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

by Adams, Scott

  On the plus side, I no longer felt the need to give my employer my best efforts, or even to occasionally work long hours for no extra pay. It was an unwanted freedom, but freedom nonetheless. I took some time to work on my tennis game and I started thinking seriously about a new direction, ideally one that didn’t require me to have a boss.

  I decided to revive a long-lost interest and try my hand at cartooning. But it was an unlikely dream, given my complete lack of artistic talent and the rarity of success stories in that business. So I decided to try something called affirmations, which I will describe in more detail later in the book. I bought some art supplies, practiced drawing every morning before work, and wrote my affirmation fifteen times a day: “I, Scott Adams, will be a famous cartoonist.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Deciding Versus Wanting

  One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard goes something like this: If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it. It sounds trivial and obvious, but if you unpack the idea it has extraordinary power.

  I know a lot of people who wish they were rich or famous or otherwise fabulous. They wish they had yachts and servants and castles and they wish they could travel the world in their own private jets. But these are mere wishes. Few of these wishful people have decided to have any of the things they wish for. It’s a key difference, for once you decide, you take action. Wishing starts in the mind and generally stays there.

  When you decide to be successful in a big way, it means you acknowledge the price and you’re willing to pay it. That price might be sacrificing your personal life to get good grades in school, pursuing a college major that is deadly boring but lucrative, putting off having kids, missing time with your family, or taking business risks that put you in jeopardy for embarrassment, divorce, or bankruptcy. Successful people don’t wish for success; they decide to pursue it. And to pursue it effectively, they need a system. Success always has a price, but the reality is that the price is negotiable. If you pick the right system, the price will be a lot nearer what you’re willing to pay.

  I can’t change the fact that success requires a lot of work. But if you learn to appreciate the power of systems over goals, it might lower the price of success just enough to make it worth a go.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Selfishness Illusion

  During your journey to success you will find yourself continually trying to balance your own needs with the needs of others. You will always wonder if you are being too selfish or not selfish enough. I’m glad I can be here to help you sort it all out.

  For starters, when it comes to the topic of generosity, there are three kinds of people in the world:

  Selfish

  Stupid

  Burden on others

  That’s the entire list. Your best option is to be selfish, because being stupid or a burden on society won’t help anyone. Society hopes you will handle your selfishness with some grace and compassion. If you do selfishness right, you automatically become a net benefit to society. Successful people generally don’t burden the world. Corporate raiders, overpaid CEOs, and tyrannical dictators are the exceptions. Most successful people give more than they personally consume, in the form of taxes, charity work, job creation, and so on. My best estimate is that I will personally consume about 10 percent of the total wealth I create over my career. The rest goes to taxes, future generations, start-up investments, charity, and stimulating the economy.

  As a future or current rich person, you might pay far more than your share of taxes because of your selfish pursuit of income. Selfish successful people don’t cause worry and stress for those who care about them. As a selfish successful person, you can be a role model for others. Selfish successful people can be fun company if they’ve squirreled away all they need and have no complaints to voice.

  By “selfishness” I don’t mean the kind where you grab the last doughnut so your coworker doesn’t get it. That wouldn’t be enlightened selfishness because that sort of pettiness can bite you in the ass later. And it might rob you of some energy if you feel guilty about it or you get caught.

  The most important form of selfishness involves spending time on your fitness, eating right, pursuing your career, and still spending quality time with your family and friends. If you neglect your health or your career, you slip into the second category—stupid—which is a short slide to becoming a burden on society.

  I blame society for the sad state of adult fitness in the Western world. We’re raised to believe that giving of ourselves is noble and good. If you’re religious, you might have twice as much pressure to be unselfish. All our lives we are told it’s better to give than to receive. We’re programmed for unselfish behavior by society, our parents, and even our genes to some extent. The problem is that our obsession with generosity causes people to think in the short term. We skip exercise to spend an extra hour helping at home. We buy fast food to save time to help a coworker with a problem. At every turn, we cheat our own future to appear generous today.

  So how can you make the right long-term choices for yourself, thus being a benefit to others in the long run, without looking like a selfish turd in your daily choices? There’s no instant cure, but a step in the right direction involves the power of permission. I’m giving you permission to take care of yourself first, so you can do a better job of being generous in the long run.

  What?

  You might be wondering how a cartoonist’s permission to be selfish can help in any way. The surprising answer is that it can, in my opinion. If you’ve read this far, we have a relationship of sorts. It’s an author-reader relationship, but that’s good enough. We humans are wired to be easily influenced by the people who are in relationships with us, no matter what those relationships are. Sometimes we call that influence peer pressure. Sometimes it’s called modeling or imitating. Sometimes it’s learning by example. And most of the time it’s just something we do automatically, without thinking.

  Luckily most of us have filters that prevent us from being influenced in the most obviously damaging ways. If I were to encourage you to buy a rifle with a high-powered scope and wait on a bridge for further instructions, you probably wouldn’t do that. Influence works best when the person being influenced has no objection to the suggested change. Often all one needs is some form of permission to initiate a change, and it doesn’t always matter what form the permission is in, or if it even makes sense. I’m sure you already want to be fit and successful and happy. You already want to skip some of your chores at home or at work to take care of your own needs. I’m simply your cartoonist friend telling you that generous people take care of their own needs first. In fact, doing so is a moral necessity. The world needs you at your best.

  I should pause here for my more literal readers and explain that being selfish doesn’t mean you should let a runaway baby carriage roll into traffic if you think stopping it will make you ten seconds late for work. Humans are so emotionally and societally connected with one another that often the best thing we can do for ourselves is to help others. I’ll trust you to recognize those situations. Being selfish doesn’t mean being a sociopath. It just means you take the long view of things.

  One of the more interesting surprises for me when I started making more money than I would ever spend is that it automatically changed my priorities. I could afford any car I wanted, but suddenly I didn’t care so much about my possessions beyond the utility they provided. Once all of my personal needs were met, my thoughts automatically turned to how I could make the world a better place. I didn’t plan the transformation. It wasn’t something I thought about and decided to do. It just happened on its own. Apparently humans are wired to take care of their own needs first, then family, tribe, country, and the world, roughly in that order.

  I’m sure there are plenty of selfish turds who make billions and spend it all on helicopters and mansions with never a thought given to the well-being of others. I meet a lot of super successful people in my line
of work, especially living in the San Francisco Bay Area, and my observation is that it’s rare to find a selfish successful person. I assume some or even most successful people started out selfishly, but success changes you. It’s not a coincidence that Brad Pitt is helping to build homes after the Hurricane Katrina disaster or that Bill Gates is one of the most important philanthropists of all time. Success does that.

  The healthiest way to look at selfishness is that it’s a necessary strategy when you’re struggling. In hard times, or even presuccess times, society and at least one cartoonist want you to take care of yourself first. If you pursue your selfish objectives, and you do it well, someday your focus will turn outward. It’s an extraordinary feeling. I hope you can experience it.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Energy Metric

  We humans want many things: good health, financial freedom, accomplishment, a great social life, love, sex, recreation, travel, family, career, and more. The problem with all of this wanting is that the time you spend chasing one of those desires is time you can’t spend chasing any of the others. So how do you organize your limited supply of time to get the best result?

  The way I approach the problem of multiple priorities is by focusing on just one main metric: my energy. I make choices that maximize my personal energy because that makes it easier to manage all of the other priorities.

  Maximizing my personal energy means eating right, exercising, avoiding unnecessary stress, getting enough sleep, and all of the obvious steps. But it also means having something in my life that makes me excited to wake up. When I get my personal energy right, the quality of my work is better, and I can complete it faster. That keeps my career on track. And when all of that is working, and I feel relaxed and energetic, my personal life is better too.

  You might be familiar with a television show that was called The Dog Whisperer. On the show, Cesar Millan, a dog-training expert, helped people get their seemingly insane dogs under control. Cesar’s main trick involved training the humans to control their own emotional states, because dogs can pick up crazy vibes from their owners. When the owners learned to control themselves, the dogs calmed down too. I think this same method applies to humans interacting with other humans. You’ve seen for yourself that when a sad person enters a room, the mood in the room drops. And when you talk to a cheerful person who is full of energy, you automatically feel a boost. I’m suggesting that by becoming a person with good energy, you lift the people around you. That positive change will improve your social life, your love life, your family life, and your career.

  When I talk about increasing your personal energy, I don’t mean the frenetic, caffeine-fueled, bounce-off-the-walls type of energy. I’m talking about a calm, focused energy. To others it will simply appear that you are in a good mood. And you will be.

  Before I became a cartoonist, I worked in a number of awful corporate jobs. But I still enjoyed going to work, partly because I exercised most evenings and usually woke up feeling good, and partly because I always had one or two side projects going on that had the potential to set me free. Cartooning was just one of a dozen entrepreneurial ideas I tried out during my corporate days. For years, the prospect of starting “my own thing” and leaving my cubicle behind gave me an enormous amount of energy.

  The main reason I blog is because it energizes me. I could rationalize my blogging by telling you it increases traffic on Dilbert.com by 10 percent or that it keeps my mind sharp or that I think the world is a better place when there are more ideas in it. But the main truth is that blogging charges me up. It gets me going. I don’t need another reason.

  This book is another example of something that gets my energy up. I like to think that someone might read this collection of ideas and find a few thoughts that help. That possibility is tremendously motivating for me. So while writing takes me away from my friends and family for a bit, it makes me a better person when I’m with them. I’m happier and more satisfied with my life. The energy metric helps make my choices easier.

  “Energy” is a simple word that captures a mind-boggling array of complicated happenings. For our purposes I’ll define your personal energy as anything that gives you a positive lift, either mentally or physically. Like art, you know it when you see it. Examples will help.

  For me, shopping is an energy killer. The moment I walk into a busy store, I feel the energy drain from my body. The exhaustion starts as a mental thing, but within minutes I feel as if my body had been through a marathon. Shopping is simply exhausting for me.

  Your situation might be different. For some people, shopping is a high. It boosts energy. So using my example, a person like me should seek to minimize shopping (and I do), while a person who gets a buzz from it should indulge, so long as it doesn’t take too much away from other priorities in life.

  Managing your personal energy is like managing budgets in a company. In business, every financial decision in one department is connected to others. If the research and development group cuts spending today, eventually that decision will ripple through the organization and reduce profits in some future year. Similarly, when you manage your personal energy, it’s not enough to maximize it in the short run or in one defined area. Ideally, you want to manage your personal energy for the long term and the big picture. Having one more cocktail at midnight might be an energy boost at the time, but you pay for it double the next day.

  At this point in the book, allow me to pause and acknowledge your entirely appropriate skepticism about my notion that organizing your life around the concept of personal energy is useful. I applaud your healthy skepticism. But I’ll ask you to hold off on judging the usefulness of personal energy as an organizing principle until you see how it’s woven into the following chapters.

  By analogy, imagine explaining the idea of capitalism to someone who had never heard of it. You’d be greeted with severe skepticism and legitimate questions:

  Wouldn’t it cause you to cut expenses now and underinvest?

  Wouldn’t it cause you to become sort of a jerk to your employees?

  Wouldn’t it cause you to cheat your customers whenever you could?

  The honest answer to all of those concerns is that they are entirely valid. Capitalism is rotten at every level, and yet it adds up to something extraordinarily useful for society over time. The paradox of capitalism is that adding a bunch of bad-sounding ideas together creates something incredible that is far more good than bad. Capitalism inspires people to work hard, to take reasonable risks, and to create value for customers. On the whole, capitalism channels selfishness in a direction that benefits civilization, not counting a few fat cats who have figured out how to game the system.

  You have the same paradox with personal energy. If you look at any individual action that boosts your personal energy, it might look like selfishness. Why are you going skiing when you should be working at the homeless shelter, you selfish bastard!

  My proposition is that organizing your life to optimize your personal energy will add up to something incredible that is more good than bad.

  As I write this paragraph, my wife and our good friends are wondering why I’m selfishly lagging behind and not meeting them for an afternoon of sitting in the sun. I’ll get there soon. And when I do, I’ll feel energized and satisfied and be far more fun to be around. No one will think worse of me in the long run for being thirty minutes behind for a full day of fun that they have already started. But everyone will appreciate that I’m in a better mood when I show up. That’s the trade-off. Like capitalism, some forms of selfishness are enlightened.

  Matching Mental State to Activity

  One of the most important tricks for maximizing your productivity involves matching your mental state to the task. For example, when I first wake up, my brain is relaxed and creative. The thought of writing a comic is fun, and it’s relatively easy because my brain is in exactly the right mode for that task. I know from experience that trying to be creative in the midafternoon is a waste
of time. By 2:00 P.M. all I can do is regurgitate the ideas I’ve seen elsewhere. At 6:00 A.M. I’m a creator, and by 2:00 P.M. I’m a copier.

  Everyone is different, but you’ll discover that most writers work either early in the morning or past midnight. That’s when the creative writing juices flow most easily.

  When lunchtime rolls around, I like to grab a quick snack and go to the gym or play tennis. At that time of day I have plenty of energy, and it makes exercise seem like a good idea. I know that if I wait until after dinner I won’t have the sort of physical energy I need to talk myself into exercising. In my twenties I could exercise at midnight with no problem, so keep in mind that you might want to make adjustments to your daily patterns over time.

  My comic-creating process is divided into two stages to maximize my natural energy cycles. In the late afternoon and early evening my hand is steady. I’m relaxed from exercising and ready to do some simple, mindless, mechanical tasks such as drawing the final art for Dilbert or paying bills online. It’s the perfect match of my energy level with a mindless task. Without the exercise I wouldn’t have the attention span to handle boring tasks. I would be bouncing around from one thing to another and accomplishing nothing.

  Most people aren’t lucky enough to have a flexible schedule. I didn’t have one either for the first sixteen years of my corporate life. So I did the next best thing by going to bed early and getting up at 4:00 A.M. to do my creative side projects. One of those projects became the sketches for Dilbert.