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

by Adams, Scott

  As Jim tells the story, the cleansing process was a long and unpleasant one. But since he only needs to do it once every year or so, it’s worth the unpleasantness. Jim walked into the doctor’s office and proudly announced his readiness for the colonoscopy. The receptionist checked her calendar and said, “Your appointment is … tomorrow.”

  That’s the punch line, and it illustrates two interesting points about storytelling. First, you can probably sense that the story would be far funnier in person. You will discover that some types of humor work best in written form and others work best in person. Jim’s story is an in-person type. As you read it here, you probably managed little more than a smile, if that. Told in person, it gets a huge laugh every time.

  The second interesting point is that Jim’s story saves the “bad part” for your imagination. His second day of cleansing will obviously be unpleasant, but the joke ends with the simple knowledge that unpleasant times are ahead. In general, you want your punch line to inspire listeners to complete the story—including the bad part—in their own minds. That allows every person to imagine the ending in the way that is most amusing.

  Engineered Humor

  An engineered joke is one that includes an unlikely or surprising solution to a problem, much the way an engineer discovers a novel way to fix something that is broken.

  For example, in 2010 the world watched the drama of the Chilean coal miners who were trapped underground for days. A small hole from the surface to their tiny underground space was their only source of oxygen, food, and water. The world was emotionally connected to these miners, praying for their rescue.

  Meanwhile, stories started emerging that some of the miners had both wives and mistresses. My friend Laura heard the stories of the mistresses and quipped, “If I were one of those wives, I’d be shoveling dirt down that air hole.”

  That’s an engineering solution to a problem not normally solved by engineering. You can visualize the angry wife hearing the news of her husband’s mistress and shoveling dirt down the hole while cursing. It’s a funny image, at least for people who have a warped sense of humor. (I laughed for about a week.)

  I realize that my stereotypes about the type of humor that women enjoy versus men won’t hold for all people. For example, Laura created one of the best-engineered jokes I’ve heard. But I think you’ll find the gender generalization about humor to be about 80 percent true.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Affirmations

  In my book The Dilbert Future, I described my odd experience with something called affirmations. You’ll need to know the backstory about my experience with affirmations to have a context for understanding my unwavering optimism against long odds, including my voice problem.

  Affirmations are simply the practice of repeating to yourself what you want to achieve while imagining the outcome you want. You can write it, speak it, or just think it in sentence form. The typical form of an affirmation would be “I, Scott Adams, will become an astronaut.” The details of affirmations probably don’t matter much because the process is about improving your focus, not summoning magic.

  Apparently I failed badly at my first attempt to write about affirmations in The Dilbert Future. I had intended to make a point about the limits of human perception and how they might be holding us back. Based on the angry e-mail I got and the buzz on the Internet, apparently most people interpreted my point to mean I believe in magic. The skeptics of the world were apoplectic about what they perceived as my promotion of magical thinking to an irrational and gullible public.

  So let me start by clearly stating that I don’t believe in magic. But like most of you, I have experienced several events in my life that are indistinguishable from magic in the same way a caveman might perceive your phone as magic.* My point then and now is that you don’t need to know why something works to take advantage of it. A caveman could successfully use a phone, assuming someone taught him how, while continuing to believe its inner workings were based on magic. His faulty perceptions would have no impact on the usefulness of the phone, at least until it broke and he started praying to it.

  Affirmations might be a bit like the caveman and the phone. You can make your own judgment about whether my story that follows is a case of coincidence, selective memory, simple luck, hard work, greater focus, tuning my mind, hidden talent, or whatever you like. My perception (which I assume for the sake of consistency is flawed) is that affirmations are useful and I have no idea why.

  Let me simply tell you what happened when I tried affirmations, and you can judge for yourself. But let’s agree to rule out magic as one of the options.

  How It Started

  As I mentioned earlier, in my midtwenties I took classes to learn hypnosis, and I got to know some of the students outside of class. One of my classmates called me at home to say she had read a book about affirmations, tried it, and experienced some hugely unlikely results, at least according to her own estimate of the odds. She strongly recommended I try it. It would cost me nothing but time, which I had in abundance during those years, so I said I’d give it a try. My real agenda was to debunk it. I assumed it was complete bullshit. But it is my preference to be open-minded when I can manage it, so I went into it with the intention of giving it a fair try.

  My first affirmation was “I, Scott, will become rich.” The long version of the story involves two ridiculously lucky stock picks that came to me out of nowhere in separate flashes of something that felt like intuition. But I didn’t trust affirmations enough to invest heavily in stocks that came to my attention through some sort of irrational process. I invested nothing in the first stock because of a paperwork snafu, and it subsequently went to the moon. I bought and quickly sold the second stock for a respectable gain and then watched from the sidelines as it too zoomed up. Both stocks were big stories that year and among the top gainers out of a field of perhaps ten thousand possible stocks. I didn’t pick any other stocks during that time.

  My affirmation failed to make me rich, at least right away. But I wondered: What were the odds that I could pick two of the best stocks of the year, back to back, with zero research? Obviously it could be pure luck. A monkey could pick two winning stocks in a row at least some of the time. But it was enough of a tease to encourage me to try again with another affirmation.

  My second attempt involved a girl I perceived to be far out of my league. I’ll shortcut that story by saying a series of coincidences lined up to make the unlikely happen, albeit briefly. But again, this wasn’t proof that affirmations work. Maybe I’m just a good stock picker and far more handsome than my lying mirror is willing to admit. Whatever the real reason for my success, I got enough of a payoff to encourage me to keep trying affirmations just in case there was something to them.

  My next affirmation was more personal than I can describe here. But it happened to be the type of thing for which I could calculate the odds with some degree of certainty, similar to how you might know a lottery winner beat odds of ten million to one. In my case, I beat odds that I calculated to be somewhere in the ten-thousand-to-one range, and none of it required hard work, skill, or connections.

  I pause here to acknowledge the possibility that selective memory is behind my perceptions. Perhaps I tried lots of affirmations and only remember the ones that seemed to work. I can’t rule that out. Maybe I was a good stock picker, a total stud who didn’t realize it, and lucky like a lottery winner. Or perhaps I am terrible at estimating the odds of particular events happening. Any one of those explanations is possible.

  I tried affirmations again. This time it was in service of a bet. My coworker at the bank had signed up for a class to help raise her GMAT test scores. That’s the test you take to qualify for a master’s degree program in business, better known as an MBA. I had taken the test in my senior year of college and scored a mediocre seventy-seventh percentile, meaning 23 percent of the people who took the test did better. It wasn’t good enough to get into a top school, and so I had aband
oned that dream. But for some reason that I don’t even understand in hindsight, I bet my coworker that I could retake the test and beat her next score, whatever that might be. And I boldly (stupidly) proclaimed I would do it without a prep class. It was a dumb bet, given that she had scored in the eighty-sixth percentile on her first try and expected to do better because of the class.

  I took some practice tests at home and never scored much better than my original seventy-seventh percentile. I decided to put my affirmations to the test. I wanted to visualize a specific result, so I picked the ninety-fourth percentile because I thought that would be high enough to win the bet. I visualized opening the mail and seeing the “94” on my test-result form.

  On test day I felt I did no better than I had on my practice tests, but I kept up my affirmations on the ninety-fourth percentile and waited for the results in the mail. A few weeks later the results arrived. I opened the letter and looked in the box with my overall score. It said 94.

  Perhaps I’m just a good test taker and my bet with a coworker inspired me. And perhaps hitting the exact score of 94 was nothing but a coincidence. All I knew for sure is that if affirmations had any kind of value, I should set my sights higher. But for the next few years I focused on my day job and didn’t use affirmations because things seemed to be going generally well without any help. I graduated from the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley and assumed I was on my way to becoming a CEO of something important someday, and I didn’t think I needed any help to get there.

  That plan did not work out.

  The next time I used affirmations it was in pursuit of the rarest, most desirable job I have ever imagined. The affirmation went like this: “I, Scott Adams, will be a famous cartoonist.”

  That worked out better.*

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Timing Is Luck Too

  When you practice affirmations and you happen to succeed in the area of your focus, it feels like extraordinary luck. That’s how you perceive it, anyway. The Dilbert success story is engorged with lucky-sounding events. I’ll describe some of the luckiest parts of my story so you can get a sense for how deep luck sometimes needs to run before you find success.

  The biggest component of luck is timing. When the universe and I have been on a compatible schedule—entirely by chance—things have worked out swimmingly. When my timing has been off, no amount of hard work or talent has mattered. Dilbert was the best example of lucky timing you will ever see. It wasn’t a complete accident that luck found me; I put myself in a position where luck was more likely to happen. I was like a hunter who picks his forest location intelligently and waits in his blind for a buck to stroll by. The hunter still has to be lucky, but he manages his situation to increase his odds.

  I did something similar. I tried a lot of different ventures, stayed optimistic, put in the energy, prepared myself by learning as much as I could, and stayed in the game long enough for luck to find me. I hoped a buck would eventually walk by, and with Dilbert it did.

  Let me give you a snapshot of the luck (timing) that needed to happen for Dilbert to succeed.

  For starters, I had to be born in a time in which newspapers existed and comics mattered. And I had to have the right genetic makeup for the work and the right upbringing. And it helped a great deal that I was born in the United States.

  My first comics editor, Sarah Gillespie, immediately saw the potential in Dilbert when she looked over the samples I submitted to United Media. Sarah was married to an engineer who worked at IBM. When he dressed for work, he wore a short-sleeved white button-up shirt with pens in his pocket, just like Dilbert. When the other syndication companies saw Dilbert and didn’t relate to him, they sent me polite rejection letters. When Sarah saw Dilbert, she related to both the content and the writing, and she championed the strip against some heavy objections within her company. Had someone else been in Sarah’s job, I believe Dilbert would have been rejected. There were only a handful of people in the industry who were gatekeepers for new comics. What were the odds that one of them would be married to a real-life Dilbert?

  For the first few years after Dilbert’s launch, we had trouble getting any large metropolitan newspaper to pick it up. You need the first big paper to get on board before the others see it as a worthy risk.

  One day an employee at the Boston Globe, whose job included looking at syndication submissions and recommending new comics to senior management, went on a vacation with her husband. She was driving; he was bored. The Dilbert sales packet happened to be in the car. The husband, who was—as luck would have it—an engineer, picked it up and started laughing. His wife didn’t relate to Dilbert the same way, but she trusted her husband’s reaction and recommended it for inclusion in the Boston Globe. With that sale in the bag, many of the newspapers in the Northeast followed suit.

  But sales in the western United States were comatose. I later learned that the salesperson for that region wasn’t a fan of Dilbert. So when he went on sales calls he kept the Dilbert sales packet in his briefcase and showed other comics. Then the universe got involved: The salesman had a heart attack and died in a hotel room on the road. His replacement, John Matthews, identified Dilbert as the most sellable comic in United Media’s stable. And sell it he did, to every newspaper he visited. John is the best salesman I’ve ever seen. Had he not been available for the job, or had the original salesman lived, Dilbert might have been a small comic that ran in the Northeast for a few years before fading to obscurity.

  The good timing for Dilbert was relentless. In the mid-1990s the media was focusing on the disturbing trend of corporate downsizing, and Dilbert got pushed to the front of the conversation as the symbol of hapless office workers everywhere. Dilbert was on the covers of Time, People, Newsweek, Fortune, Inc., and more. I modified Dilbert to be more workplace focused than it had originally been, and it became a perfect match of a comic with an era.

  At about the same time, technology itself became a celebrity. The Internet exploded, the dot-com era happened, and all things technical were suddenly fascinating, even to the general public. In the eighties, Dilbert would have been nothing but another nerd comic. In the nineties, Dilbert symbolized the type of technology geniuses who were transforming life on planet Earth. Dilbert was unexpectedly and ironically “sexy.”

  I had even more luck when Berke Breathed retired his popular comic strip Bloom County and opened up hundreds of spaces in newspapers. Later, Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, retired and opened up even more space. It was unprecedented for cartoonists at the top of their game, and so young, to retire. And the timing coincided with the growing spotlight on Dilbert, making it the most obvious replacement choice. Newspapers snapped it up like candy.

  I mentioned my hand problem—the focal dystonia—in an earlier chapter. My career would have been over if not for the simultaneous development of Wacom’s Cintiq product, which allowed me to draw directly to the computer with no worries. What were the odds that the problem and the solution would happen at the same time? If my hand problem had happened five years earlier, I might have retired from cartooning.

  The success of Dilbert is mostly a story of luck. But I did make it easier for luck to find me, and I was thoroughly prepared when it did. Luck won’t give you a strategy or a system—you have to do that part yourself.

  I find it helpful to see the world as a slot machine that doesn’t ask you to put money in. All it asks is your time, focus, and energy to pull the handle over and over. A normal slot machine that requires money will bankrupt any player in the long run. But the machine that has rare yet certain payoffs, and asks for no money up front, is a guaranteed winner if you have what it takes to keep yanking until you get lucky. In that environment, you can fail 99 percent of the time, while knowing success is guaranteed. All you need to do is stay in the game long enough.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  A Few Times Affirmations Worked

  A few years into my car
tooning career, the Wall Street Journal asked me to write a guest editorial about the workplace. That article was titled “The Dilbert Principle,” and it got a great response from readers. An editor for Harper Business contacted me and asked if I would be willing to write a book around the same topic. I agreed and started writing. During that time, and usually while running on the treadmill at the gym, I repeated my new affirmation in my head: “I, Scott Adams, will be a number one best-selling author.”

  The Dilbert Principle started strong and within a few weeks hit number one on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list. In a matter of months my follow-up book, Dogbert’s Big Book of Business, joined it in the number-two slot. The success of the two books brought me a lot of attention and put a turbo boost on sales of Dilbert to newspapers. The Dilbert.com Web site was getting huge traffic by the standards of the day, and I had a booming speaking career on the side. The licensing business for Dilbert took off too. Suddenly it seemed that everything I touched was working.

  With so many good things happening I convinced myself that I could do just about anything that I set my mind to. I discounted the affirmations as being nothing more than a way to focus, and I figured I no longer needed that crutch.

  So I didn’t use affirmations when I worked as coexecutive producer of the animated Dilbert TV show that ran for two half seasons on the now-defunct UPN network. The first half season did well, but we lost our time slot the following season because of a simple communication problem that resulted in the show’s getting moved to a new time slot. Viewers had trouble finding the show and the ratings tanked. At the same time, the network decided to remake itself as a channel focusing on African American viewers. Dilbert was canceled after the second half season. I had mixed feelings about the show’s premature death because it was a lot of work, and not the fun kind.