How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life (27 page)

Let’s talk about
the elephant in the room when it comes to any discussion of success: luck.

My worldview is that
all
success is luck if you track it back to its source. Steve Jobs needed to both be born with Steve Jobs’s DNA and meet a fellow named Steve Wozniak. If Bill Gates had been born where I was born, he would have been shooting woodchucks on weekends to help the local dairy farmers instead of learning to program computers. Warren Buffett makes a similar observation about his own skills, saying, in effect, that if he had been born in an earlier time, his natural talents wouldn’t have matched the opportunities.

My worldview is that every element of your personality, from your perseverance to your risk tolerance to your ambition to your intelligence, is a product of pure chance. You needed the genes you were born with and the exact experiences of your life to create the person you are with the opportunities you have. Every decision you make is a simple math product of those variables.

What good is a book that discusses success if success is entirely luck? That’s a perfectly reasonable thing to wonder. And it matters because if you believe all success is based on luck, you’re not likely to try as hard as if you believe success comes from hard work. No matter what genes and circumstances you have, history tells us you still need to work hard to pull it off. Does a belief in pure luck work against you?

It can, but it doesn’t need to.

This
book has just become part of your experience. If I did my job right, some parts of it will repeat in your head and be reinforced by your own observations. As with any experience, you can’t help but be changed by a book, if only a trivial amount. But everyone is different. One book can have a profound effect on one person and a tiny impact on another.

In the coming year, assuming you’ve made it through this entire book, notice how many times you are reminded of something I wrote. Is there a time you don’t feel like exercising but you remember my trick of putting on your exercise clothes anyway? Do you steer clear of simple carbs for lunch because you’ve noticed they make you sleepy during the day? Are you looking for ways to turn your failures into something good?

You wouldn’t buy a book if it didn’t have the potential to change you in some way, even if that change is just entertainment or an increase in your knowledge. Books change us automatically, just as any experience does. And if a book helps you see the world in a more useful way or amps up your energy level, it becomes part of the fabric of your personal luck.

You’re a different person now than you were when you started this book, literally. Some of your cells have died and been replaced. Your body has matured, even if only by a few hours. And your brain has modified its internal structure based on its chemistry and all of your outside influences, including what you’ve read. If anything in this book sticks in your mind, it will probably get reinforced over time. You’re a new person now.

You don’t need to
do
anything as a result of reading this book. You’ve already changed. And if I’ve done my job right, you’ve changed in a way that will someday make people say you were lucky.

At the same
time I was creating
Dilbert
comics and writing this book, I was working with partners on a start-up called
CalendarTree.com
. It’s a Web site that helps you create a list of upcoming events and share a link so members of your team or group can add the events to their calendars with a few keystrokes. Our main selling point is that CalendarTree works across Google’s, Microsoft Outlook’s, and Apple’s calendars. If your family is juggling a lot of team/sport/activity/work schedules from different sources, CalendarTree can be a huge help.

At the time of this writing, the beta version is being readied for launch. I have no idea how successful the company will be because luck will surely play a big role. But the project serves as a good framework for showcasing the difference between systems and goals.

For starters, my life requires a lot of mental energy. Today I will write two comics, a blog post, and a chapter of this book. I will work through some complicated real-estate and trust issues, finish some legal work for the start-up, do some quality testing, and still make time for family. The key to my doing that many things is that I eat right, exercise daily, and have lots of control over my schedule, which allows me to match my tasks with my mental state. Later today, when I’m mentally spent, I’ll do a few hours of mindless drawing for the comics I already roughed out. So the first part of my system involves managing my mental and physical states so I can do more things with the right kind of energy.

Another
big part of my system involves generating lots of opportunities for luck to find me and taking the sort of risks that will allow me to come out ahead even if the project fails. CalendarTree fits that model perfectly. No matter how well the business actually does, I will come out of it with a detailed understanding of the start-up process, a new network of highly capable contacts, a wealth of new knowledge in half a dozen areas, and about seventy-five new jokes for
Dilbert.
No one can predict how a start-up will go after launch. The only thing I know for sure is that my partners and I plan to come out ahead. Every time we add new skills and broaden our network of contacts, our market value increases.

The nurses rolled
me into the operating room on a gurney. I was already drugged up with stress-reducing medicines that were working wonders. I couldn’t have been happier as the anesthesiologist asked me to count backward from a hundred. I made it to ninety-eight. It felt like dying happy.

The recovery period was wretched. I choked on nearly everything I tried to swallow, and that situation lasted months. I could whisper because that doesn’t involve the vocal cords. But my vocal cords might have been on the moon as far as my brain was concerned. They weren’t talking to each other.

Luckily, cartooning doesn’t require speaking. I was back to work in a few days, once the brain fog of surgery lifted. And I waited. Dr. Berke told me that nerves regenerate at a very predictable rate. In three and a half months, if the surgery worked, the nerves would make their first full connection between my brain and my vocal cords. And after that, it might take a year to speak in a truly normal way. And that was only if the surgery worked.

I often tried to speak during those months, just to see what would happen. But indeed, my brain was no longer communicating with my vocal cords. It was an odd feeling. So I whispered when I was at home, wrote notes when I was in noisy environments, choked on everything that went down my throat, and waited. I also repeated my affirmations in my head, if for no other reason than to prop up my optimism:
I, Scott Adams, will speak perfectly.

Three
and a half months after the surgery, almost to the day, Shelly stood in our living room and stared at me with disbelief. She said, “You just …
talked
.” And indeed I had. It wasn’t much of a voice. It was weak and breathy and I couldn’t sustain it beyond a few words at a time. But right on schedule, my brain and my vocal cords were becoming reacquainted. It wasn’t success. It was just a start. I had months to go before knowing if the surgery had worked in any meaningful way. And I was worlds away from fulfilling my affirmation of speaking “perfectly.” But it was something. It was a lot. I cried.

In the months that followed, my voice steadily improved. The dropping of syllables that defines spasmodic dysphonia was 100 percent gone, but my voice was weak, uneven, and sometimes hoarse. Luckily, these were more fixable problems, given time and practice. And by that point I was quite knowledgeable about proper voice technique, thanks to my many hours of voice therapy while I was searching for a cure.

Interestingly, my brain was no longer practiced in vocal fluency. Long after my vocal cords were functioning normally, I had trouble forming coherent sentences. Speaking fluently in full sentences was something I hadn’t done for nearly four years. But over time, my fluency returned too.

Today, several years after the surgery, I can’t say I’ve achieved my affirmation of speaking “perfectly,” if such a thing even exists. I had a weak and nasally voice before I ever got spasmodic dysphonia, so after surgery that seemed like the realistic upper limit for my recovery. And for most of my life people couldn’t hear me over crowd noise because my tone seemed to blend exactly with the background. For me, getting back to normal meant getting back to a crappy voice. That would have felt like success.

To my surprise, that’s not exactly what happened. Thanks largely to all of my voice training before the operation, and what Dr. Berke hypothesized might have been a “latent spasmodic dysphonia” all my life, I ended up with a far more functional voice than ever before. I have no problem projecting in noisy environments, and since much of life is noisy, that is a big, big improvement.

I still get a bit hoarse after exercise. And I’ll never have a radio-quality voice. So aesthetically my voice remains less than ideal. But functionally, my voice is indeed perfect. I have escaped from my prison cell of silence. And life has never been more enjoyable or more satisfying.

But
there’s one more thing I need to do, if you recall, or perhaps a few more things. I wasn’t planning a simple escape from my voice prison. I promised myself that if I escaped, I would free the other inmates, kill the warden, and burn down the prison. That was one of my big motivations for this book. I wrote it, in part, for some poor soul in the middle of nowhere who has lost his voice to spasmodic dysphonia, and with it all enjoyment of life. It’s also for anyone who has an unsolvable problem, healthwise or otherwise. If you think your odds of solving your problem are bad, don’t rule out the possibility that what is really happening is that you are bad at estimating odds.