No matter how you explain the perception, it leaves room for hope, and hope has a lot of practical utility. I don’t need to know why my long shots seem to come in more often than my faulty brain expects; I just need to perceive—accurately or not—that it happens.

  Realistically, what were my odds of being the first person on earth to beat a focal dystonia? One in a million? One in ten million? I didn’t care. That one person was going to be me. Thanks to my odd life experiences, and odder genes, I’m wired to think things will work out well for me no matter how unlikely it might seem.

  At a follow-up visit, the doctor asked if I would be willing to try a few experimental treatments, joining some other human guinea pigs he was working with. I agreed. For weeks I tried various hand exercises, went to a physical therapist, tried meditation, galvanic skin-response feedback, self-hypnosis, and anything else that seemed like it made a grain of sense. Nothing worked, not even a little.

  Meanwhile I tried to draw Dilbert left-handed, which I could do with a lot of effort. I’m mildly ambidextrous, but drawing is a high level of difficulty for the nondominant hand. I could tell that drawing lefty wouldn’t be a long-term solution. My drawings were extra terrible for a few months during that period.

  I also tried strapping down my pinkie, but that had the odd effect of making the rest of my hand dysfunctional. And it hurt like crazy.

  I lost the ability to write simple notes using pen on paper, which was obviously inconvenient at my day job. Oddly, the pinkie spasms happened only during the specific motions involved in writing or drawing. Otherwise my hand was 100 percent normal. Weirder still, when I drew with my left hand, the pinkie on my right hand would spasm, so obviously the wiring in my brain was the problem, not the architecture of my hand. My experience was consistent with the doctor’s research. None of the people who have focal dystonias seem to have anything abnormal in the structure of their hands. It seems to be some sort of short circuit in the brain.

  At my day job, as I sat through endless boring meetings, I started practicing my drawing motion by touching my pen to p
aper and then pulling up before the spasm started. I tapped the page hundreds of times per meeting under the table on the notepad on my lap. My idea was to rewire my brain gradually, to relearn that I can touch pen to paper and not spasm. I was literally trying to hack my brain. My hypnosis training* suggested this might be possible.

  Over the next several weeks I noticed I could hold my pen to paper for a full second before feeling the onset of a pinkie spasm. Eventually it was two seconds, then five. One day, after I trained myself to hold pen to paper for several seconds without a spasm, my brain suddenly and unexpectedly rewired itself and removed the dystonia altogether. Apparently I broke the spasm cycle and reinforced the nonspasm association.

  And so I was the first person in the world to cure a focal dystonia, at least as far as I know. It’s entirely possible that I’m wrong about that, since I can’t know what everyone else is doing or what worked for them. Still, it was an unlikely result.

  I went back to drawing right-handed, paced myself, and didn’t have a problem again for years. My hand doctor said I’m part of the literature on this topic now, although my name is not mentioned.

  In 2004, after once again doing too much drawing in a compressed time, the dystonia returned. This time I tried a smarter work-around. I made an educated guess that somewhere in the world a company was probably making a computer tablet or screen on which I could draw my comic. My hypothesis was that drawing on a computer would feel different enough from pen on paper that the dystonia wouldn’t trigger, even though I would be drawing with a stylus just as I would with a pen.

  I did some Google searches and discovered that Wacom was making a special computer monitor for artists. I ordered it the same day. In a week it was up and running. As I’d hoped, drawing on the computer was different enough that the dystonia didn’t trigger. And through my not reinforcing the trigger and the spasm, the dystonia faded away. I’m sure it would come back if I tried drawing or writing on paper for a long time, but since that will never happen, it’s a nonissue in my life.

  By the way, drawing on the Wacom product cut my total workday in half. The focal dystonia was a case of extraordinary bad luck for a cartoonist. But when I got done beating the dystonia problem to death and rifling through its pockets, I came out the other end a far more efficient cartoonist. The quality of my drawing improved dramatically on the Wacom because it’s so easy to make small adjustments. On balance, I came out way ahead.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  My Speaking Career

  Here’s an example of how useful it is to have a smart friend. When I was a few years into my cartooning career, a Canadian woman called and asked if I would give a speech to an organization of petroleum engineers in Calgary. I said I didn’t do that sort of work, but she persisted, saying that the organization had asked for me specifically and that there would be a healthy payment involved. I continued to balk, because I had very little flexibility in my schedule. At that point I was still working my full-time job at Pacific Bell, and creating Dilbert before and after work, plus weekends. Traveling to Canada just wasn’t a practical option.

  The Canadian woman suggested that I give her a price for my services that would make it worthwhile for me. If my price was too high, at least she could take it back to her organization and say she’d tried. She made it sound as if I would be doing her a favor to come up with a price for something I didn’t want to do.

  But how does one come up with a price for giving a speech? I had no idea where to start. So I did what anyone in that situation would do: I sought out a friend who might have a template for this sort of thing.

  At the time, Dilbert was syndicated by an organization within United Media, a large licensing and syndication business headquartered in New York City. I figured correctly that someone in that hierarchy would have experience with professional speaking. I called a senior vice president who had once been a best-selling author and had decades of experience that made him far more qualified than I was for this sort of topic.

  I put the question to him: “What should I say is my price for speaking?” I told him that I would be perfectly happy to price myself out of the job. He said, “Ask for five thousand dollars. If they say no, you avoid a trip to Canada.” I laughed at his suggestion, knowing that I wasn’t worth that kind of money. But I had my plan. I practiced saying “five thousand dollars” until I thought I could say it without laughing. I called back my Canadian contact. That conversation went like this:

  Canadian: “Did you come up with a price?”

  Me: “Yes … five thousand dollars.”

  Canadian: “Okay, and we’ll also pay for your first-class travel and hotel.”

  I flew to Canada and gave a speech.

  As time went by and Dilbert became more well known, more speaking requests flowed in, often several per day. I raised my price to $10,000, and the requests kept coming. I tried $15,000, and the requests accelerated. By the time I got to $25,000, the speakers’ bureaus had started to see me as a source of bigger commissions and advised me to raise my price to $35,000, then $45,000. The largest offer I ever turned down, because of a scheduling conflict, was $100,000 to speak for an hour on any topic I wanted.

  All of this was possible because I had access to a smart friend who told me how to find the simple entry point into the speaking circuit. All I needed to do was overprice myself and see what happened. As simple as that sounds in retrospect, I doubt I would have taken that path on my own. I think I would have politely declined the invitation.

  It’s a cliché that who you know is helpful for success. What is less obvious is that you don’t need to know CEOs and billionaires. Sometimes you just need a friend who knows different things than you do. And you can always find one of those.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  My Voice Problem Gets a Name

  Six months after losing my voice, in 2005, I still didn’t know what the source of the problem was, and it was immensely frustrating. I don’t mind a fair fight, but this invisible, nameless problem was kicking my ass and I didn’t even know which direction to punch back. I needed a name for my condition. I figured if I knew its name that would lead me down the trail to a cure.

  But how could I find the name for a condition that was unfamiliar to two ear-nose-throat doctors, two voice specialists, a psychologist, a neurologist, and my general practitioner? There was only one creature smarter than all of those doctors put together: the Internet. (Yes, it’s a creature, okay?)

  I opened a Google search box and tried a variety of voice-related key words. I found nothing useful. My searches were too broad. And then something interesting happened. It’s a phenomenon that people in creative jobs experience often, but it might be unfamiliar to the rest of you. Suddenly, out of nowhere, two totally unrelated thoughts—separated by topic, time, and distance—came together in my head. For some reason I had a spontaneous memory of the problem with my drawing hand that I had experienced several years earlier. In that case I’d lost control of my pinkie. Now I was losing control of my voice. Could the two problems be related?

  I entered the search string “voice dystonia” because my hand problem was called a focal dystonia. Bingo. The search popped up a video of a patient who had something called spasmodic dysphonia, a condition in which the vocal cords clench involuntarily when making certain sounds. I played the video and recognized my exact voice pattern—broken words and clipped syllables—coming out of the patient in the video. Now I had its name: spasmodic dysphonia, which I discovered is often associated with other forms of dystonia. As I learned with further research, it’s common for someone who has one type of dystonia to get another. (Luckily it doesn’t tend to progress beyond that.)

  My secret assassin had a name, and now I knew it. It felt like a turning point.

  I printed out a description of spasmodic dysphonia and took it to my doctor. He referred me back to my ear-nose-throat doctor, who in turn referred me to a doctor I hadn’t yet seen in the Kaiser health-care system, who turn
ed out to be an expert in that exact condition. Within ten seconds of my opening my mouth in her office, the doctor confirmed the diagnosis. I had a classic case.

  “What’s the cure?” I whispered.

  “There is none,” she replied.

  But that isn’t what I heard. The optimist in me translated the gloomy news as “Scott, you will be the first person in the world to be cured of spasmodic dysphonia.” And I decided that after I cured myself, somehow, some way, I would spread the word to others. I wouldn’t be satisfied simply escaping from my prison of silence; I was planning to escape, free the other inmates, shoot the warden, and burn down the prison.

  Sometimes I get that way.

  It’s a surprisingly useful frame of mind.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Voice Solution That Didn’t Work

  The standard treatment for spasmodic dysphonia involves a doctor pushing a needle filled with botulinum toxin (better known by its trade name, Botox) through the front of the patient’s neck and hoping it finds the vocal-cord region on the back side of the throat. Doctors who give the shot use a mixture of experience, guessing, and electronics to find the right dose and the right place to put it. If all goes well, a patient’s voice can normalize after a few weeks and stay functional for several weeks until the Botox wears off. Then you repeat. It’s a creepy process because the needle is so thick you need an initial shot of local anesthetic just to keep you from going through the roof when the second needle goes in. It’s not a fun day.