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

by Adams, Scott

  I also didn’t use affirmations when I invested in my first or second restaurant, and in the long run, neither of those worked out.

  I didn’t use affirmations when I started my vegetarian burrito company, and that never took off.

  I can’t tell you that I believe affirmations caused my few successes, or that not doing affirmations doomed other projects to failure. I can only tell you what I did and when. As I’ve explained, there are a number of perfectly reasonable explanations for the pattern. The one that stands out in my mind is that I really had no love for the work involved in the TV show, the Dilberito, or the restaurants. And I felt relief when each ended. The pattern I noticed is that the affirmations only worked when I had a 100 percent unambiguous desire for success. If I could have snapped my fingers and made the TV show, the Dilberito, and the restaurants successful, I would have done it. But I knew I wouldn’t enjoy ongoing management of any one of them. Did my mixed feelings matter? I’ll never know.

  I used affirmations only one more time. And in that case I had no mixed feelings. I wanted something as much as a person can want.

  “I, Scott, will speak perfectly.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Voice Update

  Months had passed since my last Botox shot to my vocal cords. My voice was so weak and unpredictable that it was a struggle to accomplish the simplest human interactions. I’m a natural optimist, but the reality was that spasmodic dysphonia had no cure and I was likely to go the rest of my life without ever again experiencing a conversation.

  I couldn’t speak on the phone except to people who knew my situation and were willing to keep conversations to short yes-or-no answers. I couldn’t order my own food at restaurants, couldn’t talk to people at social gatherings, couldn’t continue my speaking tour, and generally couldn’t enjoy life. I was often depressed, which I understand happens to most people with this condition. The loneliness was debilitating.

  Blogging kept me alive. When I wrote a blog post, I was communicating. People understood me, mostly, and left fascinating comments and responses. Blogging made me feel less lonely. It kept me sane, but only barely.

  I wasn’t looking forward to the next several decades of life as a nontalker. It felt like my personal hell. But I hadn’t given up. I didn’t know how to give up.

  Incurable health problems often attract quack cures. I tried most of the ones that weren’t dangerous. Drinking a certain brand of cough syrup didn’t work. Acupuncture didn’t work. Mineral supplements didn’t work. Stutter cures didn’t work. Three different approaches to voice therapy didn’t work. The Alexander Technique* didn’t work. Iron supplements didn’t work. Changing my diet didn’t work.

  I hadn’t spoken normally for over a year. It was slowly killing me.

  But what I did have was a two-part system. In order to identify the pattern that caused my voice to be its worst, I created a spreadsheet and recorded every factor I guessed might be at work, including diet, hours of sleep, exercise, practice talking, and even the number of Diet Cokes consumed. If I could find the pattern behind my worst voice days, I would know what I needed to change. But no pattern emerged.

  The second part of my system involved scouring the planet for any mention of the words “spasmodic dysphonia” in a medical context. Luckily, I was born in the right era, so the scouring was done by Google, using its Google Alerts function. I just plugged in the key words. Any mention of my condition anywhere on the Internet generated an e-mail message that went to my phone, which lives in my left-front pants pocket. I got several alerts per week, but none looked promising. Usually the articles on the Internet discussed the incurability of the condition, which was no surprise given that the medical consensus was that my condition was caused by a brain abnormality. Those are hard to fix.

  No one wants to feel lonely and depressed. But on the plus side, it totally alters your appetite for risk. If someone had suggested a plan for fixing my voice that had a 50 percent chance of killing me, I would have taken it in a heartbeat.

  I checked my phone often to see if any Google Alert e-mails had come in. And I waited. Homo sapiens have been around for 150,000 years. My best hope was that one of us, somewhere on earth, would figure out a cure for this problem within my lifetime, before the condition devoured what was left of my optimism. My odds were not good. But I was far from giving up. In fact, I was mad as hell, and for me, anger is sometimes enough. My attitude was always the same: Escape from my cell, free the other inmates, shoot the warden, and burn down the prison.

  In my car, every day, I repeated over and over, “I, Scott Adams, will speak perfectly.” I believed it would happen because I needed to believe it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Experts

  Many years ago, in my late twenties, I asked a doctor to look at a strange lump that had formed on my neck, about half the size of a Ping-Pong ball. I asked what it might be, and he said, “Well, two possibilities. It’s either cancer or … I don’t know what else it could be. I’ll schedule you for X-rays.”

  I have a vivid memory of sitting in the doctor’s waiting room with the other patients who were there for the same reason: maybe cancer. The doctor would enter the room with some X-rays in hand and call out a name, and if the news was good, he would announce it before the patient even rose from his chair. “Mr. Gonzales? Good news. Your X-rays are clean.” A few minutes later, “Mrs. Johnson, the X-rays look great. It’s all good.”

  Then it was my turn. “Mr. Adams? Please step into my office.”

  Yikes.

  The doctor showed me the X-rays and said that from the looks of it, it was probably some sort of neck cancer. I slumped in my chair.

  The doctor explained that it might be something harmless. He explained that sometimes a lump looks just like cancer on an X-ray but it turns out to be just “one of those things” and no big deal. He scheduled me for a biopsy to settle it once and for all.

  The appointment was set for the following week. For seven days I was like Schrödinger’s cat, maybe dead and maybe not. I lived alone in San Francisco and didn’t have much of a social-support structure. It was just me and my one-room apartment. My bed was also my couch. It was a long week.

  At the appointment, the nurse technician described the biopsy procedure. Time slowed to a crawl, and I could hear my own heartbeat. The technician explained that he would put a needle into the lump and draw out some fluid. If it was blood, I probably had cancer. If the fluid was clear, it was just “one of those things” and no big deal.

  The needle went in, and time slowed again as the technician sucked out the liquid just beyond my peripheral vision. Say something, you bastard! He knew the result in the first second. He made me wait until he was done.

  The needle was full of clear fluid. “I guess it was just one of those things,” he said. “Let me get the rest of it.”

  I left the hospital a few minutes later with a tiny bandage and a new outlook on life. Food tasted better for weeks. Annoying people were no longer annoying. Trees were fuzzy balls of wonder. Cold air was refreshing instead of painful. And I learned that sometimes experts get it wrong on the first try.

  Dealing with experts is always tricky. Are they honest? Are they competent? How often are they right? My observation and best guess is that experts are right about 98 percent of the time on the easy stuff but only right 50 percent of the time on anything that is unusually complicated, mysterious, or even new.

  Years later, when a psychologist offered me Valium to fix my voice problem, I recognized the situation as the type in which experts are wrong half of the time. That made it easy for me to say no to the Valium and keep searching for a less-druggy solution. When I made the decision, it felt like intuition, whatever that is. But I think it would be more accurate to say it was the result of pattern recognition plus optimism.

  If your gut feeling (intuition) disagrees with the experts, take that seriously. You might be experiencing some pattern recognition that you can�
�t yet verbalize.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Association Programming

  When I worked for Crocker National Bank, my coworkers and I had a good laugh at a summer intern who espoused a wacky theory about success being a function of the neighborhood you choose to live in. His plan was to get into the best apartment he could afford in an upscale neighborhood, no matter how many roommates that might require him to have, and let some sort of vague magic do the rest. He was willing to work hard, go to school, obey the law, and take all of the normal steps to success. But he figured that could only take him so far. The real kicker was his brilliant plan to live among rich people until he could become one by association.

  I recall cleverly mocking him to the delight of all who were within earshot. He seemed like such a rational guy in every other way. But this rich-by-association scheme was just plain stupid. Upon interrogation, I learned that he wasn’t suggesting he would network and make important contacts with his well-to-do neighbors. There was no defined mechanism to explain how proximity to rich people would make him successful. The best he could offer was his observation that life had patterns and this was one of them: You become like the people around you.

  A few years later I learned more than I wanted to know about the workings of Alcoholics Anonymous. My ex-girlfriend had a need for its services and I learned that it works better than most alternatives for people with drinking problems.1 One of Alcoholics Anonymous’s rules involves keeping away from people who are bad influences. That seems obvious when you think about it, given the power of peer pressure and that sort of thing. In this situation, whom you associate with makes a big difference. But this is a special case and quite different from the rich-by-association hypothesis. Still, there was enough similarity between the two cases that it began to register with me as a potential pattern.

  More recently, I saw a study that said hanging around with overweight people can cause you to gain weight.2 I would not have imagined that to be true. But I can imagine several mechanisms that would explain it. If each of your friends is fifty pounds overweight and you’re only sporting an extra ten, you probably don’t feel much pressure to change. And if your corpulent friends keep steering you toward fast-food joints when you’re together, that can hurt too. So it seems entirely plausible that hanging around with overweight people can influence your own waistline. Still, that’s very different from the rich-by-association theory, which has no obvious mechanism.

  After Dilbert launched, I continued working my day job at Pacific Bell for several years. Since then, my old boss, Mike Goodwin (who was also the guy who named Dilbert), wrote and published a book about his father’s experience in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. (Spoiler alert: It didn’t go well.) The book, Shobun, was his first attempt as a writer. It didn’t strike me as a huge coincidence that two cubicle rats from Pacific Bell both became published writers. The world is full of such ordinary coincidences.

  After I left Pacific Bell, I learned that another fellow who sat across the cubicle wall from me subsequently wrote a book about his stint in prison for murder. He’s out of jail now, and because I have a policy of being kind to people who strangle acquaintances with belts, I’d like to say he’s a fine fellow and his book is excellent. It’s You Got Nothing Coming: Notes from a Prison Fish, by Jimmy Lerner. What are the odds that three people in one little corner of Pacific Bell could all become published authors? I understand that coincidences are normally just that, but they seem special because we don’t get to see all of the things that don’t happen. Still, my pattern detector perked up. Here were two guys who worked with me and ended up following a similar model. Did their proximity to me matter in some way, perhaps by example or inspiration? Or would they have written books anyway? There’s no way to know.

  But there’s more to the story. Back up several years to my time as a supervisor in the technology wing of Crocker National Bank, before Dilbert was even an idea. One of the employees I managed came to me one day and announced his plan to write an article about a spreadsheet trick he had discovered. His plan was to submit it to a trade magazine and see if it would pay. He had no experience as a writer, but his idea was clever and worthy of sharing. I encouraged him to submit his work, and to my surprise, the magazine accepted it and paid him a hefty (at the time) fee of $1,500. It even rewrote most of the article, which it called editing and he called butchering. Still, he proved that a guy in a cubicle can become a published writer and make money at it. He went on to write several more articles that also got published. Did my association with him make it more likely I would later pursue a career in cartooning? I think it did. It made success outside my field seem accessible. It made it real.

  Humans are social animals. There are probably dozens of ways we absorb energy, inspiration, skills, and character traits from those around us. Sometimes we learn by example. Sometimes success appears more approachable and ordinary because we see normal people achieve it, and perhaps that encourages us to pursue schemes with higher payoffs. Sometimes the people around us give us information we need, or encouragement, or contacts, or even useful criticism. We can’t always know the mechanism by which others change our future actions, but it’s pretty clear it happens, and it’s important.

  Years ago I mocked an intern for thinking his choice of neighbors would influence his career. If he’s reading this, I’d like to offer my apology. I can easily see that where you live might influence the energy you put into your career. If you live near optimistic winners, those qualities are sure to rub off to some extent. And I advise you to consider this fact a primary tool for programming your moist-robot self. The programming interface is your location. To change yourself, part of the solution might involve spending more time with the people who represent the change you seek.

  For example, you’ll find it much easier to exercise in an environment where others are exercising. When you watch others exercise, it activates the exercise subroutine in your own brain. Likewise, it’s often easier to work when others are working in the same room, so long as they don’t bug you too much.

  Given our human impulse to pick up the habits and energy of others, you can use that knowledge to literally program your brain the way you want. Simply find the people who most represent what you would like to become and spend as much time with them as you can without trespassing, kidnapping, or stalking. Their good habits and good energy will rub off on you.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Happiness

  The only reasonable goal in life is maximizing your total lifetime experience of something called happiness. That might sound selfish, but it’s not. Only a sociopath or a hermit can find happiness through extreme selfishness. A normal person needs to treat others well in order to enjoy life. For the sake of argument, let’s assume you’re normal(ish).

  If you want to boost your happiness, it helps to understand what happiness is and how it works. You might think the science of happiness is fairly obvious, but it’s not. Pursuing happiness without understanding the mechanisms behind it is like planting a garden without knowing the basics of fertilization, pest control, watering, and frost. It’s easy to pop a seed in the ground, but it takes a deeper understanding of the gardening arts to grow something wonderful. Happiness, like gardening, only seems simple. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the tomato plant in my garden. I gave it water and sunlight. What more could it need?

  Let’s start by defining happiness and agreeing on what causes it. My definition of happiness is that it’s a feeling you get when your body chemistry is producing pleasant sensations in your mind. That definition is compatible with the science of happiness.1

  It’s tempting to imagine happiness as a state of mind caused by whatever is happening in your life. By that way of thinking, we’re largely victims of the cold, cold world that sometimes rewards our good work and sometimes punishes us for no reason. That’s a helpless worldview and it can blind you to a simple system for being happier.

  Science has d
one a good job in recent years of demonstrating that happiness isn’t as dependent on your circumstances as you might think. For example, amputees often return to whatever level of happiness they enjoyed before losing a limb.2 And you know from your own experience that some people seem to be happy no matter what is going on in their lives, while others can’t find happiness no matter how many things are going right. We’re all born with a limited range of happiness, and the circumstances of life can only jiggle us around within the range.

  The good news is that anyone who has experienced happiness probably has the capacity to spend more time at the top of his or her personal range and less time near the bottom. In my case, my baseline is on the fence between happy and unhappy, so staying near the top of my narrow range makes all the difference. To do that I treat myself like the moist robot I am and manipulate my body chemistry as needed. I also try to improve my situation and circumstances wherever I can, but I see that as 20 percent of the solution. The big part—the 80 percent of happiness—is nothing but a chemistry experiment. And it’s hugely helpful to think of it that way. You can’t always quickly fix whatever is wrong in your environment, and you can’t prevent negative thoughts from drifting into your head. But you can easily control your body chemistry through lifestyle, and that in turn will cause your thoughts to turn positive, while making the bumps in your path feel less important.

  Let’s get to the mechanics of manipulating your body chemistry. Obviously your doctor can give you a pill to change your mood. Antidepressants are big business. And you can change your chemistry by drinking alcohol or doing recreational drugs. The problem with each of those methods is that it comes with risks and side effects you’d rather avoid. I advocate a more natural approach.