How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life (10 page)

Reality outside the quantum world of particles and waves might be fixed and objective, at least according to most scientists. But how we think of our reality is clearly subject to regular changes. We’ve all had the experience of meeting someone for the first time and having a wildly inaccurate first impression, which in turn drives the way we act. Later, once you know more about the person, you start behaving differently. The external reality doesn’t change, but your point of view does. In many cases, it’s your point of view that influences your behavior, not the universe. And you can control your point of view even when you can’t change the underlying reality.

For
over a decade I’ve been semifamous for creating
Dilbert,
but I’m still generally unrecognized in public. When I meet people for the first time without the benefit of a full introduction, I’m treated like any other stranger. But if the topic of my job comes up, people immediately become friendlier, as if we had been friends forever. The underlying reality doesn’t change, but the way people think of me does, and that changes how they act.

My main point about perceptions is that you shouldn’t hesitate to modify your perceptions to whatever makes you happy, because you’re probably wrong about the underlying nature of reality anyway. If I had to bet my life, I’d say humans are more like my dog trying to use psychic powers on me to play fetch than we are like enlightened creatures that understand their environment at a deep level. Every generation before us believed, like Snickers, that it had things figured out. We now know that every generation before us was wrong about a lot of it. Is it likely that you were born at the tipping point of history, in which humans know enough about reality to say we understand it? This is another case where humility is your friend. When you can release on your ego long enough to view your perceptions as incomplete or misleading, it gives you the freedom to imagine new and potentially more useful ways of looking at the world.

In practical terms, the reason my dog happily plays fetch three times a day is that she chose an illusion that works. I believe she imagines she can make me play fetch just by visualizing it. You too can sometimes get what you want by adopting a practical illusion. Reality is overrated and impossible to understand with any degree of certainty. What you do know for sure is that some ways of looking at the world work better than others. Pick the way that works, even if you don’t know why.

The process of writing this book is a good example of what I’m talking about. Writing a book is hard work—far harder than most people imagine, and you probably imagine it to be plenty hard. The way I motivate myself to take on a task this large is by imagining that I have fascinating and useful things to say that will help people. The reality might be quite different. I can’t see the future, so I have the option of imagining it in whatever way gives me the greatest utility. I choose to imagine that the book will do well because that illusion is highly motivating. It increases my energy.

The
worst-case scenario is that I will spend a lot of time writing a book that no one will find useful or entertaining. It wouldn’t be the first time. But because of my imaginary future in which the book is enjoyed by millions, I’m able to find great satisfaction in writing it. No matter what reality delivers in the future, my imagined version of the future has great usefulness today.

Free yourself from the shackles of an oppressive reality. What’s real to you is what you imagine and what you feel. If you manage your illusions wisely, you might get what you want, but you won’t necessarily understand why it worked.

You already passed
the first filter for success. By reading this book you’ve established yourself as a seeker of knowledge. Seekers obviously find more stuff than the people who sit and wait. Your decision to read this book is confirmation that you are a person of action who has a desire to be more effective. I’m reinforcing that thought to help lock it in.

You also get some automatic benefits by reading this book and in a sense joining a new group. Specifically, you’re on your way to being one of the people who have read this book. When you define yourself as a member of any group, you start to automatically identify with the other members and take on some of the characteristics of the group.
¹
The group of people who read books on how to succeed is an excellent group to be in. You’re the people most likely to succeed because you’re putting real thought and research into the mechanics of success.

You might fairly ask if this is a trivial point. I suppose everyone who reads this book will be influenced in a different way, and there’s no way to accurately measure this sort of thing. But I think you’ve seen examples in your life in which a person changes dramatically upon becoming a member of a group or getting a promotion or anything that redefines a person.

The most striking example of this effect happened to me. My cartooning skills improved dramatically within a week of United Media’s offering to syndicate
Dilbert.
The simple knowledge that I had
become an official professional cartoonist had a profound effect on unlocking whatever talent I had.

In my corporate career I often marveled at how people changed as soon as they got promoted from worker bees to management. I saw one of my coworkers transform from a hesitant and unimpressive personality to confidence and power within two months of his promotion. Obviously there was some acting involved, but we are designed to become in reality however we act. We fake it until it becomes real. Our core personality doesn’t change, but we quickly adopt the mannerisms and skills associated with our new status and position.

So congratulations on being a person who studies the mechanics of success. It’s a bigger deal than you might realize.

By the early
nineties,
Dilbert
was a modest success, but it was nowhere near the point where I was tempted to quit my day job at the phone company, Pacific Bell. I would wake at 4:00
A.M.
to draw before my commute, then work all day in my cubicle prison and come home to draw all night. My time windows for drawing were always compressed, which put a lot of pressure on my drawing hand. The overuse took its toll, and my pinkie finger started to spasm whenever I touched pen to paper, making it nearly impossible to draw.

I went to see my doctor in the Kaiser health-care system, and he said he might know another doctor in the system who was an expert in this very problem. By wonderful coincidence, one of the world’s most knowledgeable doctors in this specific condition worked for Kaiser, and his office was just down the road from my home.

Pause for a moment to reflect on that. There were over six billion people in the world, and one of the most published experts in the field worked within walking distance of my home. Never assume you understand the odds of things.

I met with the doctor and he diagnosed me in minutes. I had something called a focal dystonia, common to people who do repetitive tasks with their hands, primarily musicians, draftsmen, and that sort of job. It wasn’t carpal tunnel. This was different.

“What’s the cure?” I asked.

“Change jobs,” he said. “There’s no known treatment.”

I
walked out of the doctor’s office with my life demolished. My dream of being a cartoonist for the rest of my life was over unless I found a way to be the first person in the world to beat a focal dystonia.

What were the odds of that?

It took a few days for my baseline optimism to return. My optimism is like an old cat that likes to disappear for days, but I always expect it to return. And frankly, cumulatively the events in my life up to that point gave me a sensation of being exempt from the normal laws of chance, and that is probably the source of my optimism. If you need a more scientific-sounding explanation, perhaps I’m just bad at estimating the odds of things, or perhaps I have selective memory and forget the things that don’t work out. No matter how you explain the perception, it leaves room for hope, and hope has a lot of practical utility. I don’t need to know why my long shots seem to come in more often than my faulty brain expects; I just need to perceive—accurately or not—that it happens.

Realistically, what were my odds of being the first person on earth to beat a focal dystonia? One in a million? One in ten million? I didn’t care. That one person was going to be me. Thanks to my odd life experiences, and odder genes, I’m wired to think things will work out well for me no matter how unlikely it might seem.

At a follow-up visit, the doctor asked if I would be willing to try a few experimental treatments, joining some other human guinea pigs he was working with. I agreed. For weeks I tried various hand exercises, went to a physical therapist, tried meditation, galvanic skin-response feedback, self-hypnosis, and anything else that seemed like it made a grain of sense. Nothing worked, not even a little.

Meanwhile I tried to draw
Dilbert
left-handed, which I could do with a lot of effort. I’m mildly ambidextrous, but drawing is a high level of difficulty for the nondominant hand. I could tell that drawing lefty wouldn’t be a long-term solution. My drawings were extra terrible for a few months during that period.

I also tried strapping down my pinkie, but that had the odd effect of making the rest of my hand dysfunctional. And it hurt like crazy.

I lost the ability to write simple notes using pen on paper, which was obviously inconvenient at my day job. Oddly, the pinkie spasms happened only during the specific motions involved in writing or drawing. Otherwise my hand was 100 percent normal. Weirder still,
when I drew with my left hand, the pinkie on my
right
hand would spasm, so obviously the wiring in my brain was the problem, not the architecture of my hand. My experience was consistent with the doctor’s research. None of the people who have focal dystonias seem to have anything abnormal in the structure of their hands. It seems to be some sort of short circuit in the brain.

At my day job, as I sat through endless boring meetings, I started practicing my drawing motion by touching my pen to paper and then pulling up before the spasm started. I tapped the page hundreds of times per meeting under the table on the notepad on my lap. My idea was to rewire my brain gradually, to relearn that I can touch pen to paper and not spasm. I was literally trying to hack my brain. My hypnosis training
*
suggested this might be possible.

Over the next several weeks I noticed I could hold my pen to paper for a full second before feeling the onset of a pinkie spasm. Eventually it was two seconds, then five. One day, after I trained myself to hold pen to paper for several seconds without a spasm, my brain suddenly and unexpectedly rewired itself and removed the dystonia altogether. Apparently I broke the spasm cycle and reinforced the nonspasm association.

And so I was the first person in the world to cure a focal dystonia, at least as far as I know. It’s entirely possible that I’m wrong about that, since I can’t know what everyone else is doing or what worked for them. Still, it was an unlikely result.

I went back to drawing right-handed, paced myself, and didn’t have a problem again for years. My hand doctor said I’m part of the literature on this topic now, although my name is not mentioned.

In 2004, after once again doing too much drawing in a compressed time, the dystonia returned. This time I tried a smarter work-around. I made an educated guess that somewhere in the world a company was probably making a computer tablet or screen on which I could draw my comic. My hypothesis was that drawing on a computer would feel different enough from pen on paper that the dystonia wouldn’t trigger, even though I would be drawing with a stylus just as I would with a pen.

I did some Google searches and discovered that Wacom was making a special computer monitor for artists. I ordered it the same day.
In a week it was up and running. As I’d hoped, drawing on the computer was different enough that the dystonia didn’t trigger. And through my not reinforcing the trigger and the spasm, the dystonia faded away. I’m sure it would come back if I tried drawing or writing on paper for a long time, but since that will never happen, it’s a nonissue in my life.

By the way, drawing on the Wacom product cut my total workday in half. The focal dystonia was a case of extraordinary bad luck for a cartoonist. But when I got done beating the dystonia problem to death and rifling through its pockets, I came out the other end a far more efficient cartoonist. The quality of my drawing improved dramatically on the Wacom because it’s so easy to make small adjustments. On balance, I came out way ahead.