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

by Adams, Scott

  I’ll defend the economic value of each of these skills in the remainder of this chapter.

  Public Speaking

  I took one public-speaking class in college. It helped a little. I took two more classes in public speaking during my corporate career. The company paid for both. Those classes helped a little too. Then one day my employer—the local phone company—announced it would pick up the tab for any employee who took the Dale Carnegie class on his or her own time. Anyone who wanted to learn more could attend a presentation in the big lecture room. I was curious and had heard good things about Dale Carnegie courses, so I decided to go and see what it was all about.

  The regional director for Dale Carnegie, whose name I inexplicably remember twenty years later—Tony Snow—gave the shortest and most persuasive sales pitch I have ever seen. I’ll condense it further here, but the essence was this: “Instead of describing the Dale Carnegie course myself, I’ve asked two of your fellow employees who took the course to tell you what they think.” He introduced the first guy and walked off. Tony Snow was done selling.

  My fellow employee bounded onto the stage as if he had just won the lottery. His energy and enthusiasm were infectious. He had no notes. He prowled the stage and owned it. We, the audience, locked onto him like a tail and we let him wag us. He was funny, expressive, engaging, and spontaneous. It was the best speech by a nonprofessional I had ever seen. I could tell he loved every second onstage, and yet he had the discipline to keep things brief.

  When he was done, Tony Snow thanked him and introduced the second speaker. The second guy was completely different in style from the first speaker but every bit as good. He was enjoying himself. He projected. He was clear and concise. He owned us.

  When he was done, Tony Snow thanked the audience and told us how we could get more information about the course. Tony Snow: magnificent bastard.

  I signed up that day.

  There are several flavors of Dale Carnegie courses. I don’t remember what my particular course was called, and it has probably changed names by now. The focus was on public speaking, but for reasons that took a long time for me to understand, Dale Carnegie didn’t classify it as a speaking course. It had a broader agenda.

  On day one our instructor explained the Dale Carnegie method he would be employing. Rule one was that no one would ever be criticized or corrected. Only positive reinforcement would be allowed, from the instructor or from the other students. I was immediately skeptical. How was I supposed to learn if I didn’t know what I was doing wrong?

  The next rule was that every person would speak to the rest of the class during each session, but we had to volunteer to go next. This rule was more important than you might think, because most of the people in the class were deathly afraid of public speaking. The instructor acknowledged that sometimes the class would need to sit quietly for long periods waiting for the next volunteer. And wait we did.

  On day one we sat like frightened squirrels, hoping someone would go first. For some reason, going first seemed extra bad, even though we all knew we would go eventually. The instructor stood in front of the frozen class and waited patiently, not judging, clearly having gone through this before.

  Eventually someone volunteered, and then another. Our speaking assignment was something simple. I think we simply had to say something about ourselves. For most people, including me, this was a relatively easy task. But for many in the class it was nearly impossible. One young lady who had been forced by her employer to take the class was so frightened that she literally couldn’t form words. In the cool, air-conditioned room, beads of sweat ran from her forehead down to her chin and dropped onto the carpet. The audience watched in shared pain as she battled her own demons and tried to form words. A few words came out, just barely, and she returned to her seat defeated, humiliated, broken.

  Then an interesting thing happened. I rank it as one of the most fascinating things I have ever witnessed. The instructor went to the front and looked at the broken student. The room was dead silent. I’ll always remember his words. He said, “Wow. That was brave.”

  My brain spun in my head. Twenty-some students had been thinking this woman had just crashed and burned in the most dramatically humiliating way. She had clearly thought the same thing. In four words, the instructor had completely reinterpreted the situation. Every one of us knew the instructor was right. We had just witnessed an extraordinary act of personal bravery, the likes of which one rarely sees. That was the takeaway. Period.

  I looked at the student’s face as she reacted to the instructor’s comment. She had been alone in her misery, fighting a losing fight. But somehow the instructor understood what was happening inside her and he respected it. I swear I saw a light come on in her eyes. She looked up from the floor. She had a reprieve. She was still in the fight.

  The next week she volunteered to speak again. (See how powerful this volunteering thing is? She owned the choice.) She didn’t do well, but she got through it without perspiring or locking up, and the instructor praised her for her progress.

  By the end of the course, some weeks later, every member of the class could have sold Tony Snow’s product. Every time we spoke, we got compliments from the instructor and sometimes other students. We got applause. It felt great. Today when I see a stage and a thousand people waiting to hear me speak, a little recording goes off in my head that says today is a good day. I’m the happiest person in the room. The audience only gets to listen, but I get to speak, to feel, to be fully alive. I will absorb their energy and turn it into something good. And when I’m done, there’s a 100 percent chance that people will say good things about me.

  There are several things to learn from that story. The most important is the transformative power of praise versus the corrosive impact of criticism. I’ve had a number of occasions since then to test the powers of praise, and I find it an amazing force, especially for adults. Children are accustomed to a continual stream of criticisms and praise, but adults can go weeks without a compliment while enduring criticism both at work and at home. Adults are starved for a kind word. When you understand the power of honest praise (as opposed to bullshitting, flattery, and sucking up), you realize that withholding it borders on immoral. If you see something that impresses you, a decent respect to humanity insists you voice your praise.

  “Wow. That was brave,” is the best and cleanest example I’ve seen in which looking at something in a different way changes everything. When the instructor switched our focus from the student’s poor speaking performance to her bravery, everything changed. Positivity is far more than a mental preference. It changes your brain, literally, and it changes the people around you. It’s the nearest thing we have to magic.

  Another thing I learned from my Dale Carnegie experience is that we don’t always have an accurate view of our own potential. I think most people who are frightened of public speaking can’t imagine they might feel different as a result of training. Don’t assume you know how much potential you have. Sometimes the only way to know what you can do is to test yourself.

  Psychology

  It’s hard to imagine any business or social activity that doesn’t require a basic understanding of how the human brain perceives the world. Almost any decision you make is in the context of managing what other people will think of you. We’re all in the business of selling some version of ourselves. Psychology is embedded in everything we do.

  For example, a real-estate salesperson might show you the worst house first, knowing it will make you appreciate the better home you see later, and it might make you reach deeper in your pockets. A car salesman knows that a high sticker price will make the eventual negotiated price look better than it would have otherwise. Salespeople know they can manipulate buyers by controlling what they compare.

  A building contractor knows that when customers see the house during the framing phase the rooms will look too small. Later, when the rooms are finished and furnished, they look larger. A smart builder w
arns the customers in advance that everything will look smaller in the framing phase. That way the customer doesn’t flip out. That’s psychology.

  Even an engineer who deals mostly with the material world needs to understand how his boss feels, how customers feel, and how users will perceive the product. You can’t get away from the need to make decisions based on psychology.

  The examples I gave are the common ones that most people figure out on their own. But given that the field of psychology is miles deep, most people know only the stuff that qualifies as common knowledge. How much more effective would you be if you had a greater understanding of psychology? Answer: a lot.

  Psychology was a huge factor in my eventual success with Dilbert. By the time United Media offered me a syndication contract for Dilbert, my confidence had taken some direct hits. The other syndication companies had turned me down flat. One editor had suggested that perhaps I could find an actual artist to do the drawing for me. Ouch. So when Sarah Gillespie, editor at United Media, called and offered a contract, I apologized for my poor drawing skills and suggested that perhaps she could pair me with someone who could do the artwork. Sarah, who evidently understood a lot about psychology, told me my drawing skill was fine; no improvement necessary. That triggered a highly unexpected change in my actual level of talent: It went up. Overnight my drawing skill went from about a three on a scale of one to ten to about a six. That’s still not good, but apparently it was good enough. The sudden improvement was entirely due to Sarah’s compliment of my artistic ability. I became a more confident artist—and a better one—because she changed what I thought of my own talent. It was a Wizard of Oz moment.

  When I look at the list of my personal failures and successes, one of the things that stand out is psychology. When I got the psychology right, either by accident or by cleverness, things worked out better. When I was blind to the psychology, things went badly.

  For example, after Dilbert became a hit, I briefly considered launching a second comic. I posted on Dilbert.com some early samples of what I hoped would be a comic about a young Elbonian boy who didn’t fit in. His name was Plop and he was the only unbearded Elbonian in the world, and that included the women and babies. On day one, the Plop comic was a lot better than the first Dilbert comics, but not nearly as good as Dilbert had become by that time. What I didn’t count on—my blind spot—was that my new comic would be compared with Dilbert, not with other new comics. Compared with Dilbert, it was flat and lacked an edge. Compared with all of the new comics that launched that same year from unknown cartoonists, it was fairly competitive. Most of my feedback by e-mail was of the “Keep your day job” variety, along with “It’s no Dilbert.” I wouldn’t have guessed that being a successful cartoonist would be a barrier to launching a new comic, but in my case it was. I could have saved a lot of time if I’d understood that in advance.

  Dilbert was the first syndicated comic that focused primarily on the workplace. At the time there was nothing to compare it with. That allowed me to get away with bad artwork and immature writing until I could improve my skills to the not-so-embarrassing level. Since the launch of Dilbert in 1989, dozens of cartoonists have tried to enter the workplace-comic space and gotten clobbered by unfavorable comparisons to a mature Dilbert. If I were to disguise my identity and launch a new workplace comic tomorrow, with all new characters, readers would compare it with Dilbert and it wouldn’t stand a chance.

  Over the past ten years or so I have been in a few dozen meetings on the topic of turning Dilbert into a feature film. I always get the question of how we could make a Dilbert movie different enough from the TV show The Office or the cult movie Office Space. The implication is that the quality of a Dilbert movie might be less important to its success than whatever the public reflexively compares it with. Quality is not an independent force in the universe; it depends on what you choose as your frame of reference.

  When my restaurant partner and I built our second restaurant, we decided to make it more upscale than the first so it wouldn’t cannibalize business, given that the two restaurants were only five miles apart. The upscale-decor strategy seemed like a perfectly good idea until I observed women walk in for lunch, look at the upscale decor, look at their own casual clothes, and proclaim to the hostess that they were underdressed. The self-assessed underdressed customer would turn and leave. I saw that scenario repeat itself over and over. None of the women who rejected themselves from the restaurant looked underdressed to me. The restaurant wasn’t that upscale. It was still a neighborhood restaurant in a suburban strip mall. But compared with other restaurants in the area it was a step up in design. It made people feel uncomfortable. To make matters worse, our food quality wasn’t up to the level people expected for a place with that type of decor. The restaurant’s appearance caused us to be compared with the very best of fine-dining restaurants. Our business model assumed people would prefer eating upscale comfort food in an unusually attractive setting. It was a bad idea. Customers were confused. Was the restaurant supposed to be casual or upscale? People compared our decor with casual restaurants and decided it was too fancy to be a casual eating experience. They compared our food with the top restaurants in San Francisco and decided it wasn’t sufficiently special. We failed to predict how customers would compare us.

  This book itself presents an especially challenging comparison problem. If I add too much humor to this book, reviewers and readers will compare it with other humor books and it will come up short because many of the chapters don’t lend themselves to jokes. If I leave out all humor, the book will be compared with self-help books, which would be misleading in its own way, but I’d probably come out better in that sort of comparison. In other words, to increase your perceived enjoyment of the book, I might leave out some humor that you would otherwise enjoy.

  When I talk of the comparison problem, I don’t mean a simple comparison of one thing with its competition. If the competition is simply better than you, your problem is more than customer perceptions. I’m talking about comparisons that common sense tells you should be irrelevant, such as comparing Dilbert the TV show to The Simpsons. They weren’t competitors in any real way. They didn’t run during the same time or exhaust the limited supply of the public’s discretionary time in any meaningful way. And yet the comparison to The Simpsons was a big obstacle to the show’s success because it contrasted a seasoned, big-budget show against a poorly funded upstart that was still trying to find its rhythm. Animated shows take longer to “tune” than live action because the writers for animation can’t know what worked in a particular show until it is fully animated and too late to change. Success in anything usually means doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t, and for animated TV shows that means you don’t hit your pace until about the third season. We got canceled after the second half season. I believe that if The Simpsons had never existed as the gold standard of animated prime-time TV shows, the Dilbert show would have had time to reach the next level.

  I’ve spent a lot of time describing just one psychological phenomenon: the tendency to make irrational comparisons. But how many psychological tips and tricks does a person really need to understand in order to be successful in life?

  My best guess is that there are a few hundred rules in psychology that you should have a passing familiarity with. I’ve been absorbing information in this field for decades, and I don’t feel that I am getting anywhere near the end of it. And just about everything I learn about human psychology ends up being helpful.

  I went to Wikipedia to get a quick list of the psychological and cognitive traps that humans often fall into. Psychology is an immense field and well beyond the scope of this book. My point is to impress upon you how many useful nuggets of information are at your disposal, and most of them are free. Every psychological trap on this list can be used to manipulate you. If there’s something on this list that you’re not familiar with, you’re vulnerable to deception. In some cases, you’re missing opportunities
to make your product and yourself more attractive to others.

  It’s a good idea to make psychology your lifelong study. Most of what you need to know as a regular citizen can be gleaned from the Internet.

  Below is Wikipedia’s list of cognitive biases.1 It looks like a lot to know, but you have your entire life to acquire the knowledge. Think of it as a system in which you learn a bit every year. That will be easier if you understand how important psychology is to everything you want to accomplish in life. On a scale of one to ten, the importance of understanding psychology is a solid ten.

  Some of the things on the list are common sense, and you might know them by other names. I include the comprehensive list just to give you a feel for how deep the field is. And I would go so far as to say that anything on the list that you don’t understand might cost you money in the future.

  You’ve heard the old saying that knowledge is power. But knowledge of psychology is the purest form of that power. No matter what you’re doing or how well you’re doing it, you can benefit from a deeper understanding of how the mind interprets its world using only the clues that somehow find a way into your brain through the holes in your skull.

  When I was in my twenties, I took a certification course in hypnosis. I thought it would be fascinating and maybe useful. I even considered making some money on the side as a hypnotist. I decided against it because I didn’t want to be in the business of selling my time. But the skills and insights I gleaned from studying hypnosis have improved my performance in just about everything I’ve done since then, from business to my personal life. It was time well spent.

  In hypnosis, you don’t spend a lot of time asking why one technique works and why another does not. Hypnosis is largely a trial-and-error process that uses your own experience plus that of hypnotists who have gone before to reduce the number of wrong moves. In that sense, hypnosis treats people as if they were machines that can be programmed. If you provide the right inputs, you get the outputs you want.