How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life (20 page)

When
you practice
affirmations and you happen to succeed in the area of your focus, it feels like extraordinary luck. That’s how you perceive it, anyway. The
Dilbert
success story is engorged with lucky-sounding events. I’ll describe some of the luckiest parts of my story so you can get a sense for how deep luck sometimes needs to run before you find success.

The biggest component of luck is timing. When the universe and I have been on a compatible schedule—entirely by chance—things have worked out swimmingly. When my timing has been off, no amount of hard work or talent has mattered.
Dilbert
was the best example of lucky timing you will ever see. It wasn’t a complete accident that luck found me; I put myself in a position where luck was more likely to happen. I was like a hunter who picks his forest location intelligently and waits in his blind for a buck to stroll by. The hunter still has to be lucky, but he manages his situation to increase his odds.

I did something similar. I tried a lot of different ventures, stayed optimistic, put in the energy, prepared myself by learning as much as I could, and stayed in the game long enough for luck to find me. I hoped a buck would eventually walk by, and with
Dilbert
it did.

Let me give you a snapshot of the luck (timing) that needed to happen for
Dilbert
to succeed.

For starters, I had to be born in a time in which newspapers existed and comics mattered. And I had to have the right genetic makeup for
the work and the right upbringing. And it helped a great deal that I was born in the United States.

My first comics editor, Sarah Gillespie, immediately saw the potential in
Dilbert
when she looked over the samples I submitted to United Media. Sarah was married to an engineer who worked at IBM. When he dressed for work, he wore a short-sleeved white button-up shirt with pens in his pocket, just like Dilbert. When the other syndication companies saw Dilbert and didn’t relate to him, they sent me polite rejection letters. When Sarah saw
Dilbert,
she related to both the content and the writing, and she championed the strip against some heavy objections within her company. Had someone else been in Sarah’s job, I believe
Dilbert
would have been rejected. There were only a handful of people in the industry who were gatekeepers for new comics. What were the odds that one of them would be married to a real-life Dilbert?

For the first few years after
Dilbert
’s launch, we had trouble getting any large metropolitan newspaper to pick it up. You need the first big paper to get on board before the others see it as a worthy risk.

One day an employee at the
Boston Globe,
whose job included looking at syndication submissions and recommending new comics to senior management, went on a vacation with her husband. She was driving; he was bored. The
Dilbert
sales packet happened to be in the car. The husband, who was—as luck would have it—an engineer, picked it up and started laughing. His wife didn’t relate to
Dilbert
the same way, but she trusted her husband’s reaction and recommended it for inclusion in the
Boston Globe.
With that sale in the bag, many of the newspapers in the Northeast followed suit.

But sales in the western United States were comatose. I later learned that the salesperson for that region wasn’t a fan of
Dilbert.
So when he went on sales calls he kept the
Dilbert
sales packet in his briefcase and showed other comics. Then the universe got involved: The salesman had a heart attack and died in a hotel room on the road. His replacement, John Matthews, identified
Dilbert
as the most sellable comic in United Media’s stable. And sell it he did, to every newspaper he visited. John is the best salesman I’ve ever seen. Had he not been available for the job, or had the original salesman lived,
Dilbert
might have been a small comic that ran in the Northeast for a few years before fading to obscurity.

The good timing for
Dilbert
was relentless. In the mid-1990s the
media was focusing on the disturbing trend of corporate downsizing, and
Dilbert
got pushed to the front of the conversation as the symbol of hapless office workers everywhere.
Dilbert
was on the covers of
Time, People, Newsweek, Fortune, Inc.,
and more. I modified
Dilbert
to be more workplace focused than it had originally been, and it became a perfect match of a comic with an era.

At about the same time, technology itself became a celebrity. The Internet exploded, the dot-com era happened, and all things technical were suddenly fascinating, even to the general public. In the eighties,
Dilbert
would have been nothing but another nerd comic. In the nineties,
Dilbert
symbolized the type of technology geniuses who were transforming life on planet Earth.
Dilbert
was unexpectedly and ironically “sexy.”

I had even more luck when Berke Breathed retired his popular comic strip
Bloom County
and opened up hundreds of spaces in newspapers. Later, Bill Watterson, the creator of
Calvin and Hobbes,
retired and opened up even more space. It was unprecedented for cartoonists at the top of their game, and so young, to retire. And the timing coincided with the growing spotlight on
Dilbert,
making it the most obvious replacement choice. Newspapers snapped it up like candy.

I mentioned my hand problem—the focal dystonia—in an earlier chapter. My career would have been over if not for the simultaneous development of Wacom’s Cintiq product, which allowed me to draw directly to the computer with no worries. What were the odds that the problem and the solution would happen at the same time? If my hand problem had happened five years earlier, I might have retired from cartooning.

The success of
Dilbert
is mostly a story of luck. But I did make it easier for luck to find me, and I was thoroughly prepared when it did. Luck won’t give you a strategy or a system—you have to do that part yourself.

I find it helpful to see the world as a slot machine that doesn’t ask you to put money in. All it asks is your time, focus, and energy to pull the handle over and over. A normal slot machine that requires money will bankrupt any player in the long run. But the machine that has rare yet certain payoffs, and asks for no money up front, is a guaranteed winner if you have what it takes to keep yanking until you get lucky. In that environment, you can fail 99 percent of the time, while knowing success is guaranteed. All you need to do is stay in the game long enough.

A few years
into my cartooning career, the
Wall Street Journal
asked me to write a guest editorial about the workplace. That article was titled “The Dilbert Principle,” and it got a great response from readers. An editor for Harper Business contacted me and asked if I would be willing to write a book around the same topic. I agreed and started writing. During that time, and usually while running on the treadmill at the gym, I repeated my new affirmation in my head: “I, Scott Adams, will be a number one best-selling author.”

The Dilbert Principle
started strong and within a few weeks hit number one on the
New York Times
nonfiction best-seller list. In a matter of months my follow-up book,
Dogbert’s Big Book of Business,
joined it in the number-two slot. The success of the two books brought me a lot of attention and put a turbo boost on sales of
Dilbert
to newspapers. The
Dilbert.com
Web site was getting huge traffic by the standards of the day, and I had a booming speaking career on the side. The licensing business for
Dilbert
took off too. Suddenly it seemed that everything I touched was working.

With so many good things happening I convinced myself that I could do just about anything that I set my mind to. I discounted the affirmations as being nothing more than a way to focus, and I figured I no longer needed that crutch.

So I didn’t use affirmations when I worked as coexecutive producer of the animated
Dilbert
TV show that ran for two half seasons on the now-defunct UPN network. The first half season did well, but we lost
our time slot the following season because of a simple communication problem that resulted in the show’s getting moved to a new time slot. Viewers had trouble finding the show and the ratings tanked. At the same time, the network decided to remake itself as a channel focusing on African American viewers.
Dilbert
was canceled after the second half season. I had mixed feelings about the show’s premature death because it was a lot of work, and not the fun kind.

I also didn’t use affirmations when I invested in my first or second restaurant, and in the long run, neither of those worked out.

I didn’t use affirmations when I started my vegetarian burrito company, and that never took off.

I can’t tell you that I believe affirmations
caused
my few successes, or that not doing affirmations doomed other projects to failure. I can only tell you what I did and when. As I’ve explained, there are a number of perfectly reasonable explanations for the pattern. The one that stands out in my mind is that I really had no love for the work involved in the TV show, the Dilberito, or the restaurants. And I felt relief when each ended. The pattern I noticed is that the affirmations only worked when I had a 100 percent unambiguous desire for success. If I could have snapped my fingers and made the TV show, the Dilberito, and the restaurants successful, I would have done it. But I knew I wouldn’t enjoy ongoing management of any one of them. Did my mixed feelings matter? I’ll never know.

I used affirmations only one more time. And in that case I had no mixed feelings. I wanted something as much as a person can want.

“I, Scott, will speak perfectly.”

Months had passed
since my last Botox shot to my vocal cords. My voice was so weak and unpredictable that it was a struggle to accomplish the simplest human interactions. I’m a natural optimist, but the reality was that spasmodic dysphonia had no cure and I was likely to go the rest of my life without ever again experiencing a conversation.

I couldn’t speak on the phone except to people who knew my situation and were willing to keep conversations to short yes-or-no answers. I couldn’t order my own food at restaurants, couldn’t talk to people at social gatherings, couldn’t continue my speaking tour, and generally couldn’t enjoy life. I was often depressed, which I understand happens to most people with this condition. The loneliness was debilitating.

Blogging kept me alive. When I wrote a blog post, I was communicating. People understood me, mostly, and left fascinating comments and responses. Blogging made me feel less lonely. It kept me sane, but only barely.

I wasn’t looking forward to the next several decades of life as a nontalker. It felt like my personal hell. But I hadn’t given up. I didn’t know how to give up.

Incurable health problems often attract quack cures. I tried most of the ones that weren’t dangerous. Drinking a certain brand of cough syrup didn’t work. Acupuncture didn’t work. Mineral supplements didn’t work. Stutter cures didn’t work. Three different approaches to
voice therapy didn’t work. The Alexander Technique
*
didn’t work. Iron supplements didn’t work. Changing my diet didn’t work.

I hadn’t spoken normally for over a year. It was slowly killing me.

But what I did have was a two-part system. In order to identify the pattern that caused my voice to be its worst, I created a spreadsheet and recorded every factor I guessed might be at work, including diet, hours of sleep, exercise, practice talking, and even the number of Diet Cokes consumed. If I could find the pattern behind my worst voice days, I would know what I needed to change. But no pattern emerged.

The second part of my system involved scouring the planet for any mention of the words “spasmodic dysphonia” in a medical context. Luckily, I was born in the right era, so the scouring was done by Google, using its Google Alerts function. I just plugged in the key words. Any mention of my condition anywhere on the Internet generated an e-mail message that went to my phone, which lives in my left-front pants pocket. I got several alerts per week, but none looked promising. Usually the articles on the Internet discussed the incurability of the condition, which was no surprise given that the medical consensus was that my condition was caused by a brain abnormality. Those are hard to fix.

No one wants to feel lonely and depressed. But on the plus side, it totally alters your appetite for risk. If someone had suggested a plan for fixing my voice that had a 50 percent chance of killing me, I would have taken it in a heartbeat.

I checked my phone often to see if any Google Alert e-mails had come in. And I waited.
Homo sapiens
have been around for 150,000 years. My best hope was that one of us, somewhere on earth, would figure out a cure for this problem within my lifetime, before the condition devoured what was left of my optimism. My odds were not good. But I was far from giving up. In fact, I was mad as hell, and for me, anger is sometimes enough. My attitude was always the same: Escape from my cell, free the other inmates, shoot the warden, and burn down the prison.

In my car, every day, I repeated over and over, “I, Scott Adams, will speak perfectly.” I believed it would happen because I
needed
to believe it.