by Adams, Scott
I tried the Botox treatments for a few months. The first shot worked well enough for me to say “I do” when I got married to Shelly, which was great, but it wore off in a few weeks. Subsequent shots were not nearly as effective. The problem is that no two shots were ever the same, in part because I never knew how much Botox was still in my system, and partly because the shot never hit exactly the same place twice. And the dose was always either ramping up or wearing off. It only hit the right dose level by accident for a week or so on the way up or down.
The bigger issue for me was that the Botox masked the impact of any other type of treatment I might want to experiment with. I made the decision to stop the Botox and give myself a chance to find a lasting fix.
With the Botox, I knew I could find a way to talk almost normally some of the time. Without it, I was pretty much shut off from the world of the living. I was taking a big swing at a ball I couldn’t even see.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Recognizing Your Talents and Knowing When to Quit
If you have world-class talent—for anything—you probably know it. In fact, your parents probably dragged you from place to place when you were young to develop your skill. But world-class talent is such an exception that I prefer ignoring it for this book. I’m going to focus on ordinary talents and combinations of ordinary talents that add up to something extraordinary. In the case of ordinary talent, how do you know which of your various skills can be combined to get something useful? It’s a vital question because you want to put your focus where it makes a real difference.
One helpful rule of thumb for knowing where you might have a little extra talent is to consider what you were obsessively doing before you were ten years old. There’s a strong connection between what interests you and what you’re good at. People are naturally drawn to the things they feel comfortable doing, and comfort is a marker for talent.
In my case, I was doodling and drawing obsessively from the time I could pick up a crayon. I never became a talented artist, but my high level of interest in drawing foreshadowed my career decades later. Granted, most kids enjoy art, and some enjoy it a lot more than others. But I was off the charts. I doodled all through my classes in school. I drew in the dirt with sticks. I drew in the snow. For me, drawing was more of a compulsion than a choice. Childhood compulsions aren’t a guarantee of future talent. But my unscientific observation is that people are born wired for certain preferences. Those preferences drive behavior, and that’s what can make a person willing to practice a skill. A study that got a lot of attention in the past few years involved the discovery that becoming an “expert” at just about anything requires ten thousand hours of disciplined practice.1 Author Malcolm Gladwell wrote about it in his book Outliers. Few people will put in that kind of practice to one skill. But early obsessions can predict which skills a kid might someday be good at.
Another clue to talent involves tolerance for risk. When I was in grade school I often drew humorously inappropriate comics involving my teachers and fellow students. I would show them to classmates and I enjoyed making them laugh, all the while knowing that getting caught by an authority figure meant a serious penalty. I was willing to take a significant personal risk for my so-called art, and this was in sharp contrast to my otherwise risk-averse lifestyle. People generally accept outsized risk only when they expect big payoffs. Drawing inappropriate comics made me happy. To me, it was worth the risk.
I owned a very used, very old motorcycle when I was a teen. I’d paid $150 for it from my earnings as an entrepreneurial mower of lawns, shoveler of show, and farmer’s incompetent assistant. The motorcycle was dangerous, of course, especially in the hands of a teen. I laid it down a few times on the local back roads. On a number of occasions I barely missed deer, angry dogs, and other motorists. One day I was barreling across a field and drove the front wheel into a woodchuck hole, thus taking flight and miraculously landing on nothing hard in a field littered with large rocks. I enjoyed having a motorcycle, but it wasn’t an obsession for me. And eventually I concluded that it wasn’t worth the risk. Clearly I was not destined to be a motorcycle daredevil or motocross star. I wasn’t willing to accept a high risk in return for the joy of riding. But when it came to comics, I eagerly accepted the risk of expulsion and great bodily harm that comes with insulting larger kids. My risk profile predicted my future.
When you hear stories about famous actors as kids, one of the patterns you notice is that before they were stars they were staging plays in their living rooms and backyards. That’s gutsy for a kid. A child who eagerly accepts the risk of embarrassment in front of a crowd—even a friendly crowd—probably has some talent for entertaining.
Consider the biographies of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. As young men, both took legal risks in the field of technology. Bill Gates famously found ways to hone his technical skills by stealing time on a mainframe.2 Jobs and Wozniak’s first product involved technology that allowed people to steal long-distance phone calls. Where there is a tolerance for risk, there is often talent.
Childhood obsessions and tolerance for risk are only rough guides to talent at best. As you grow and acquire more talents, your potential paths to success multiply quickly. That makes it extra hard to know which possibility among many would put you in a position of competitive advantage. Should you pursue a career that uses your knowledge of photography and software, or something that uses your public-speaking skills and your gift for writing? There’s no way to be completely sure which path will be most fruitful.
The smartest system for discerning your best path to success involves trying lots of different things—sampling, if you will. For entrepreneurial ventures it might mean quickly bailing out if things don’t come together quickly.
That approach might conflict with the advice you’ve heard all your life—that sticking with something, no matter the obstacles, is important to success. Indeed, most successful people had to chew through a wall at some point. Overcoming obstacles is normally an unavoidable part of the process. But you also need to know when to quit. Persistence is useful, but there’s no point in being an idiot about it.
My guideline for deciding when to quit is informed by a lifetime of trying dozens of business ideas, most of them failures. I’ve also carefully observed others struggling with the stay-or-quit decision. There have been times I stuck with bad ideas for far too long out of a misguided sense that persistence is a virtue. The pattern I noticed was this: Things that will someday work out well start out well. Things that will never work start out bad and stay that way. What you rarely see is a stillborn failure that transmogrifies into a stellar success. Small successes can grow into big ones, but failures rarely grow into successes.
To illustrate my point, consider the history of cell phones. Early cell phones had bad reception all the time. They dropped calls. They had few features. They were expensive. They didn’t fit in your pocket. Yet cell phones were successful, at least in terms of demand, on day one. Despite the many flaws of cell phones—flaws that lasted decades—demand started brisk and stayed strong. The poor quality of the product made no difference. Cell phones started as a small success and grew.
Fax machines followed a similar path. The early fax machines were slow and spectacularly unreliable. They would eat your original and only sometimes deliver a legible copy to the other machine. Still, fax machines had demand from the beginning that grew until the age of computers rendered them less necessary.
The first personal computers were slow, expensive, nonintuitive, and crash prone. And still the demand was explosive.
In each of these examples, the quality of the early products was a poor predictor of success. The predictor is that customers were clamoring for the bad versions of the product before the good versions were even invented. It’s as if a future success left bread crumbs that were visible in the present.
When Fox launched The Simpsons in 1989, it was a national phenomenon on day one. Everywhere I went, the topic of The Simpson
s came up: “Did you see it?” Interestingly, as much as The Simpsons is rebroadcast in syndication, you won’t often see that first season repeated. The reason, I assume based on clips I’ve seen, is that by today’s standards it would be judged to be embarrassingly bad. The original art looked amateurish and the writing was violent, sophomoric slapstick. Compared with today’s episodes, the first season of The Simpsons was an awful product. Again, the quality didn’t predict success. The better predictor is that The Simpsons was an immediate hit despite its surface quality. It had the x factor. In time it grew to be one of the most important, most creative, and best shows of all time.
My experience with Dilbert followed the same pattern. I submitted my original samples of Dilbert to several comic-syndication companies in 1988. United Media offered me a contract and successfully sold Dilbert into a few dozen newspapers at its launch in 1989. A year later, sales to newspapers stalled and United Media turned its attention to other comic properties. Over the next five years, I found a way to generate more interest in Dilbert by writing books and exploiting the Internet. The turning point for Dilbert came in 1993 after I started printing my e-mail address in the margins of the strip. It was the first time I could see unfiltered opinions about my work. Until then I’d relied on the opinions of friends and business associates, and that had limited value because that group of folks rarely offered criticism. But wow, the general public doesn’t hold back. They were savage about my art skills—no surprise—and that was just the tip of the hateberg. But I noticed a consistent theme that held for both the fans and the haters: They all preferred the comics in which Dilbert was in the office. So I changed the focus of the strip to the workplace, and that turned out to be the spark in the gasoline.
But the thing that predicted Dilbert’s success in year one is that it quickly gained a small but enthusiastic following. My best estimate, based on shaky anecdotal evidence, is that 98 percent of newspaper readers initially disliked Dilbert, but 2 percent thought it was one of the best comics in the paper despite all objective evidence to the contrary. In other words, it had the x factor on day one. And this brings me to a lesson I learned in Hollywood, or at least near Hollywood.
In the late nineties I spent some time in the Los Angeles area trying to get a Dilbert TV pilot off the ground. The first attempt, which failed miserably, involved live actors portraying the Dilbert characters. During that process I got to observe a test audience watching the pilot and registering their opinions in real time. Moving graphs appeared on monitors so we could see the ebb and flow of the audience’s enjoyment at each point in the show. I was chatting with the television executive in charge of the project and asking what the cutoff was for an acceptable test-audience response. The executive explained that for television shows, the best predictor is not the average response. Averages don’t mean much for entertainment products. What you’re looking for is an unusually strong reaction from a subset of the public, even if the majority hates it. The Dilbert pilot got an okay response from the test audience, but no one seemed enthusiastic. The project went no further. But during the process I learned enough about making a television show that the next attempt went far better. The animated Dilbert show ran for two half seasons on the now-defunct UPN and got decent ratings for that tiny network. When that show got canceled, for reasons I describe later in this book, I emerged with just enough new skills, knowledge, and contacts that my odds of someday getting a Dilbert movie made are far higher. I’ve been trying and failing to get a Dilbert movie made for about fifteen years. Every failure so far has been because of some freakish intersection of bad luck. But bad luck doesn’t have the option of being that consistent forever. I’ll get it done unless I die first.
Back to my point, the enthusiasm model, if I may call it that, is a bit like the x factor. It’s the elusive and hard-to-predict quality of a thing that makes some percentage of the public nuts about it. When the x factor is present, the public—or some subset of the public—picks up on it right away. For the excited few, the normal notions of what constitutes quality don’t apply. In time, the products that inspire excitement typically evolve to have quality too. Quality is one of the luxuries you can afford when the marketplace is spraying money in your direction and you have time to tinker.
Consider the iPhone. The first version was a mess, yet it was greeted with an almost feverish enthusiasm. That enthusiasm, and the enormous sales that followed, funded improvements until the product became superb.
One of the best ways to detect the x factor is to watch what customers do about your idea or product, not what they say. People tend to say what they think you want to hear or what they think will cause the least pain. What people do is far more honest. For example, with comics, a good test of potential is whether people stick the comic to the refrigerator, tweet it, e-mail it to friends, put it on a blog page, or do anything else active.
You might be tempted to think that sometimes an idea with no x factor and no enthusiastic fans can gain those qualities over time. I’m sure it’s happened, but I can’t think of an example in my life. It’s generally true that if no one is excited about your art/product/idea in the beginning, they never will be.
If the first commercial version of your work excites no one to action, it’s time to move on to something different. Don’t be fooled by the opinions of friends and family. They’re all liars.
If your work inspires some excitement and some action from customers, get ready to chew through some walls. You might have something worth fighting for.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Is Practice Your Thing?
One day a friend’s three-year-old was playing around on our tennis court* along with a bunch of teenagers. Some kids were shooting baskets at the hoop on one end. A few kids were firing tennis balls at one another, and others were slapping volleyballs around. But the three-year-old was intensely practicing the art of hitting a tennis ball. He would bounce it once, lock his eyes on it, and swing the racket. He hit the ball a lot more often than you’d expect for a three-year-old, but that wasn’t the interesting part. I watched for several minutes as he worked alone, ignoring the older kids around him. He’s an otherwise social kid, but this simple task of hitting a tennis ball had all of his focus. He hit it again and again and again.
Then it got stranger. I decided to give him an impromptu lesson on the proper way to swing a racket. Remember, he was three. He barely had language skills. I asked for the racket, saying I wanted to show him how to swing, and amazingly—for a three-year-old—he handed it over. He looked at me and absorbed every word I said. I demonstrated how to hold the racket and how to swing. He tried it, and with some coaching he duplicated my swing, more or less. He was fully coachable at the age of three. Some adults—maybe most—never have that capability. As I walked away, he went back to his solitary practice amid a foaming sea of teenagers. Again. Again. Again.
I know this kid well, and tennis is the fourth or fifth sport he’s picked up the same way. He watches how it’s done, on television or in person, and then he imitates and practices endlessly. I’ve never seen him get bored while practicing.
There’s no denying the importance of practice. The hard part is figuring out what to practice.
When I was a kid I spent countless bored hours in my bedroom on winter nights trying to spin a basketball on one finger. Eventually I mastered that skill, only to learn later that it has no economic value. In a similar vein, none of my past bosses has ever been impressed with my ability to juggle up to three objects for as long as fifteen seconds or to play Ping-Pong left-handed. I can also flip a pen in the air with one hand while swiping my other hand under it just as it takes off—which looks cooler than it sounds—then catch it cleanly after a full rotation. These and other skills have not served me well. It matters what you practice.
My observation is that some people are born with a natural impulse to practice things and some people find mindless repetition without immediate reward to be a form of torture.
Whichever camp you’re in, it probably won’t change. It’s naive to expect the average person to embrace endless practice in pursuit of long-term success. It makes more sense to craft a life plan for yourself that embraces your natural inclinations, assuming you’re not a cannibal. Most natural inclinations have some sort of economic value if you channel them right.
The first filter in deciding where to spend your time is an honest assessment of your ability to practice. If you’re not a natural “practicer,” don’t waste time pursuing a strategy that requires it. You know you won’t be a concert pianist or a point guard in the NBA. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. You’re not doomed to mediocrity. You simply need to pick a life strategy that rewards novelty seeking more than mindless repetition. For example, you might want to be an architect, designer, home builder, computer programmer, entrepreneur, Web site designer, or even doctor.
All of those professions require disciplined study, but every class will be different, and later on all of your projects will be different. Your skills will increase with experience, which is the more fun cousin of practice. Practice involves putting your consciousness in suspended animation. Practicing is not living. But when you build your skills through an ever-changing sequence of experiences, you’re alive.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Managing Your Odds for Success
The primary purpose of schools is to prepare kids for success in adulthood. That’s why it seems odd to me that schools don’t have required courses on the systems and practices of successful people. Success isn’t magic; it’s generally the product of picking a good system and following it until luck finds you. Unfortunately, schools barely have the resources to teach basic course work. Students are on their own to figure out the best systems for success.
