How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life (7 page)

We humans want
many things: good health, financial freedom, accomplishment, a great social life, love, sex, recreation, travel, family, career, and more. The problem with all of this wanting is that the time you spend chasing one of those desires is time you can’t spend chasing any of the others. So how do you organize your limited supply of time to get the best result?

The way I approach the problem of multiple priorities is by focusing on just one main metric: my energy. I make choices that maximize my personal energy because that makes it easier to manage all of the other priorities.

Maximizing my personal energy means eating right, exercising, avoiding unnecessary stress, getting enough sleep, and all of the obvious steps. But it also means having something in my life that makes me excited to wake up. When I get my personal energy right, the quality of my work is better, and I can complete it faster. That keeps my career on track. And when all of that is working, and I feel relaxed and energetic, my personal life is better too.

You might be familiar with a television show that was called
The Dog Whisperer
. On the show, Cesar Millan, a dog-training expert, helped people get their seemingly insane dogs under control. Cesar’s main trick involved training the humans to control their own emotional states, because dogs can pick up crazy vibes from their owners. When the owners learned to control themselves, the dogs calmed down too. I think this same method applies to humans interacting
with other humans. You’ve seen for yourself that when a sad person enters a room, the mood in the room drops. And when you talk to a cheerful person who is full of energy, you automatically feel a boost. I’m suggesting that by becoming a person with good energy, you lift the people around you. That positive change will improve your social life, your love life, your family life, and your career.

When I talk about increasing your personal energy, I don’t mean the frenetic, caffeine-fueled, bounce-off-the-walls type of energy. I’m talking about a calm, focused energy. To others it will simply appear that you are in a good mood. And you will be.

Before I became a cartoonist, I worked in a number of awful corporate jobs. But I still enjoyed going to work, partly because I exercised most evenings and usually woke up feeling good, and partly because I always had one or two side projects going on that had the potential to set me free. Cartooning was just one of a dozen entrepreneurial ideas I tried out during my corporate days. For years, the prospect of starting “my own thing” and leaving my cubicle behind gave me an enormous amount of energy.

The main reason I blog is because it energizes me. I could rationalize my blogging by telling you it increases traffic on
Dilbert.com
by 10 percent or that it keeps my mind sharp or that I think the world is a better place when there are more ideas in it. But the main truth is that blogging charges me up. It gets me going. I don’t need another reason.

This book is another example of something that gets my energy up. I like to think that someone might read this collection of ideas and find a few thoughts that help. That possibility is tremendously motivating for me. So while writing takes me away from my friends and family for a bit, it makes me a better person when I’m with them. I’m happier and more satisfied with my life. The energy metric helps make my choices easier.

“Energy” is a simple word that captures a mind-boggling array of complicated happenings. For our purposes I’ll define your personal energy as anything that gives you a positive lift, either mentally or physically. Like art, you know it when you see it. Examples will help.

For me, shopping is an energy killer. The moment I walk into a busy store, I feel the energy drain from my body. The exhaustion starts as a mental thing, but within minutes I feel as if my body had been through a marathon. Shopping is simply exhausting for me.

Your
situation might be different. For some people, shopping is a high. It boosts energy. So using my example, a person like me should seek to minimize shopping (and I do), while a person who gets a buzz from it should indulge, so long as it doesn’t take too much away from other priorities in life.

Managing your personal energy is like managing budgets in a company. In business, every financial decision in one department is connected to others. If the research and development group cuts spending today, eventually that decision will ripple through the organization and reduce profits in some future year. Similarly, when you manage your personal energy, it’s not enough to maximize it in the short run or in one defined area. Ideally, you want to manage your personal energy for the long term and the big picture. Having one more cocktail at midnight might be an energy boost at the time, but you pay for it double the next day.

At this point in the book, allow me to pause and acknowledge your entirely appropriate skepticism about my notion that organizing your life around the concept of personal energy is useful. I applaud your healthy skepticism. But I’ll ask you to hold off on judging the usefulness of personal energy as an organizing principle until you see how it’s woven into the following chapters.

By analogy, imagine explaining the idea of capitalism to someone who had never heard of it. You’d be greeted with severe skepticism and legitimate questions:

The honest answer to all of those concerns is that they are entirely valid. Capitalism is rotten at every level, and yet it adds up to something extraordinarily useful for society over time. The paradox of capitalism is that adding a bunch of bad-sounding ideas together creates something incredible that is far more good than bad. Capitalism inspires people to work hard, to take reasonable risks, and to create value for customers. On the whole, capitalism channels selfishness in
a direction that benefits civilization, not counting a few fat cats who have figured out how to game the system.

You have the same paradox with personal energy. If you look at any individual action that boosts your personal energy, it might look like selfishness.
Why are you going skiing when you should be working at the homeless shelter, you selfish bastard!

My proposition is that organizing your life to optimize your personal energy will add up to something incredible that is more good than bad.

As I write this paragraph, my wife and our good friends are wondering why I’m selfishly lagging behind and not meeting them for an afternoon of sitting in the sun. I’ll get there soon. And when I do, I’ll feel energized and satisfied and be far more fun to be around. No one will think worse of me in the long run for being thirty minutes behind for a full day of fun that they have already started. But everyone will appreciate that I’m in a better mood when I show up. That’s the trade-off. Like capitalism, some forms of selfishness are enlightened.

One of the most important tricks for maximizing your productivity involves matching your mental state to the task. For example, when I first wake up, my brain is relaxed and creative. The thought of writing a comic is fun, and it’s relatively easy because my brain is in exactly the right mode for that task. I know from experience that trying to be creative in the midafternoon is a waste of time. By 2:00
P.M.
all I can do is regurgitate the ideas I’ve seen elsewhere. At 6:00
A.M.
I’m a creator, and by 2:00
P.M.
I’m a copier.

Everyone is different, but you’ll discover that most writers work either early in the morning or past midnight. That’s when the creative writing juices flow most easily.

When lunchtime rolls around, I like to grab a quick snack and go to the gym or play tennis. At that time of day I have plenty of energy, and it makes exercise seem like a good idea. I know that if I wait until after dinner I won’t have the sort of physical energy I need to talk myself into exercising. In my twenties I could exercise at midnight with no problem, so keep in mind that you might want to make adjustments to your daily patterns over time.

My
comic-creating process is divided into two stages to maximize my natural energy cycles. In the late afternoon and early evening my hand is steady. I’m relaxed from exercising and ready to do some simple, mindless, mechanical tasks such as drawing the final art for
Dilbert
or paying bills online. It’s the perfect match of my energy level with a mindless task. Without the exercise I wouldn’t have the attention span to handle boring tasks. I would be bouncing around from one thing to another and accomplishing nothing.

Most people aren’t lucky enough to have a flexible schedule. I didn’t have one either for the first sixteen years of my corporate life. So I did the next best thing by going to bed early and getting up at 4:00
A.M.
to do my creative side projects. One of those projects became the sketches for
Dilbert.

You might not think you’re an early-morning person. I didn’t think I was either. But once you get used to it, you might never want to go back. You can accomplish more by the time other people wake up than most people accomplish all day.

Some people are what I call simplifiers and some are optimizers. A simplifier will prefer the easy way to accomplish a task, while knowing that some amount of extra effort might have produced a better outcome. An optimizer looks for the very best solution even if the extra complexity increases the odds of unexpected problems. Allow me to compare and contrast the two approaches.

My wife, Shelly, is a world-class optimizer. I, on the other hand, cling to simplicity like a monkey on a coconut. As I write this chapter, we have plans tonight for a simple dinner thirty minutes from home followed by a movie that is near the restaurant. We’ll stop to pick up our friends who conveniently live on the shortest path to our destination. Once we get to the restaurant, we won’t even need to move the car. Parking will be easy, the drive will avoid all rush-hour traffic, and the timing will allow for a leisurely evening with no worries. I, the simplifier, made these plans.

In about an hour the optimizer in the family will return home from whatever she is optimizing and potentially introduce several changes to my plan. If the changes work, our evening will be even better than
I imagined, or perhaps more productive. That’s great! But the changes will also introduce new opportunities for things to go wrong. This balance works well for Shelly because she has nerves of steel. I’m more like a squirrel that wandered into a monster-truck rally. I don’t have the constitution to optimize.

Tonight Shelly might try to complete several urgent tasks before we leave, which might make us get a late start, but not too late. No big deal. Then perhaps Shelly will recommend that we drive her car, which has no gas, so we can refuel it on the way, because she needs it in the morning and won’t have much time then. Before we leave the house Shelly might produce a shopping bag with an item that needs to be returned to the store that is “right on the way.” Perhaps the receipt will be misplaced, which means there might be some negotiating in the store. All of this would make us fifteen minutes late for our dinner reservation and put us at risk of losing our table. That thought would spike my blood pressure until my head begins to look like the bottom of a thermometer, all red and bulbous. I would need to remind myself that Shelly makes her optimized plans work about 90 percent of the time.
Relax, Scott. Just relax.

Allow me to predict the rest of the story as if narrating in real time. I might be exaggerating a little just to paint the picture.

As we leave the house, Shelly suggests we take a shortcut that I am not familiar with. I’m driving, and Shelly tells me that all I need to do is listen to her directions. No problem. At least I think it’s no problem until her cell phone rings just when I need to know which way to go. Now Shelly is talking on the phone and solving some thorny issue such as missile defense or climate change while occasionally saying things that sound as if they might be meant for me. Does “right” mean I should turn right, or is she just agreeing with whomever she’s talking to on the phone?

Soon I am lost, and I look to Shelly for help. She waves me off because she’s deep into solving whatever problem is happening on the phone. I pull over and look at my watch. I get the brilliant idea of using GPS to find the store, but I’m not entirely sure which store it is. The shopping bag is in the trunk. So now I’m opening the trunk, finding the bag, and hoping to find the store’s address on my smart phone. But my phone has no Internet connection. So I drive while holding my phone like a signal meter, waiting for a data icon to appear and hoping the police are not watching.

I
find a signal, pull over, and try to find the store’s address, but it takes forever on my phone. Finally I get it! Now I enter the address into GPS, but I forget to change the route preferences from freeway to shortest route. Shelly sees me heading for an on-ramp during rush-hour traffic and starts gesturing in a way that means I should go in a different direction or possibly means something about chopping wood or taxiing a plane. I can’t interpret the gestures. I pull over and wait for the call to end.

By now we are so late that our plan will work only if the restaurant allows us to be thirty minutes late and there is a different movie that all four of us want to watch that starts later. This seems unlikely to me.

But as I said, 90 percent of the times that we try to optimize, we get several errands completed, get a perfectly good table, have a nice meal, and see a movie that might even be better than the one we first picked. Optimizing works often enough to reinforce the habit.

The cost of optimizing is that it’s exhausting and stress inducing, at least for people like me. Sometimes I think I’m literally going to have a heart attack from all of the optimizing. It also requires full concentration. I prefer simple, foolproof plans that allow my heart to beat normally and my mind to wander toward blissful thoughts of puppies and rose petals.