How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life (14 page)

For
example, a real-estate salesperson might show you the worst house first, knowing it will make you appreciate the better home you see later, and it might make you reach deeper in your pockets. A car salesman knows that a high sticker price will make the eventual negotiated price look better than it would have otherwise. Salespeople know they can manipulate buyers by controlling what they compare.

A building contractor knows that when customers see the house during the framing phase the rooms will look too small. Later, when the rooms are finished and furnished, they look larger. A smart builder warns the customers in advance that everything will look smaller in the framing phase. That way the customer doesn’t flip out. That’s psychology.

Even an engineer who deals mostly with the material world needs to understand how his boss feels, how customers feel, and how users will perceive the product. You can’t get away from the need to make decisions based on psychology.

The examples I gave are the common ones that most people figure out on their own. But given that the field of psychology is miles deep, most people know only the stuff that qualifies as common knowledge. How much more effective would you be if you had a greater understanding of psychology? Answer: a lot.

Psychology was a huge factor in my eventual success with
Dilbert.
By the time United Media offered me a syndication contract for
Dilbert,
my confidence had taken some direct hits. The other syndication companies had turned me down flat. One editor had suggested that perhaps I could find an actual artist to do the drawing for me. Ouch. So when Sarah Gillespie, editor at United Media, called and offered a contract, I apologized for my poor drawing skills and suggested that perhaps she could pair me with someone who could do the artwork. Sarah, who evidently understood a lot about psychology, told me my drawing skill was fine; no improvement necessary. That triggered a highly unexpected change in my actual level of talent: It went up. Overnight my drawing skill went from about a three on a scale of one to ten to about a six. That’s still not good, but apparently it was good enough. The sudden improvement was entirely due to Sarah’s compliment of my artistic ability. I became a more confident artist—and a better one—because she changed what I thought of my own talent. It was a
Wizard of Oz
moment.

When I look at the list of my personal failures and successes, one
of the things that stand out is psychology. When I got the psychology right, either by accident or by cleverness, things worked out better. When I was blind to the psychology, things went badly.

For example, after
Dilbert
became a hit, I briefly considered launching a second comic. I posted on
Dilbert.com
some early samples of what I hoped would be a comic about a young Elbonian boy who didn’t fit in. His name was Plop and he was the only unbearded Elbonian in the world, and that included the women and babies. On day one, the Plop comic was a lot better than the first
Dilbert
comics, but not nearly as good as
Dilbert
had become by that time. What I didn’t count on—my blind spot—was that my new comic would be compared with
Dilbert,
not with other new comics. Compared with
Dilbert,
it was flat and lacked an edge. Compared with all of the new comics that launched that same year from unknown cartoonists, it was fairly competitive. Most of my feedback by e-mail was of the “Keep your day job” variety, along with “It’s no
Dilbert.
” I wouldn’t have guessed that being a successful cartoonist would be a barrier to launching a new comic, but in my case it was. I could have saved a lot of time if I’d understood that in advance.

Dilbert
was the first syndicated comic that focused primarily on the workplace. At the time there was nothing to compare it with. That allowed me to get away with bad artwork and immature writing until I could improve my skills to the not-so-embarrassing level. Since the launch of
Dilbert
in 1989, dozens of cartoonists have tried to enter the workplace-comic space and gotten clobbered by unfavorable comparisons to a mature
Dilbert.
If I were to disguise my identity and launch a new workplace comic tomorrow, with all new characters, readers would compare it with
Dilbert
and it wouldn’t stand a chance.

Over the past ten years or so I have been in a few dozen meetings on the topic of turning
Dilbert
into a feature film. I always get the question of how we could make a
Dilbert
movie different enough from the TV show
The Office
or the cult movie
Office Space
. The implication is that the quality of a
Dilbert
movie might be less important to its success than whatever the public reflexively compares it with. Quality is not an independent force in the universe; it depends on what you choose as your frame of reference.

When my restaurant partner and I built our second restaurant, we decided to make it more upscale than the first so it wouldn’t cannibalize business, given that the two restaurants were only five miles apart.
The upscale-decor strategy seemed like a perfectly good idea until I observed women walk in for lunch, look at the upscale decor, look at their own casual clothes, and proclaim to the hostess that they were underdressed. The self-assessed underdressed customer would turn and leave. I saw that scenario repeat itself over and over. None of the women who rejected themselves from the restaurant looked underdressed to me. The restaurant wasn’t
that
upscale. It was still a neighborhood restaurant in a suburban strip mall. But compared with other restaurants in the area it was a step up in design. It made people feel uncomfortable. To make matters worse, our food quality wasn’t up to the level people expected for a place with that type of decor. The restaurant’s appearance caused us to be compared with the very best of fine-dining restaurants. Our business model assumed people would prefer eating upscale comfort food in an unusually attractive setting. It was a bad idea. Customers were confused. Was the restaurant supposed to be casual or upscale? People compared our decor with casual restaurants and decided it was too fancy to be a casual eating experience. They compared our food with the top restaurants in San Francisco and decided it wasn’t sufficiently special. We failed to predict how customers would compare us.

This book itself presents an especially challenging comparison problem. If I add too much humor to this book, reviewers and readers will compare it with other humor books and it will come up short because many of the chapters don’t lend themselves to jokes. If I leave out all humor, the book will be compared with self-help books, which would be misleading in its own way, but I’d probably come out better in that sort of comparison. In other words, to increase your perceived enjoyment of the book, I might leave out some humor that you would otherwise enjoy.

When I talk of the comparison problem, I don’t mean a simple comparison of one thing with its competition. If the competition is simply better than you, your problem is more than customer perceptions. I’m talking about comparisons that common sense tells you should be irrelevant, such as comparing
Dilbert
the TV show to
The Simpsons.
They weren’t competitors in any real way. They didn’t run during the same time or exhaust the limited supply of the public’s discretionary time in any meaningful way. And yet the comparison to
The Simpsons
was a big obstacle to the show’s success
because it contrasted a seasoned, big-budget show against a poorly funded upstart that was still trying to find its rhythm. Animated shows take longer to “tune” than live action because the writers for animation can’t know what worked in a particular show until it is fully animated and too late to change. Success in anything usually means doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t, and for animated TV shows that means you don’t hit your pace until about the third season. We got canceled after the second half season. I believe that if
The Simpsons
had never existed as the gold standard of animated prime-time TV shows, the
Dilbert
show would have had time to reach the next level.

I’ve spent a lot of time describing just one psychological phenomenon: the tendency to make irrational comparisons. But how many psychological tips and tricks does a person really need to understand in order to be successful in life?

My best guess is that there are a few hundred rules in psychology that you should have a passing familiarity with. I’ve been absorbing information in this field for decades, and I don’t feel that I am getting anywhere near the end of it. And just about everything I learn about human psychology ends up being helpful.

I went to Wikipedia to get a quick list of the psychological and cognitive traps that humans often fall into. Psychology is an immense field and well beyond the scope of this book. My point is to impress upon you how many useful nuggets of information are at your disposal, and most of them are free. Every psychological trap on this list can be used to manipulate you. If there’s something on this list that you’re not familiar with, you’re vulnerable to deception. In some cases, you’re missing opportunities to make your product and yourself more attractive to others.

It’s a good idea to make psychology your lifelong study. Most of what you need to know as a regular citizen can be gleaned from the Internet.

Below is Wikipedia’s list of cognitive biases.
¹
It looks like a lot to know, but you have your entire life to acquire the knowledge. Think of it as a system in which you learn a bit every year. That will be easier if you understand how important psychology is to everything you want to accomplish in life. On a scale of one to ten, the importance of understanding psychology is a solid ten.

Some
of the things on the list are common sense, and you might know them by other names. I include the comprehensive list just to give you a feel for how deep the field is. And I would go so far as to say that anything on the list that you don’t understand might cost you money in the future.

You’ve heard the old saying that knowledge is power. But knowledge of psychology is the purest form of that power. No matter what you’re doing or how well you’re doing it, you can benefit from a deeper understanding of how the mind interprets its world using only the clues that somehow find a way into your brain through the holes in your skull.

When I was in my twenties, I took a certification course in hypnosis. I thought it would be fascinating and maybe useful. I even considered making some money on the side as a hypnotist. I decided against it because I didn’t want to be in the business of selling my time. But the skills and insights I gleaned from studying hypnosis have improved my performance in just about everything I’ve done since then, from business to my personal life. It was time well spent.

In hypnosis, you don’t spend a lot of time asking why one technique works and why another does not. Hypnosis is largely a trial-and-error process that uses your own experience plus that of hypnotists who have gone before to reduce the number of wrong moves. In that sense, hypnosis treats people as if they were machines that can be programmed. If you provide the right inputs, you get the outputs you want.

Hypnosis is an inexact process because every brain has a different mix of chemistry. For example, if I ask you to relax and imagine a forest in the summer, most of you would find that a pleasing image. But people who are afraid of bears or afraid of getting lost might get agitated by the thought of a forest. A hypnotist learns to detect slight changes in breathing, posture, movement, and skin tone to know if the images presented are working as planned. Adjustments are made accordingly. In the simplest terms, a hypnotist tries to do more of whatever works and less of what doesn’t.

My experience with hypnosis completely changed the way I view people and how I interpret the choices they make. I no longer see
reason
as the driver of behavior. I see simple cause and effect, similar to the way machines operate. If you believe people use reason for the important decisions in life, you will go through life feeling confused
and frustrated that others seem to have bad reasoning skills. The reality is that reason is just one of the drivers of our decisions, and often the smallest one.

Recently my wife and I went shopping for a new vehicle. We looked at a lot of models online and in person, and none were irresistible. Then we came upon a vehicle that was so “us” that I laughed when I saw it. I could almost feel my brain make up its mind before we had done one iota of reasoning, data gathering, or negotiating. I could tell that my wife had the same experience. This car was so obviously going to belong to us that seeing it was like peering into the future.

Predictably, everything we learned about the car after that point seemed either good or good enough. We convinced ourselves that the price was reasonable. We convinced ourselves that the features were just what we wanted. And eventually we convinced ourselves that we had negotiated a good deal.

The normal way people would look at our car-buying experience is that we saw a model that looked good enough to interest us then we did research and applied our reason and came to a rational decision. The reality is quite different. The amateur hypnotist in me knows that our visceral reaction to the car was the beginning and end of the “thinking” that went into the purchase. Our powers of reason did some due diligence to make sure it met our basic requirements, but we already knew it would. The purchase was an irrational decision that tried, and failed, to sell itself to me as the product of reason.

It is tremendously useful to know when people are using reason and when they are rationalizing the irrational. You’re wasting your time if you try to make someone see reason when reason is not influencing the decision. If you’ve ever had a frustrating political debate with your friend who refuses to see the logic in your argument, you know what I mean. But keep in mind that the friend sees you exactly the same way.

When politicians tell lies, they know the press will call them out. They also know it doesn’t matter. Politicians understand that reason will never have much of a role in voting decisions. A lie that makes a voter feel good is more effective than a hundred rational arguments. That’s even true when the voter knows the lie is a lie. If you’re perplexed at how society can tolerate politicians who lie so blatantly, you’re thinking of people as rational beings. That worldview is frustrating and limiting. People who study hypnosis start to view humans
as moist machines that are simply responding to inputs with programmed outputs. No reasoning is involved beyond eliminating the most absurd options. Your reasoning can prevent you from voting for a
total
imbecile, but it won’t stop you from supporting a half-wit with a great haircut.

If your view of the world is that people use reason for their important decisions, you are setting yourself up for a life of frustration and confusion. You’ll find yourself continually debating people and never winning except in your own mind. Few things are as destructive and limiting as a worldview that assumes people are mostly rational.

On an episode of
The Bachelorette,
a show on ABC, one of the contending single men played a practical joke on the young woman he hoped to marry. The joke involved taking her to his parents’ home and convincing her that he still lived there, which he didn’t. The joke was well executed, complete with a fake bedroom that was a disgusting mess. What the suitor failed to understand is that the bachelorette would still
feel
the scenario in the joke long after the truth was revealed. In the bachelorette’s mind—the irrational part that we all have—the memory of this fellow being a live-at-home loser was like a stain that couldn’t be removed. I think the bachelorette genuinely appreciated the joke and had a good laugh. But my wife and I turned to each other and said, “He’s toast.” He was eliminated soon after. We can’t know how much impact the joke had on the bachelorette’s decision, but my training with hypnosis tells me it was probably huge.

Apple owes much of its success to Steve Jobs’s understanding that the way a product makes users feel trumps most other considerations, including price. If Steve Jobs had seen people as rational beings, he might have followed a path similar to Dell, selling highly capable machines at the lowest possible price. Dell succeeded too, of course, but if buyers were rational, there would have been only one computer manufacturer left after about a year; consumers would always buy the best computer for the money and drive out the bad players overnight. Luckily for Dell and several other Windows computer manufacturers, there are enough irrational people with poor information to keep several companies afloat so long as their products are confusingly similar. Jobs’s worldview led him to a business model with high margins, whereas Windows computers have become commodities.

If you feel I’m overstating the case that people are irrational, allow me to put some boundaries on that idea. People certainly make the
small decisions based on rational considerations. You probably invest your money in ways that are prudent, or so you think. But keep in mind that the financial meltdown of 2009 happened because even the best minds in finance were irrationally optimistic about financial instruments they couldn’t hope to understand.

Rational behavior is especially useless in any situation that is too complex for a human to grasp. Cell-phone companies exploit that fact by offering pricing plans that are too complicated to compare with the competition. (I coined the word “confusopoly” to describe that strategy.) The intent is to prevent consumers from using whatever small reasoning power they possess to compare prices and features. Instead, consumers make largely uninformed decisions and convince themselves they did well. I speak from experience, having moved from one cell phone carrier to another recently, while planning a third move soon. I tell myself that each of the moves was based on price, coverage, and features. But reason didn’t help me the first two times I chose a cell phone carrier, and it probably won’t help the next time because the pricing plans are intentionally hard to compare.

I don’t think you need to become a hypnotist to understand human psychology, although it helps. But I do think a working knowledge of psychology is essential to your success—both personally and professionally. Consider it a lifelong learning process. You’ll be glad you did. Over time it starts to feel like a superpower that allows you to understand things that confuse and confound those around you.

I never took a writing class in high school or in college. I learned the basics in English classes and that seemed good enough. I could write sentences that people understood. What else did I need?

I did notice that some people in the business world wrote with an impressive level of clarity and persuasiveness. But I figured that was just because those people were extra smart. It never occurred to me that there was some technique involved and that we unwashed citizens could easily learn it.

One day during my corporate career I signed up for a company-sponsored class in business writing. This was part of my larger strategy of learning as much as I could about whatever might someday be
useful while my employer was willing to foot the bill. I didn’t have high hopes that the class would change my life. I was just looking for some tips and tricks for better writing.

I was very wrong about how useful the class would be. If I recall, the class was only two afternoons long. And it was life altering.

As it turns out, business writing is all about getting to the point and leaving out all of the noise. You think you already do that in your writing, but you probably don’t.

Consider the previous sentence. I intentionally embedded some noise. Did you catch it? The sentence that starts with “You think you already do that” includes the unnecessary word “already.” Remove it and you get exactly the same meaning: “You think you do that.” The “already” part is assumed and unnecessary. That sort of realization is the foundation of business writing.