How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life (11 page)

Here’s an example
of how useful it is to have a smart friend. When I was a few years into my cartooning career, a Canadian woman called and asked if I would give a speech to an organization of petroleum engineers in Calgary. I said I didn’t do that sort of work, but she persisted, saying that the organization had asked for me specifically and that there would be a healthy payment involved. I continued to balk, because I had very little flexibility in my schedule. At that point I was still working my full-time job at Pacific Bell, and creating
Dilbert
before and after work, plus weekends. Traveling to Canada just wasn’t a practical option.

The Canadian woman suggested that I give her a price for my services that would make it worthwhile for me. If my price was too high, at least she could take it back to her organization and say she’d tried. She made it sound as if I would be doing her a favor to come up with a price for something I didn’t want to do.

But how does one come up with a price for giving a speech? I had no idea where to start. So I did what anyone in that situation would do: I sought out a friend who might have a template for this sort of thing.

At the time,
Dilbert
was syndicated by an organization within United Media, a large licensing and syndication business headquartered in New York City. I figured correctly that someone in that hierarchy would have experience with professional speaking. I called a senior vice president who had once been a best-selling author and had
decades of experience that made him far more qualified than I was for this sort of topic.

I put the question to him: “What should I say is my price for speaking?” I told him that I would be perfectly happy to price myself out of the job. He said, “Ask for five thousand dollars. If they say no, you avoid a trip to Canada.” I laughed at his suggestion, knowing that I wasn’t worth that kind of money. But I had my plan. I practiced saying “five thousand dollars” until I thought I could say it without laughing. I called back my Canadian contact. That conversation went like this:

Canadian: “Did you come up with a price?”

Me: “Yes … five thousand dollars.”

Canadian: “Okay, and we’ll also pay for your first-class travel and hotel.”

I flew to Canada and gave a speech.

As time went by and
Dilbert
became more well known, more speaking requests flowed in, often several per day. I raised my price to $10,000, and the requests kept coming. I tried $15,000, and the requests accelerated. By the time I got to $25,000, the speakers’ bureaus had started to see me as a source of bigger commissions and advised me to raise my price to $35,000, then $45,000. The largest offer I ever turned down, because of a scheduling conflict, was $100,000 to speak for an hour on any topic I wanted.

All of this was possible because I had access to a smart friend who told me how to find the simple entry point into the speaking circuit. All I needed to do was overprice myself and see what happened. As simple as that sounds in retrospect, I doubt I would have taken that path on my own. I think I would have politely declined the invitation.

It’s a cliché that who you know is helpful for success. What is less obvious is that you don’t need to know CEOs and billionaires. Sometimes you just need a friend who knows different things than you do. And you can always find one of those.

Six months after
losing my voice, in 2005, I still didn’t know what the source of the problem was, and it was immensely frustrating. I don’t mind a fair fight, but this invisible, nameless problem was kicking my ass and I didn’t even know which direction to punch back. I needed a name for my condition. I figured if I knew its name that would lead me down the trail to a cure.

But how could I find the name for a condition that was unfamiliar to two ear-nose-throat doctors, two voice specialists, a psychologist, a neurologist, and my general practitioner? There was only one creature smarter than all of those doctors put together: the Internet. (Yes, it’s a creature, okay?)

I opened a Google search box and tried a variety of voice-related key words. I found nothing useful. My searches were too broad. And then something interesting happened. It’s a phenomenon that people in creative jobs experience often, but it might be unfamiliar to the rest of you. Suddenly, out of nowhere, two totally unrelated thoughts—separated by topic, time, and distance—came together in my head. For some reason I had a spontaneous memory of the problem with my drawing hand that I had experienced several years earlier. In that case I’d lost control of my pinkie. Now I was losing control of my voice. Could the two problems be related?

I entered the search string “voice dystonia” because my hand problem was called a focal dystonia. Bingo. The search popped up a video of a patient who had something called spasmodic dysphonia, a condition
in which the vocal cords clench involuntarily when making certain sounds. I played the video and recognized my exact voice pattern—broken words and clipped syllables—coming out of the patient in the video. Now I had its name: spasmodic dysphonia, which I discovered is often associated with other forms of dystonia. As I learned with further research, it’s common for someone who has one type of dystonia to get another. (Luckily it doesn’t tend to progress beyond that.)

My secret assassin had a name, and now I knew it. It felt like a turning point.

I printed out a description of spasmodic dysphonia and took it to my doctor. He referred me back to my ear-nose-throat doctor, who in turn referred me to a doctor I hadn’t yet seen in the Kaiser health-care system, who turned out to be an expert in that exact condition. Within ten seconds of my opening my mouth in her office, the doctor confirmed the diagnosis. I had a classic case.

“What’s the cure?” I whispered.

“There is none,” she replied.

But that isn’t what I heard. The optimist in me translated the gloomy news as “Scott, you will be the first person in the world to be cured of spasmodic dysphonia.” And I decided that after I cured myself, somehow, some way, I would spread the word to others. I wouldn’t be satisfied simply escaping from my prison of silence; I was planning to escape, free the other inmates, shoot the warden, and burn down the prison.

Sometimes I get that way.

It’s a surprisingly useful frame of mind.

The standard treatment
for spasmodic dysphonia involves a doctor pushing a needle filled with botulinum toxin (better known by its trade name, Botox) through the front of the patient’s neck and hoping it finds the vocal-cord region on the back side of the throat. Doctors who give the shot use a mixture of experience, guessing, and electronics to find the right dose and the right place to put it. If all goes well, a patient’s voice can normalize after a few weeks and stay functional for several weeks until the Botox wears off. Then you repeat. It’s a creepy process because the needle is so thick you need an initial shot of local anesthetic just to keep you from going through the roof when the second needle goes in. It’s not a fun day.

I tried the Botox treatments for a few months. The first shot worked well enough for me to say “I do” when I got married to Shelly, which was great, but it wore off in a few weeks. Subsequent shots were not nearly as effective. The problem is that no two shots were ever the same, in part because I never knew how much Botox was still in my system, and partly because the shot never hit exactly the same place twice. And the dose was always either ramping up or wearing off. It only hit the right dose level by accident for a week or so on the way up or down.

The bigger issue for me was that the Botox masked the impact of any other type of treatment I might want to experiment with. I made
the decision to stop the Botox and give myself a chance to find a lasting fix.

With the Botox, I knew I could find a way to talk almost normally some of the time. Without it, I was pretty much shut off from the world of the living. I was taking a big swing at a ball I couldn’t even see.

If you have
world-class talent—for anything—you probably know it. In fact, your parents probably dragged you from place to place when you were young to develop your skill. But world-class talent is such an exception that I prefer ignoring it for this book. I’m going to focus on ordinary talents and combinations of ordinary talents that add up to something extraordinary. In the case of ordinary talent, how do you know which of your various skills can be combined to get something useful? It’s a vital question because you want to put your focus where it makes a real difference.

One helpful rule of thumb for knowing where you might have a little extra talent is to consider what you were obsessively doing before you were ten years old. There’s a strong connection between what interests you and what you’re good at. People are naturally drawn to the things they feel comfortable doing, and comfort is a marker for talent.

In my case, I was doodling and drawing obsessively from the time I could pick up a crayon. I never became a talented artist, but my high level of interest in drawing foreshadowed my career decades later. Granted, most kids enjoy art, and some enjoy it a lot more than others. But I was off the charts. I doodled all through my classes in school. I drew in the dirt with sticks. I drew in the snow. For me, drawing was more of a compulsion than a choice. Childhood compulsions aren’t a guarantee of future talent. But my unscientific observation is that people are born wired for certain preferences. Those
preferences drive behavior, and that’s what can make a person willing to practice a skill. A study that got a lot of attention in the past few years involved the discovery that becoming an “expert” at just about anything requires ten thousand hours of disciplined practice.
¹
Author Malcolm Gladwell wrote about it in his book
Outliers
. Few people will put in that kind of practice to one skill. But early obsessions can predict which skills a kid might someday be good at.

Another clue to talent involves tolerance for risk. When I was in grade school I often drew humorously inappropriate comics involving my teachers and fellow students. I would show them to classmates and I enjoyed making them laugh, all the while knowing that getting caught by an authority figure meant a serious penalty. I was willing to take a significant personal risk for my so-called art, and this was in sharp contrast to my otherwise risk-averse lifestyle. People generally accept outsized risk only when they expect big payoffs. Drawing inappropriate comics made me happy. To me, it was worth the risk.

I owned a very used, very old motorcycle when I was a teen. I’d paid $150 for it from my earnings as an entrepreneurial mower of lawns, shoveler of show, and farmer’s incompetent assistant. The motorcycle was dangerous, of course, especially in the hands of a teen. I laid it down a few times on the local back roads. On a number of occasions I barely missed deer, angry dogs, and other motorists. One day I was barreling across a field and drove the front wheel into a woodchuck hole, thus taking flight and miraculously landing on nothing hard in a field littered with large rocks. I enjoyed having a motorcycle, but it wasn’t an obsession for me. And eventually I concluded that it wasn’t worth the risk. Clearly I was not destined to be a motorcycle daredevil or motocross star. I wasn’t willing to accept a high risk in return for the joy of riding. But when it came to comics, I eagerly accepted the risk of expulsion and great bodily harm that comes with insulting larger kids. My risk profile predicted my future.

When you hear stories about famous actors as kids, one of the patterns you notice is that before they were stars they were staging plays in their living rooms and backyards. That’s gutsy for a kid. A child who eagerly accepts the risk of embarrassment in front of a crowd—even a friendly crowd—probably has some talent for entertaining.

Consider the biographies of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. As young men, both took legal risks in the field of technology. Bill Gates famously found ways to hone his technical skills by stealing time on a
mainframe.
²
Jobs and Wozniak’s first product involved technology that allowed people to steal long-distance phone calls. Where there is a tolerance for risk, there is often talent.

Childhood obsessions and tolerance for risk are only rough guides to talent at best. As you grow and acquire more talents, your potential paths to success multiply quickly. That makes it extra hard to know which possibility among many would put you in a position of competitive advantage. Should you pursue a career that uses your knowledge of photography and software, or something that uses your public-speaking skills and your gift for writing? There’s no way to be completely sure which path will be most fruitful.

The smartest system for discerning your best path to success involves trying lots of different things—sampling, if you will. For entrepreneurial ventures it might mean quickly bailing out if things don’t come together quickly.

That approach might conflict with the advice you’ve heard all your life—that sticking with something, no matter the obstacles, is important to success. Indeed, most successful people had to chew through a wall at some point. Overcoming obstacles is normally an unavoidable part of the process. But you also need to know when to quit. Persistence is useful, but there’s no point in being an idiot about it.

My guideline for deciding when to quit is informed by a lifetime of trying dozens of business ideas, most of them failures. I’ve also carefully observed others struggling with the stay-or-quit decision. There have been times I stuck with bad ideas for far too long out of a misguided sense that persistence is a virtue. The pattern I noticed was this: Things that will someday work out well
start out
well. Things that will never work start out bad and stay that way. What you rarely see is a stillborn failure that transmogrifies into a stellar success. Small successes can grow into big ones, but failures rarely grow into successes.

To illustrate my point, consider the history of cell phones. Early cell phones had bad reception all the time. They dropped calls. They had few features. They were expensive. They didn’t fit in your pocket. Yet cell phones were successful, at least in terms of demand, on day one. Despite the many flaws of cell phones—flaws that lasted decades—demand started brisk and stayed strong. The poor quality of the product made no difference. Cell phones started as a small success and grew.

Fax
machines followed a similar path. The early fax machines were slow and spectacularly unreliable. They would eat your original and only sometimes deliver a legible copy to the other machine. Still, fax machines had demand from the beginning that grew until the age of computers rendered them less necessary.

The first personal computers were slow, expensive, nonintuitive, and crash prone. And still the demand was explosive.

In each of these examples, the quality of the early products was a poor predictor of success. The predictor is that customers were clamoring for the
bad
versions of the product before the good versions were even invented. It’s as if a future success left bread crumbs that were visible in the present.

When Fox launched
The Simpsons
in 1989, it was a national phenomenon on day one. Everywhere I went, the topic of
The Simpsons
came up: “Did you see it?” Interestingly, as much as
The Simpsons
is rebroadcast in syndication, you won’t often see that first season repeated. The reason, I assume based on clips I’ve seen, is that by today’s standards it would be judged to be embarrassingly bad. The original art looked amateurish and the writing was violent, sophomoric slapstick. Compared with today’s episodes, the first season of
The Simpsons
was an awful product. Again, the quality didn’t predict success. The better predictor is that
The Simpsons
was an immediate hit despite its surface quality. It had the x factor. In time it grew to be one of the most important, most creative, and best shows of all time.

My experience with
Dilbert
followed the same pattern. I submitted my original samples of
Dilbert
to several comic-syndication companies in 1988. United Media offered me a contract and successfully sold
Dilbert
into a few dozen newspapers at its launch in 1989. A year later, sales to newspapers stalled and United Media turned its attention to other comic properties. Over the next five years, I found a way to generate more interest in
Dilbert
by writing books and exploiting the Internet. The turning point for
Dilbert
came in 1993 after I started printing my e-mail address in the margins of the strip. It was the first time I could see unfiltered opinions about my work. Until then I’d relied on the opinions of friends and business associates, and that had limited value because that group of folks rarely offered criticism. But
wow,
the general public doesn’t hold back. They were savage about my art skills—no surprise—and that was just the tip of the hateberg. But I noticed a consistent theme that held for both the fans
and the haters: They all preferred the comics in which
Dilbert
was in the office. So I changed the focus of the strip to the workplace, and that turned out to be the spark in the gasoline.

But the thing that predicted
Dilbert
’s success in year one is that it quickly gained a small but enthusiastic following. My best estimate, based on shaky anecdotal evidence, is that 98 percent of newspaper readers initially disliked
Dilbert,
but 2 percent thought it was one of the best comics in the paper despite all objective evidence to the contrary. In other words, it had the x factor on day one. And this brings me to a lesson I learned in Hollywood, or at least near Hollywood.

In the late nineties I spent some time in the Los Angeles area trying to get a
Dilbert
TV pilot off the ground. The first attempt, which failed miserably, involved live actors portraying the
Dilbert
characters. During that process I got to observe a test audience watching the pilot and registering their opinions in real time. Moving graphs appeared on monitors so we could see the ebb and flow of the audience’s enjoyment at each point in the show. I was chatting with the television executive in charge of the project and asking what the cutoff was for an acceptable test-audience response. The executive explained that for television shows, the best predictor is not the average response. Averages don’t mean much for entertainment products. What you’re looking for is an unusually strong reaction from a subset of the public, even if the majority hates it. The
Dilbert
pilot got an okay response from the test audience, but no one seemed enthusiastic. The project went no further. But during the process I learned enough about making a television show that the next attempt went far better. The animated
Dilbert
show ran for two half seasons on the now-defunct UPN and got decent ratings for that tiny network. When that show got canceled, for reasons I describe later in this book, I emerged with just enough new skills, knowledge, and contacts that my odds of someday getting a
Dilbert
movie made are far higher. I’ve been trying and failing to get a
Dilbert
movie made for about fifteen years. Every failure so far has been because of some freakish intersection of bad luck. But bad luck doesn’t have the option of being that consistent forever. I’ll get it done unless I die first.

Back to my point, the enthusiasm model, if I may call it that, is a bit like the x factor. It’s the elusive and hard-to-predict quality of a thing that makes some percentage of the public nuts about it. When the x factor is present, the public—or
some subset of the public—picks up on it right away. For the excited few, the normal notions of what constitutes quality don’t apply. In time, the products that inspire excitement typically evolve to have quality too. Quality is one of the luxuries you can afford when the marketplace is spraying money in your direction and you have time to tinker.

Consider the iPhone. The first version was a mess, yet it was greeted with an almost feverish enthusiasm. That enthusiasm, and the enormous sales that followed, funded improvements until the product became superb.

One of the best ways to detect the x factor is to watch what customers
do
about your idea or product, not what they
say.
People tend to say what they think you want to hear or what they think will cause the least pain. What people
do
is far more honest. For example, with comics, a good test of potential is whether people stick the comic to the refrigerator, tweet it, e-mail it to friends, put it on a blog page, or do anything else active.

You might be tempted to think that sometimes an idea with no x factor and no enthusiastic fans can gain those qualities over time. I’m sure it’s happened, but I can’t think of an example in my life. It’s generally true that if no one is excited about your art/product/idea in the beginning, they never will be.

If the first commercial version of your work excites no one to action, it’s time to move on to something different. Don’t be fooled by the opinions of friends and family. They’re all liars.

If your work inspires some excitement and some action from customers, get ready to chew through some walls. You might have something worth fighting for.