How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life (19 page)

If you see
humor as an optional form of entertainment, you’re missing some of its biggest benefits: People who enjoy humor are simply more attractive than people who don’t. It’s human nature to want to spend time with people who can appreciate a good laugh or, better yet, cause one.

Take it from me when I say a good sense of humor can compensate for a lot of other shortcomings in one’s looks and personality. Humor makes average-looking people look cute and uninteresting people seem entertaining. Studies show that a good sense of humor even makes you seem smarter.
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One study showed that women seek out men with a better sense of humor because it can signal that they may be “amusing, kind, understanding, dependable.”
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Best of all, and central to the theme of this book, humor raises your energy, and that can reverberate into everything you do at school, at work, or in your personal life. The boost of energy will even make you more willing to exercise, and that will raise your overall energy even more.

Humor also transports your mind away from your daily troubles. Humor puts life in perspective and sometimes helps you laugh at even the worst of your problems.

Because humor directly influences your energy levels, it touches every part of your life that requires concentration and willpower. And for the most part, humor is free and easily accessible. The Internet is full of humor. If you don’t have funny friends, find
some. If you’re a reader, choose funny books. If you go to movies, choose the funny ones first and avoid anything you know will end on a sad note.

Sometimes you want to dispense a bit of your own humor. That comes naturally to some people but not most. In my experience, most people think they have a sense of humor, and to some extent that’s true. But not all senses of humor are created equal. So I thought it would be useful to include some humor tips for everyday life.

In two of my other books I talk a bit about my formula for writing humor, so I won’t repeat that here. If you’re interested in creating written humor, check out
The Joy of Work,
Dilbert 2.0,
and
Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain!
In those books I talk about the tricks and mechanics of writing humor.

You don’t have to be the joke teller in the group in order to demonstrate your sense of humor. You can be the one who steers the conversation to fun topics that are ripe for others to add humor. Every party needs a straight person. You’ll appear fun and funny by association.

When it comes to in-person humor, effort counts a lot. When people see you trying to be funny, it frees them to try it themselves. So even if your own efforts at humor fall short, you might be freeing the pent-up humor in others. People need permission to be funny in social or business settings because there’s always a risk that comes with humor. You will do people a big favor when you remove some of that risk by going first. For in-person humor, quality isn’t as important as you might think. Your attitude and effort count for a lot.

Obviously you want to avoid the label of “tries too hard” when it comes to humor. That’s generally a problem only if you laugh too vigorously at your own jokes or other people’s jokes. So-called dry humor is the best strategy if you plan to go for quantity.

I say quality is overrated when it comes to humor, but you do need to achieve a minimum threshold. And that usually means avoiding a handful of traps. If you avoid the traps, you’re golden. Allow me to map the traps for you. I’ll start with a summary then explain.

Some
people—and I was one of them—believe that humorous complaints about the little aggravations of life constitute humor, and sometimes that is the case. The problem comes when you start doing too much gripe-based humor. One funny observation about a problem in your life can be funny, but five is just complaining, no matter how witty you think you are. Funny complaints can wear people out.

Self-deprecating humor is usually the safest type, but here again you don’t want to overshoot the target. One self-deprecating comment is a generous and even confident form of humor. You have to be at least a bit self-assured to mock yourself in front of others. But if you do it too often, you can transform in the eyes of others from a confident jokester to a Chihuahua.

Don’t make fun of people too often. If that starts to look like a pattern, people will assume you’re talking behind their backs as well.

Beware of puns and other clever wordplay. The only people who appreciate puns are the people who can do them. It’s like water polo; it’s hard to appreciate the sport unless you’ve played it. If you don’t know for sure that you’re dealing with hard-core pun lovers, avoid puns completely. Otherwise you’re just begging for a courtesy snort or an eye roll.

Humor also makes you more creative, at least in the short run.
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I think it has something to do with the fact that humor is a violation of straight-line thinking. Humor temporarily shuts down the commonsense program in your moist robot brain and boots the random idea generator. At least it feels that way to me, figuratively speaking. Perhaps all that is happening is that humor makes one feel energized and relaxed at the same time and that is bound to help creativity.

One of the most reliable, albeit sexist, generalizations I’ve noticed over the years is that women tend to laugh at stories involving bad things happening to people, such as an attractive girl taking a face-plant into a mud puddle on the way to the prom. Guys like that sort of humor too, but my observation is that men are far more likely to enjoy traditional jokelike stories that are more engineered than organic.

Know your audience. Some people believe that bathroom humor
and references to genitalia are the only valid forms of humor. Others look for cleverness. You won’t win anyone over to your preferred brand of humor. It’s better to adapt to what others want to hear, assuming your goal is to be liked.

People generally broadcast their sense of humor from the moment you meet. You can observe what people laugh at, what sort of stories they tell, and whether they have an edgy personality. If I hear someone say “Gosh” or “Holy mackerel,” I leave out the profanity from my stories. If I say something mildly clever and get a reaction, I know I can turn the cleverness spigot on full. It’s a good idea to test an approach before committing.

My friend Jim tells a funny story about his colonoscopy appointment. Per his doctor’s instructions, he purged himself the day before the appointment by drinking a powerful laxative and spending the better part of the day in the bathroom. As Jim tells it, he was “squeaky clean” in his backdoor region by the time he visited the doctor.

At this point in the story you can see the structure developing. As the listener, you already know something bad is going to happen to Jim, and it will somehow involve his anal area. That’s the sign of a good story. Now back to it …

As Jim tells the story, the cleansing process was a long and unpleasant one. But since he only needs to do it once every year or so, it’s worth the unpleasantness. Jim walked into the doctor’s office and proudly announced his readiness for the colonoscopy. The receptionist checked her calendar and said, “Your appointment is … tomorrow.”

That’s the punch line, and it illustrates two interesting points about storytelling. First, you can probably sense that the story would be far funnier in person. You will discover that some types of humor work best in written form and others work best in person. Jim’s story is an in-person type. As you read it here, you probably managed little more than a smile, if that. Told in person, it gets a huge laugh every time.

The second interesting point is that Jim’s story saves the “bad part” for your imagination. His second day of cleansing will obviously be unpleasant, but the joke ends with the simple knowledge that unpleasant
times are ahead. In general, you want your punch line to inspire listeners to complete the story—including the bad part—in their own minds. That allows every person to imagine the ending in the way that is most amusing.

An engineered joke is one that includes an unlikely or surprising solution to a problem, much the way an engineer discovers a novel way to fix something that is broken.

For example, in 2010 the world watched the drama of the Chilean coal miners who were trapped underground for days. A small hole from the surface to their tiny underground space was their only source of oxygen, food, and water. The world was emotionally connected to these miners, praying for their rescue.

Meanwhile, stories started emerging that some of the miners had both wives and mistresses. My friend Laura heard the stories of the mistresses and quipped, “If I were one of those wives, I’d be shoveling dirt down that air hole.”

That’s an engineering solution to a problem not normally solved by engineering. You can visualize the angry wife hearing the news of her husband’s mistress and shoveling dirt down the hole while cursing. It’s a funny image, at least for people who have a warped sense of humor. (I laughed for about a week.)

I realize that my stereotypes about the type of humor that women enjoy versus men won’t hold for all people. For example, Laura created one of the best-engineered jokes I’ve heard. But I think you’ll find the gender generalization about humor to be about 80 percent true.

In
my book
The Dilbert Future,
I described my odd experience with something called affirmations. You’ll need to know the backstory about my experience with affirmations to have a context for understanding my unwavering optimism against long odds, including my voice problem.

Affirmations are simply the practice of repeating to yourself what you want to achieve while imagining the outcome you want. You can write it, speak it, or just think it in sentence form. The typical form of an affirmation would be “I, Scott Adams, will become an astronaut.” The details of affirmations probably don’t matter much because the process is about improving your focus, not summoning magic.

Apparently I failed badly at my first attempt to write about affirmations in
The Dilbert Future.
I had intended to make a point about the limits of human perception and how they might be holding us back. Based on the angry e-mail I got and the buzz on the Internet, apparently most people interpreted my point to mean I believe in magic. The skeptics of the world were apoplectic about what they perceived as my promotion of magical thinking to an irrational and gullible public.

So let me start by clearly stating that I don’t believe in magic. But like most of you, I have experienced several events in my life that are indistinguishable from magic in the same way a caveman might perceive
your phone as magic.
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My point then and now is that you don’t need to know why something works to take advantage of it. A caveman could successfully use a phone, assuming someone taught him how, while continuing to believe its inner workings were based on magic. His faulty perceptions would have no impact on the usefulness of the phone, at least until it broke and he started praying to it.

Affirmations might be a bit like the caveman and the phone. You can make your own judgment about whether my story that follows is a case of coincidence, selective memory, simple luck, hard work, greater focus, tuning my mind, hidden talent, or whatever you like. My perception (which I assume for the sake of consistency is flawed) is that affirmations are useful and I have no idea why.

Let me simply tell you what happened when I tried affirmations, and you can judge for yourself. But let’s agree to rule out magic as one of the options.

As I mentioned earlier, in my midtwenties I took classes to learn hypnosis, and I got to know some of the students outside of class. One of my classmates called me at home to say she had read a book about affirmations, tried it, and experienced some hugely unlikely results, at least according to her own estimate of the odds. She strongly recommended I try it. It would cost me nothing but time, which I had in abundance during those years, so I said I’d give it a try. My real agenda was to debunk it. I assumed it was complete bullshit. But it is my preference to be open-minded when I can manage it, so I went into it with the intention of giving it a fair try.

My first affirmation was “I, Scott, will become rich.” The long version of the story involves two ridiculously lucky stock picks that came to me out of nowhere in separate flashes of something that felt like intuition. But I didn’t trust affirmations enough to invest heavily in stocks that came to my attention through some sort of irrational process. I invested nothing in the first stock because of a paperwork
snafu, and it subsequently went to the moon. I bought and quickly sold the second stock for a respectable gain and then watched from the sidelines as it too zoomed up. Both stocks were big stories that year and among the top gainers out of a field of perhaps ten thousand possible stocks. I didn’t pick any other stocks during that time.

My affirmation failed to make me rich, at least right away. But I wondered: What were the odds that I could pick two of the best stocks of the year, back to back, with zero research? Obviously it could be pure luck. A monkey could pick two winning stocks in a row at least some of the time. But it was enough of a tease to encourage me to try again with another affirmation.

My second attempt involved a girl I perceived to be far out of my league. I’ll shortcut that story by saying a series of coincidences lined up to make the unlikely happen, albeit briefly. But again, this wasn’t proof that affirmations work. Maybe I’m just a good stock picker and far more handsome than my lying mirror is willing to admit. Whatever the real reason for my success, I got enough of a payoff to encourage me to keep trying affirmations just in case there was something to them.

My next affirmation was more personal than I can describe here. But it happened to be the type of thing for which I could calculate the odds with some degree of certainty, similar to how you might know a lottery winner beat odds of ten million to one. In my case, I beat odds that I calculated to be somewhere in the ten-thousand-to-one range, and none of it required hard work, skill, or connections.

I pause here to acknowledge the possibility that selective memory is behind my perceptions. Perhaps I tried lots of affirmations and only remember the ones that seemed to work. I can’t rule that out. Maybe I was a good stock picker, a total stud who didn’t realize it, and lucky like a lottery winner. Or perhaps I am terrible at estimating the odds of particular events happening. Any one of those explanations is possible.

I tried affirmations again. This time it was in service of a bet. My coworker at the bank had signed up for a class to help raise her GMAT test scores. That’s the test you take to qualify for a master’s degree program in business, better known as an MBA. I had taken the test in my senior year of college and scored a mediocre seventy-seventh percentile, meaning 23 percent of the people who took the test did better. It wasn’t good enough to get into a top school, and so I had
abandoned that dream. But for some reason that I don’t even understand in hindsight, I bet my coworker that I could retake the test and beat her next score, whatever that might be. And I boldly (stupidly) proclaimed I would do it without a prep class. It was a dumb bet, given that she had scored in the eighty-sixth percentile on her first try and expected to do better because of the class.

I took some practice tests at home and never scored much better than my original seventy-seventh percentile. I decided to put my affirmations to the test. I wanted to visualize a specific result, so I picked the ninety-fourth percentile because I thought that would be high enough to win the bet. I visualized opening the mail and seeing the “94” on my test-result form.

On test day I felt I did no better than I had on my practice tests, but I kept up my affirmations on the ninety-fourth percentile and waited for the results in the mail. A few weeks later the results arrived. I opened the letter and looked in the box with my overall score. It said 94.

Perhaps I’m just a good test taker and my bet with a coworker inspired me. And perhaps hitting the exact score of 94 was nothing but a coincidence. All I knew for sure is that if affirmations had any kind of value, I should set my sights higher. But for the next few years I focused on my day job and didn’t use affirmations because things seemed to be going generally well without any help. I graduated from the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley and assumed I was on my way to becoming a CEO of something important someday, and I didn’t think I needed any help to get there.

That plan did not work out.

The next time I used affirmations it was in pursuit of the rarest, most desirable job I have ever imagined. The affirmation went like this: “I, Scott Adams, will be a famous cartoonist.”

That worked out better.
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