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

by Adams, Scott

  My worldview is that every element of your personality, from your perseverance to your risk tolerance to your ambition to your intelligence, is a product of pure chance. You needed the genes you were born with and the exact experiences of your life to create the person you are with the opportunities you have. Every decision you make is a simple math product of those variables.

  What good is a book that discusses success if success is entirely luck? That’s a perfectly reasonable thing to wonder. And it matters because if you believe all success is based on luck, you’re not likely to try as hard as if you believe success comes from hard work. No matter what genes and circumstances you have, history tells us you still need to work hard to pull it off. Does a belief in pure luck work against you?

  It can, but it doesn’t need to.

  This book has just become part of your experience. If I did my job right, some parts of it will repeat in your head and be reinforced by your own observations. As with any experience, you can’t help but be changed by a book, if only a trivial amount. But everyone is different. One book can have a profound effect on one person and a tiny impact on another.

  In the coming year, assuming you’ve made it through this entire book, notice how many times you are reminded of something I wrote. Is there a time you don’t feel like exercising but you remember my trick of putting on your exercise clothes anyway? Do you steer clear of simple carbs for lunch because you’ve noticed they make you sleepy during the day? Are you looking for ways to turn your failures into something good?

  You wouldn’t buy a book if it didn’t have the potential to change you in some way, even if that change is just entertainment or an increase in your knowledge. Books change us automatically, just as any experience does. And if a book helps you see the world in a more useful way or amps up your energy level, it becomes part of the fabric of your personal luck.

  You’re a different person now than you were when you started this book, literally. Some of your cells have died and been replaced. Your body has matured, even if only by a few hours. And your brain has modified its internal structure based on its chemistry and all of your outside influences, including what you’ve read. If anything in this book sticks in your mind, it will probably get reinforced over time. You’re a new person now.

  You don’t need to do anything as a result of reading this book. You’ve already changed. And if I’ve done my job right, you’ve changed in a way that will someday make people say you were lucky.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CalendarTree Start-up

  At the same time I was creating Dilbert comics and writing this book, I was working with partners on a start-up called CalendarTree.com. It’s a Web site that helps you create a list of upcoming events and share a link so members of your team or group can add the events to their calendars with a few keystrokes. Our main selling point is that CalendarTree works across Google’s, Microsoft Outlook’s, and Apple’s calendars. If your family is juggling a lot of team/sport/activity/work schedules from different sources, CalendarTree can be a huge help.

  At the time of this writing, the beta version is being readied for launch. I have no idea how successful the company will be because luck will surely play a big role. But the project serves as a good framework for showcasing the difference between systems and goals.

  For starters, my life requires a lot of mental energy. Today I will write two comics, a blog post, and a chapter of this book. I will work through some complicated real-estate and trust issues, finish some legal work for the start-up, do some quality testing, and still make time for family. The key to my doing that many things is that I eat right, exercise daily, and have lots of control over my schedule, which allows me to match my tasks with my mental state. Later today, when I’m mentally spent, I’ll do a few hours of mindless drawing for the comics I already roughed out. So the first part of my system involves managing my mental and physical states so I can do more things with the right kind of energy.

  Another big part of my system involves generating lots of opportunities for luck to find me and taking the sort of risks that will allow me to come out ahead even if the project fails. CalendarTree fits that model perfectly. No matter how well the business actually does, I will come out of it with a detailed understanding of the start-up process, a new network of highly capable contacts, a wealth of new knowledge in half a dozen areas, and about seventy-five new jokes for Dilbert. No one can predict how a start-up will go after launch. The only thing I know for sure is that my partners and I plan to come out ahead. Every time we add new skills and broaden our network of contacts, our market value increases.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Voice Update 3

  The nurses rolled me into the operating room on a gurney. I was already drugged up with stress-reducing medicines that were working wonders. I couldn’t have been happier as the anesthesiologist asked me to count backward from a hundred. I made it to ninety-eight. It felt like dying happy.

  The recovery period was wretched. I choked on nearly everything I tried to swallow, and that situation lasted months. I could whisper because that doesn’t involve the vocal cords. But my vocal cords might have been on the moon as far as my brain was concerned. They weren’t talking to each other.

  Luckily, cartooning doesn’t require speaking. I was back to work in a few days, once the brain fog of surgery lifted. And I waited. Dr. Berke told me that nerves regenerate at a very predictable rate. In three and a half months, if the surgery worked, the nerves would make their first full connection between my brain and my vocal cords. And after that, it might take a year to speak in a truly normal way. And that was only if the surgery worked.

  I often tried to speak during those months, just to see what would happen. But indeed, my brain was no longer communicating with my vocal cords. It was an odd feeling. So I whispered when I was at home, wrote notes when I was in noisy environments, choked on everything that went down my throat, and waited. I also repeated my affirmations in my head, if for no other reason than to prop up my optimism: I, Scott Adams, will speak perfectly.

  Three and a half months after the surgery, almost to the day, Shelly stood in our living room and stared at me with disbelief. She said, “You just … talked.” And indeed I had. It wasn’t much of a voice. It was weak and breathy and I couldn’t sustain it beyond a few words at a time. But right on schedule, my brain and my vocal cords were becoming reacquainted. It wasn’t success. It was just a start. I had months to go before knowing if the surgery had worked in any meaningful way. And I was worlds away from fulfilling my affirmation of speaking “perfectly.” But it was something. It was a lot. I cried.

  In the months that followed, my voice steadily improved. The dropping of syllables that defines spasmodic dysphonia was 100 percent gone, but my voice was weak, uneven, and sometimes hoarse. Luckily, these were more fixable problems, given time and practice. And by that point I was quite knowledgeable about proper voice technique, thanks to my many hours of voice therapy while I was searching for a cure.

  Interestingly, my brain was no longer practiced in vocal fluency. Long after my vocal cords were functioning normally, I had trouble forming coherent sentences. Speaking fluently in full sentences was something I hadn’t done for nearly four years. But over time, my fluency returned too.

  Today, several years after the surgery, I can’t say I’ve achieved my affirmation of speaking “perfectly,” if such a thing even exists. I had a weak and nasally voice before I ever got spasmodic dysphonia, so after surgery that seemed like the realistic upper limit for my recovery. And for most of my life people couldn’t hear me over crowd noise because my tone seemed to blend exactly with the background. For me, getting back to normal meant getting back to a crappy voice. That would have felt like success.

  To my surprise, that’s not exactly what happened. Thanks largely to all of my voice training before the operation, and what Dr. Berke hypothesized might have been a “latent spasmodic dysphonia” all my life, I ended
up with a far more functional voice than ever before. I have no problem projecting in noisy environments, and since much of life is noisy, that is a big, big improvement.

  I still get a bit hoarse after exercise. And I’ll never have a radio-quality voice. So aesthetically my voice remains less than ideal. But functionally, my voice is indeed perfect. I have escaped from my prison cell of silence. And life has never been more enjoyable or more satisfying.

  But there’s one more thing I need to do, if you recall, or perhaps a few more things. I wasn’t planning a simple escape from my voice prison. I promised myself that if I escaped, I would free the other inmates, kill the warden, and burn down the prison. That was one of my big motivations for this book. I wrote it, in part, for some poor soul in the middle of nowhere who has lost his voice to spasmodic dysphonia, and with it all enjoyment of life. It’s also for anyone who has an unsolvable problem, healthwise or otherwise. If you think your odds of solving your problem are bad, don’t rule out the possibility that what is really happening is that you are bad at estimating odds.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  A Final Note About Affirmations

  I know from experience that readers of this book will be disproportionally interested in my stories about affirmations. I’m sure I will be proclaimed a witch or a moron or both. So let me answer those inevitable objections in advance.

  When I speak of affirmations these days, I try to say as clearly as possible that they appear to have a beneficial value. The reality is that if affirmations somehow steered the universe like magic, science probably would have discovered that force by now. I don’t foresee the day when affirmations get scientific backing, at least not in the sense of testing for the existence of magic or psychic powers.

  I think we can all agree that affirmations are a phenomenon of the mind and belong in the domain of psychology and perception. Viewed in that light, one can imagine that doing affirmations might have a predictable impact on the brain, perhaps in terms of focus or motivation or any number of chemical reactions. Those reactions would, one assumes, be either beneficial or harmful to the pursuit of success. So in one sense, affirmations are no more special than any form of positive thinking, prayers, visualization, chanting, or the like.

  That said, I can tell you that in my case affirmations appear to have more power than one might expect from positive thinking. The illusion is that the world itself is changing to satisfy the affirmations. Allow me to offer some explanations of why affirmations appear to be influencing more than just the person doing them.

  The most obvious explanation for the apparent power of affirmations is selective memory. There is plenty of science to support the idea that we humans tend to remember the things we want to remember and forget the things we’d rather forget. With affirmations, one might expect to remember the coincidental good luck and forget the bad luck. The result of that selective remembering gives us the incorrect impression that affirmations work more often than you might reasonably expect from chance alone.

  Another perfectly good explanation of the apparent power of affirmations is that people who report success with it are liars, with no more credibility than the people who report being abducted by aliens. In my case, I know I didn’t lie about my experiences, but you have no way to be sure I’m telling the truth.

  False memory is another possible explanation for why affirmations appear to work. Perhaps we remember victories that weren’t so amazing in reality, or we remember normal events as being huge coincidences. False memories are so common that you’ve certainly experienced them. For example, you might remember a childhood event in some detail and learn later that it happened to your sibling, not you. Humans form false memories quite easily, so that has to be one potential explanation of why affirmations appear to work.

  Another possible reason that affirmations appear to work is that optimists tend to notice opportunities that pessimists miss.1 A person who diligently writes affirmations day after day is the very definition of an optimist, even if only by actions. Any form of positive thinking, prayer, or the like, would presumably put a person in a more optimistic mind-set. And because optimists have been shown in studies to notice more opportunities than pessimists, the result can look like luck.

  Studies show that you need not be a natural-born optimist to get the benefits of better perception.2 You can train yourself to act like an optimist—and writing affirmations is probably good training—so that you get the same benefits as natural optimists when it comes to noticing opportunities.

  Whether you are a born optimist or you become one through affirmations, prayer, or positive thinking, you end up with several advantages that make it easier for luck to find you. Optimists notice more opportunities, have more energy because of their imagined future successes, and take more risks. Optimists make themselves an easy target for luck to find them.

  Another explanation for the apparent power of affirmations might be that we have the causation wrong. Perhaps only the people who know, deep down, that they have the right stuff to succeed will even bother doing affirmations. In my case it means that somewhere in my mind, before I had written my first book, my subconscious somehow knew I had the talent to write a proper book despite having no relevant writing experience or training. That explanation sounds reasonable to me, but it still means affirmations are useful, just in a different way than you might imagine. Under this explanation of the power of affirmations, they act as a sort of message from your subconscious to your rational mind telling you that you have the right stuff, even if your common sense argues otherwise. This would be useful for people who have real talent but don’t believe in it; surely there are a lot of people in that camp.

  Another possible explanation for the apparent power of affirmations is that our tiny human brains have not evolved to the point where they can give us an accurate impression of our reality. Instead, our little brains create illusions that have survival benefits and some sort of internal consistency, nothing more.

  We know the brain creates illusions because there are so many competing religions in the world. Assuming you picked the right religion, all of those other poor souls are living in a deep illusion. Your neighbor might think he remembers his previous life, while you think you saw God during your heart bypass surgery. You can’t both be right. But you could both be wrong, and both of you might be experiencing delusions of reality that somehow don’t kill you.

  The point is that affirmations might have a perfectly sensible scientific explanation that involves anything from multiple universes to quantum strangeness or anything else that baffles our tiny brains and causes us to invent delusions to compensate for our feelings of uncertainty. To put it in simpler terms, affirmations might work for perfectly logical reasons our brains aren’t equipped to understand.

  If you’ve read my blog, you know I’m fascinated by the possibility that we humans are nothing but holograms living in a computer simulation. It sounds ludicrous when you first hear the idea, but the math is oddly compelling. Consider what we humans would do a thousand years from now if we knew an asteroid was heading our way and there was no escape. I think we’d upload our personalities to computers, perhaps with our DNA information as part of the code, and launch the computers into space so our culture, memories, and minds could live forever. Now for the math: If you pick any point in time, there will be infinitely more time transpiring after that time than before, assuming the big bang marks the start of time. So if you believe humans will someday be on the brink of extinction for any reason, there is a vastly greater chance we are already the simulations left behind.

  Some have argued that the universe is too young for the hologram scenario to have played out. But if we are holograms, the age of the universe as we perceive it is nothing but a variable from the programmer. The real age could be trillions of years.

  It’s a fun thought experiment, but I know you don’t buy into it. I only include it for completeness. If we are indeed nothing but computer-generated e
ntities, affirmations could be nothing more than an unremarkable bit of programming code.

  I’ll reiterate that I have no objective information to suggest that affirmations worked for me or that they might work for you. And please don’t e-mail me to ask for the detailed instructions on affirmations so you can do it “right.” I’ve gotten hundreds of those e-mails already, and I always say some version of “I dunno.” But for what it is worth, I don’t think affirmations are sensitive to exactly how many times you write them, whether you use a keyboard or a pen, whether you throw away the paper you wrote on, how many weeks you do them for, or any other detail. I can’t imagine the process of affirmations—if it works at all—is sensitive to the little details. I think a deep and consistent focus on what you want is all that is required. But that’s just my gut feeling.

  You might see an inconsistency between affirmations and the theme of this book, specifically the parts where I say goals are for losers and systems are for winners. Affirmations look a lot like focusing on goals. But I would argue that doing affirmations is a system that helps you focus, boosts your optimism and energy, and perhaps validates the talent and drive that your subconscious always knew you had. If you plan to try affirmations, I recommend keeping your objectives broad enough to allow some luck. It’s probably better to affirm future wealth than to try to win a specific lottery.

  Humans will always think in terms of goals. Our brains are wired that way. But goals make sense only if you also have a system that moves you in the right direction.

  So what do I believe about affirmations?

  I believe I tried affirmations on a number of occasions and the results that I remember—or think I remember—appear to be borderline miraculous. To me, affirmations are an ongoing mystery. All I know for sure is that I’ve never heard of anyone being harmed, emotionally or otherwise, by affirmations. I tried affirmations out of curiosity, and because they were free. I didn’t need a better reason.