How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life (4 page)
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Authors: Scott Adams
Calendar Patent:
I had an idea for embedding ads in electronic calendars in a clever way that people would find useful. The idea was for a program to read your calendar entries and match your plans with vendor offers that made sense for the activities predicted by the calendar. For example, if you planned to go car shopping for a minivan next month, you would just put that entry on your calendar and vendors would populate the entry with local deals and offers. You would see the offers only if you clicked on them. The ads would be managed through a third party (in the “cloud,” as we might say today), so vendors would never directly see any user’s calendar information. The patent was rejected because a patent that was totally unrelated—meaning it had nothing to do with calendars at all—allegedly included the process I described. My reading of the existing patent was that it had nothing to do with my idea, but I consulted with my patent attorney and let it drop. Interestingly, the owner of the existing patent probably doesn’t know he’s sitting on a gold mine.
Keypad Patent:
I filed a patent on an idea for text entry on a ten-key keypad. This was in the pre–smart phone era, when people texted on their regular ten-key phones, tapping a key however many times it took to designate the character they intended. My idea involved mentally projecting a letter on the keypad and creating a two-key shortcut for each letter that was based on its shape characteristics. The patent was granted, but the evolution of phone technology quickly made it obsolete.
Dilberito:
During the busiest years of
Dilbert
’s climb into popular culture, I was often too busy to eat well. I also wanted to give back, as the saying goes, to a world that was being more generous than I thought my meager talent deserved. I came up with the idea of creating a food product that was fortified with 100 percent of your daily requirements of vitamins and minerals. I worked with a food expert, my only employee, who designed a line of burritos—dubbed the Dilberito—and successfully sold them into almost every
major grocery chain in the United States, plus 7-Eleven, Costco, and Walmart. In each case the product failed to sell for a variety of reasons, mostly related to shelf placement. Few products on the bottom shelf sell well, and we didn’t have the clout to earn better space. Also, nothing sells when your competitor sends people to “bury” you behind their own products on every store shelf—a common dirty trick that worked like a charm on us.
We also didn’t do much in the way of repeat business. The mineral fortification was hard to disguise, and because of the veggie and legume content, three bites of the Dilberito made you fart so hard your intestines formed a tail.
Several years and several million dollars later, I sold off the intellectual property and exited.
Restaurant 1:
After a chance encounter with an experienced restaurant manager, I agreed to partner with her to create a new restaurant in Pleasanton, California. We named the place Stacey’s Café because I figured she would work harder if her name was over the door. I did the funding, mentoring, and legal and financial stuff, and she did all of the creative, entrepreneurial, management stuff. The restaurant opened to long lines despite less-than-stellar food and service on day one. Profits poured in. The secret to our initial success was the low number of restaurants in the area relative to the population. Every restaurant in the area was busy regardless of quality or price.
What we didn’t expect was that as the food quality and service improved from mediocre to among the best in the valley, everything else trended the wrong way. Operating costs rose steadily and new restaurants started opening and nibbling at our customer base. While the first restaurant was still profitable, we decided our biggest problem was insufficient seating for the busiest nights, so …
Restaurant 2:
We opened a second restaurant five miles down the road, with a different menu, higher-end decor, and twice the space. It was also nearly triple the rent of the first. We figured that was okay because filling a space that large would be a gold mine. What we didn’t count on is that people don’t choose a restaurant because it’s large. We got our fair share of business, which would have been
just enough for a place half the size. Meanwhile, the economy tanked and big corporations that had planned on surrounding us with major campuses pulled out of the area. Our outdoor seating turned out to be a wind tunnel with major traffic noise. And customers found the decor too upscale and expensive for families, while not as exciting as a trip to nearby San Francisco for special meals. In the worst restaurant luck I have ever seen, a strip mall of nothing but restaurants opened within walking distance. The second restaurant bled money from the start and never came close to breakeven.
Meanwhile, the original restaurant turned unprofitable, thanks mostly to two major chain restaurants setting up shop nearby and cutting deeply into our business.
Then the legal problems started. We had one lawsuit or threatened lawsuit after another, mostly for ridiculous reasons. I can’t get into details because of settlement agreements, but three of the situations would make you vomit in your own mouth. None of the legal threats or lawsuits came from customers. It was the sort of stuff you’ve never even heard of. I had deep pockets and a big red bull’s-eye on my back.
I sold off the assets and got out of the restaurant business. I have to say the richness of the whole restaurant experience was totally worth the money. I was in a position to afford the losses without altering my lifestyle, so I don’t regret any of it. Eating dinner at a restaurant you own can be an extraordinarily good time. It sure beats cooking at home and washing the dishes. Of all my failures, I enjoyed the restaurants the most.
First Attempt at Cartooning:
My first attempt at professional cartooning involved sending some single-panel comics to the two magazines that paid the most:
Playboy
and the
New Yorker.
The comics were dreadful. Both magazines wisely rejected them.
Ninja Closet:
I had an idea for a Web site that would make it easier to know what gifts to buy for kids, especially kids that are not your own. Gift buying can be a huge hassle if your kid is getting invited to a birthday party every two weeks. Does little Timmy already have a particular toy? Does he want one? Who else is thinking of buying him the same toy? Who wants to pitch in for a more expensive
gift? The current process involves too much guesswork and too many e-mails and phone calls.
I decided to hire some inexpensive programmers in India to build a Web-based gift registry (essentially) for kids. I called it Ninja Closet because the metaphor was that friends and family could peek into your secret closet of wishes but also see what stuff you already owned, negotiate for shared gift buying, and more. I figured kids would love seeing what other kids owned too. No one would be able to see a kid’s closet unless a parent granted permission.
I still think it was a great idea, but managing programmers in India turned out to be impractical for me because of time differences, language issues, and my own time limitations. After too much time and expense on this side project, I let it go.
My Absolute Favorite Spectacular Failure
Most failures involve
bad luck, ignorance, and sometimes ordinary stupidity. One day in college I managed to combine all three into one experience. It was breathtaking.
In the winter of my senior year I started to think I might have the right stuff to become a good accountant and perhaps someday a CPA. I figured that career path would be a good way to learn the innards of business from the numbers side. I would need that sort of experience no matter what kind of business I someday started on my own. All I needed was an entry-level position with one of the so-called Big Eight (at the time) accounting firms. I managed to line up an interview in Syracuse, New York, a two-hour drive from campus.
The day of the interview featured a typical upstate New York half blizzard with ass-freezing temperatures. I decided I didn’t need a jacket for the trip because I was only going from building to car and back. This was only one of the remarkably stupid decisions I made that day.
My second mistake was not realizing I should wear a suit and tie to an interview with an accounting firm. I figured they knew I was in college, since it said so on my résumé, so why not dress like a college student? Yes, I was that ignorant. Remember, I didn’t even
know
anyone who worked in a traditional white-collar environment. Nor did I own a suit or a tie.
My interviewer took one look at me and remarked that apparently I didn’t know why I was there. He escorted me to the door and suggested that the next time I go to an interview perhaps I should wear a
suit. I was devastated. But my evening was far from over. So far I had only exercised my ignorance and my stupidity. The bad luck part of the day was ahead.
On the way home I took a newly constructed highway through a sparsely populated valley in the Catskill Mountains. My engine conked out and I managed to coast the car into a snowbank on the side of the road. There were no other cars on the road in either direction. It was after dark and the already-frosty temperature was dropping fast. I saw no signs of civilization for miles. The temperature was about zero degrees Fahrenheit. It wasn’t a good day to have left my jacket at home. In the days before cell phones, this was the worst-case scenario.
I knew I couldn’t stay in the car for long. The temperature inside started dropping the moment the engine died. I knew I couldn’t run back in the direction from which I had come because it had been miles since I’d seen a house. I wouldn’t make it that far. My only hope was to run forward and hope there were homes around a bend or over a hill. And so I started running.
In less than a minute the frozen air sucked the warmth from my body and distributed it into the atmosphere. My feet were like blocks of ice clunking on the frozen pavement. My breath formed cumulus clouds around my head. I lost most of the feeling in my hands. My ankles hardened. I figured I was about thirty minutes from falling into a frozen death sleep in the nearest snowbank. And now my legs were failing. I couldn’t go much farther, and when I stopped running, I knew the cold would finish me off.
As I struggled to stay upright and keep moving, I made myself a promise: If I lived, I would trade my piece-of-shit car for a one-way plane ticket to California and never see another f@$#!#& snowflake for the rest of my life.
Headlights appeared on the horizon. I stood in the middle of the road and signaled, like the frozen idiot I was, for the car to stop. A traveling shoe salesman in a beat-up station wagon saved my life. He drove me all the way back to campus.
A few months later, I kept my promise to myself. I traded my car to my sister for a one-way plane ticket to the vibrant economy and easy climate of northern California. It was the smartest decision I ever made. The experience of nearly dying in the frozen tundra of upstate New York inspired me to move to California. Thank you, failure. I no longer fear death when I go outdoors.
Goals Versus Systems
At the age
of twenty-one, college diploma in hand, I boarded an airplane for the first time in my life, destination California. I knew one thing about success: It wouldn’t be easy to find in Windham, New York, population two thousand. A few years earlier, my older and more adventurous brother Dave had driven his Volkswagen beetle cross-country to Los Angeles, looking for warmer weather and attractive women. He slept in his car and camped along the way. My plan was to fly to Los Angeles, sleep on his crumb-laden couch until I could find a job in banking, and make my home in the Golden State.
A few days before my flight to California I traded my rusted-out Datsun 510 to my sister for a one-way ticket to California. I proudly donned the cheap three-piece suit that my parents had given me as a college graduation present—my first real suit. At the time, I assumed everyone dressed in business or formal attire to fly. I grew up in a small town and I didn’t know many people who had flown in a commercial aircraft. My father had taken some flights twenty-some years earlier, but he didn’t volunteer much information about them, or anything else for that matter. He was a man of few words. I had only a few relatives nearby and none of them had ever flown. I was mostly guessing how the process worked, and I didn’t want to take the chance of getting kicked off the flight for being poorly dressed. That’s exactly the sort of mistake I make.
I also didn’t know how I would go about getting my suit ironed if it got wrinkled in my luggage. I figured I would be going on job interviews
as soon as I reached California and I needed my one and only suit to look relatively less hoboish. It just made sense to wear it on the flight.
I was seated next to a businessman who was probably in his early sixties. I suppose I looked like an odd duck with my serious demeanor, bad haircut, and cheap suit, clearly out of my element. He asked what my story was and I filled him in. I asked what he did for a living and he told me he was CEO of a company that made screws. Then he offered me some career advice. He said that every time he got a new job, he immediately started looking for a better one. For him, job seeking was not something one did when necessary. It was an ongoing process. This makes perfect sense if you do the math. Chances are the best job for you won’t become available at precisely the time you declare yourself ready. Your best bet, he explained, was to always be looking for the better deal. The better deal has its own schedule. I believe the way he explained it is that your job is not your job; your job is to find a better job.
This was my first exposure to the idea that one should have a system instead of a goal. The system was to continually look for better options. And it worked for this businessman, as he had job-hopped from company to company, gaining experience along the way, until he became a CEO. Had he approached his career with a specific goal in mind, or perhaps specific job objectives (e.g., his boss’s job), it would have severely limited his options. But for him, the entire world was his next potential job. The new job simply had to be better than the last one and allow him to learn something useful for the next hop.
Did the businessman owe his current employer loyalty? Not in his view. The businessman didn’t invent capitalism, and he didn’t create its rules. He simply played within the rules. His employers wouldn’t have hesitated to fire him at the drop of a hat for any reason that fit their business needs. He simply followed their example.
The second thing I learned on that flight—or confirmed, really—is that appearance matters. By the end of the flight, the CEO had handed me his card and almost guaranteed me a job at his company if I wanted it. Had I boarded the flight wearing my ratty jeans, threadbare T-shirt, and worn-out sneakers, things would have gone differently.
Throughout my career I’ve had my antennae up, looking for examples of people who use systems as opposed to goals. In most cases,
as far as I can tell, the people who use systems do better. The systems-driven people have found a way to look at the familiar in new and more useful ways.
To put it bluntly, goals are for losers. That’s literally true most of the time. For example, if your goal is to lose ten pounds, you will spend every moment until you reach the goal—if you reach it at all—feeling as if you were short of your goal. In other words, goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary. That feeling wears on you. In time, it becomes heavy and uncomfortable. It might even drive you out of the game.
If you achieve your goal, you celebrate and feel terrific, but only until you realize you just lost the thing that gave you purpose and direction. Your options are to feel empty and useless, perhaps enjoying the spoils of your success until they bore you, or set new goals and reenter the cycle of permanent presuccess failure.
The systems-versus-goals point of view is burdened by semantics, of course. You might say every system has a goal, however vague. And that would be true to some extent. And you could say that everyone who pursues a goal has some sort of system to get there, whether it is expressed or not. You could word-glue goals and systems together if you chose. All I’m suggesting is that thinking of goals and systems as very different concepts has power. Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous presuccess failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system.
That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.
The system-versus-goals model can be applied to most human endeavors. In the world of dieting, losing twenty pounds is a goal, but eating right is a system. In the exercise realm, running a marathon in under four hours is a goal, but exercising daily is a system. In business, making a million dollars is a goal, but being a serial entrepreneur is a system.
For our purposes, let’s say a
goal
is a specific objective that you either achieve or don’t sometime in the future. A
system
is something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run. If you do something every day, it’s a system. If you’re waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it’s a goal.
Language is messy, and I know some of you are thinking that exercising every day sounds like a goal. The common definition of goals would certainly allow that interpretation. For our purposes, let’s agree that goals are a reach-it-and-be-done situation, whereas a system is something you do on a regular basis with a reasonable expectation that doing so will get you to a better place in your life. Systems have no deadlines, and on any given day you probably can’t tell if they’re moving you in the right direction.
My proposition is that if you study people who succeed, you will see that most of them follow systems, not goals. When goal-oriented people succeed in big ways, it makes news, and it makes an interesting story. That gives you a distorted view of how often goal-driven people succeed. When you apply your own truth filter to the idea that systems are better than goals, consider only the people you know personally. If you know some extra successful people, ask some probing questions about how they got where they did. I think you’ll find a system at the bottom of it all, and usually some extraordinary luck. (Later in this book I’ll tell you how to improve your odds of getting lucky.)
Consider Olympic athletes. When one Olympian wins a gold medal, or multiple gold medals, it’s a headline story. But for every medalist there are thousands who had the goal of being on that podium and failed. Those people had goals and not systems. I don’t consider daily practices and professional coaching a system because everyone knows in advance that the odds of any specific individual winning a medal through those activities are miniscule. The minimum
requirement of a system is that a reasonable person expects it to work more often than not. Buying lottery tickets is not a system no matter how regularly you do it.
On the system side, consider Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook. It’s apparent that his system for success involved studying hard, getting extraordinary grades, going to a top college—in his case Harvard—and developing a skill set with technology that virtually guaranteed riches in today’s world. As it turns out, his riches came quickly through the explosive growth of Facebook. But had that not worked out, he would likely be a millionaire through some other start-up or just by being a highly paid technical genius for an existing corporation. Zuckerberg’s system (or what I infer was his system) was almost guaranteed to work, but no one could have imagined at the time how well.
Warren Buffett’s system for investing involves buying undervalued companies and holding them forever, or at least until something major changes. That system (which I have grossly oversimplified) has been a winner for decades. Compare that with individual investors who buy a stock because they expect it to go up 20 percent in the coming year; that’s a goal, not a system. And not surprisingly, individual investors generally experience worse returns than the market average.
I have a friend who is a gifted salesman. He could have sold anything, from houses to toasters. The field he chose (which I won’t reveal because he wouldn’t appreciate the sudden flood of competition) allows him to sell a service that almost always auto-renews. In other words, he can sell his service once and enjoy ongoing commissions until the customer dies or goes out of business. His biggest problem in life is that he keeps trading his boat for a larger one, and that’s a lot of work. Observers call him lucky. What I see is a man who accurately identified his skill set and chose a system that vastly increased his odds of getting “lucky.” In fact, his system is so solid that it could withstand quite a bit of bad luck without buckling. How much passion does this fellow have for his chosen field? Answer: zero. What he has is a spectacular system, and that beats passion every time.