Scott Adams on creating a writing routine, how to be happy, advice for career success, handling anxiety and stress, and getting published.
Scott Adams
A brief overview of Scott Adams before delving into his own words:
Who (Identity)
Scott Adams is an American cartoonist, author, and commentator, best known for creating the widely popular comic strip “Dilbert.” Adams’ work primarily focuses on satirizing corporate culture and workplace dynamics, bringing humor and insight into the daily lives of office workers around the world.
What (Contributions)
Adams’ most significant contribution to literature and popular culture is the “Dilbert” comic strip, which debuted in 1989. Through his sharp wit and keen observations, Adams has highlighted the absurdities and frustrations of corporate life. His work includes several best-selling books, such as “The Dilbert Principle” and “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big,” where he expands on his ideas about business, success, and personal development. His unique ability to blend humor with critical insights into corporate inefficiencies has earned him a dedicated following.
When (Period of Influence)
Scott Adams’ period of influence began in the late 1980s with the launch of “Dilbert” and continues to this day. The comic strip gained widespread popularity in the 1990s and has remained a staple in newspapers and online publications, reflecting ongoing trends and issues in the corporate world. Adams’ influence has extended through his books and social media presence, where he engages with a broad audience on topics ranging from business to politics.
Where (Geographic Focus)
Adams’ work is universally relatable but is particularly rooted in the American corporate environment. “Dilbert” captures the essence of office culture that resonates with employees globally. Adams himself has lived and worked in various parts of the United States, including New York and California, experiences that have shaped his understanding and portrayal of workplace dynamics.
Why (Artistic Philosophy)
Adams’ artistic philosophy revolves around using humor to expose and critique the inefficiencies and absurdities of corporate life. He believes in the power of satire to bring attention to serious issues in a way that is accessible and engaging. Adams often explores themes of bureaucracy, management incompetence, and the dehumanizing aspects of office work, aiming to provoke thought and entertain simultaneously.
How (Technique and Style)
Scott Adams’ technique and style are marked by their simplicity and directness. The “Dilbert” comic strip features minimalist art and straightforward dialogue, allowing the humor and message to take center stage. Adams employs a conversational tone, often drawing from his own experiences in the corporate world to create relatable and insightful content. His writing in books is similarly engaging, blending personal anecdotes with practical advice and social commentary. Adams’ ability to distill complex ideas into clear, humorous narratives is a hallmark of his style, making his work both entertaining and thought-provoking.
This post is a collection of selected quotes and excerpts from secondary sources used for educational purposes, with citations found at the end of the article.
I went from being a bad writer to a good writer after taking a one-day course in “business writing.” I couldn’t believe how simple it was. I’ll tell you the main tricks here so you don’t have to waste a day in class.
Business writing is about clarity and persuasion. The main technique is keeping things simple. Simple writing is persuasive. A good argument in five sentences will sway more people than a brilliant argument in a hundred sentences. Don’t fight it.
Simple means getting rid of extra words. Don’t write, “He was very happy” when you can write “He was happy.” You think the word “very” adds something. It doesn’t. Prune your sentences.
Humor writing is a lot like business writing. It needs to be simple. The main difference is in the choice of words. For humor, don’t say “drink” when you can say “swill.”
Your first sentence needs to grab the reader. Go back and read my first sentence to this post. I rewrote it a dozen times. It makes you curious. That’s the key.
Write short sentences. Avoid putting multiple thoughts in one sentence. Readers aren’t as smart as you’d think.
Learn how brains organize ideas. Readers comprehend “the boy hit the ball” quicker than “the ball was hit by the boy.” Both sentences mean the same, but it’s easier to imagine the object (the boy) before the action (the hitting). All brains work that way. (Notice I didn’t say, “That is the way all brains work”?)
That’s it. You just learned 80% of the rules of good writing. You’re welcome. 1
Here are the big things you need to learn to be a good writer:
Interesting Characters All writing is about the characters, so you have to create interesting characters. I recommend creating characters that are based on people you know. Sometimes I’ll combine people I know into one person so that I’m writing about a real person. It is way easier to imagine a real person and then write a character that’s sort of based on your real person because you could hear that person talk, you know what they would do in this situation, and then you can translate it to your character. So start with interesting and real characters.
Curiosity in Every Chapter You want to leave curiosity in every chapter. Read any of the Harry Potter books to see the best way to do this. At the end of every chapter, you want the reader to say, “I wonder who did that? I wonder where that’s going?” So try to build curiosity. If you’ve got good characters and you’re building curiosity, you can get away with a lot of mistakes and it’s still going to be fun to read.
Realistic Dialogue You want to listen to how people talk in the real world. People do not talk in the real world the way your first instinct might be to write dialogue because if you’re writing dialogue, you might say, “I’ll have somebody ask a question, I’ll have somebody answer a question.” In the real world, people are very defective and even if you ask a question, they will usually answer a different question or they will ask you a question like you haven’t even asked the question. So keep in mind that people are deeply flawed, and if you write dialogue for deeply flawed and especially selfish characters, make all of your characters selfish, make them act in character, and they will be interesting. Just pay attention to interesting people in your environment and say, “Ah, that would be a good character,” and remember how they speak could come in handy. 2
Write In Simple Sentences
This is especially true for nonfiction. Nonfiction, I think of as business writing, writing a news article, or writing humor. These are all things where a simple businesslike sentence is perfect, so you want to keep things simple. The reason you do that is that people don’t want big flowery interesting sentences, which might be fine in fiction but is deadly in any kind of nonfiction. So you want to keep it simple.
Get rid of extra words. I’m talking to you, adverbs and adjectives. If I were to write a nonfiction piece where I said, “It was very, very warm outside,” I should get rid of the “very” and the “very.” One “very” was too much; two “verys” are way too much. Get rid of extra adjectives that the reader will not remember tomorrow because tomorrow they’re going to remember, “Well, the author said it was warm.” They’re not going to remember the word “very.” If you don’t think they’re going to remember that word and it doesn’t have much of a change in the meaning, get rid of it. Your reader will remember something like 10% of what you write for nonfiction, so you want to make sure that the parts that they remember are the parts you want to remember. Get rid of all the extra stuff.
Imagine that every word is $100 value to you if you take it out. So if somebody said to you, “Here’s your sentence, if you get rid of this adjective, I’ll give you $100. I’ll just reach in my pocket and I’ll hand you $100.” Would you do it? Now if that word is important, you’d say, “No, because I don’t want to look like a fool. This sentence would make no sense if I take that word out.” But if the sentence still makes sense without that word, and that’s usually an adjective or an adverb, take the hundred dollars. 2
Importance of Business Writing
Business writing is also the foundation for humor writing. Unnecessary words and passive writing kill the timing of humor the same way they kill the persuasiveness of your point. If you want people to see you as smart, persuasive, and funny, consider taking a two-day class in business writing. There aren’t many skills you can learn in two days that will serve you this well. 3
Scott Adams and the Dilbert character cutout
Make Your First Sentence Great
You want people to be curious, excited, mad, you want to provoke them, you want to engage them in your first sentence or two. I will spend as much time on the first sentence of a piece writing and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting it until it’s great. Don’t even write the second sentence until you can make a great first few sentences. That’s very important. 2
Develop a Writing Routine
There should be something that you do every day in a similar way that through trial and error allows you to write well. Here are some of the things you should think about:
Most writers, and I would say every writer I’ve ever talked to, follows the same pattern. They either get up super early and work from, it’s not unusual for a professional writer to start at 4:00 a.m. and do most of their work before 8:00 or 9:00 a.m. That’s very common. Part of that reason is that the phones are not ringing, there’s nobody else in the house who’s awake to bother you, and you can just focus on this thing. It’s also true that your energy and your brain, depending on if you’re a morning person, this is where the experimentation comes in.
For most people who are writers, they are morning people or they’ve made themselves morning people if that’s possible. But the other way you can go is late at night, and it tends to be a similar effect. So you can either start at 4:00 in the morning or 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning, early, early, or you also see writers who will start at maybe 10 o’clock at night. The rest of the family’s in bed, it’s all their time, and they can write until 2 a.m. That’s typical.
What you rarely see is a professional writer who wants to write in the afternoon because your mind is not there, the distractions are everywhere. So make it a habit to get up early and write, even if it’s just for practice. 2
Create A Comfortable Writing Environment
Make sure that when you’re writing, you have a comfortable place to sit, that’s like a professional, serious chair. And here’s the weirdest little tip: keep your feet flat on the ground. Now I know what you’re going to say, “I don’t like to sit that way.” You might say, “I like to lean back on the couch. I like to put my feet up. I like to cross my legs.” Don’t do it, or at least experiment with this. You will find that if you put yourself in the physical situation of being completely engaged, meaning that your posture is good, your feet are on the ground, and you’re looking at your computer, you will be much more productive. If you put your body in an all-work position, you know this is not play, this is work, your mind will respond.
You want to get natural light if you can. I put my workplace right by a window. Some people like to work in the dark. There’s some personal preference, so you do need to A/B test things until you’ve got something going on. You want to remove all distractions. Don’t have a pet in the room; pets are distracting. Don’t be hungry; make sure you eat.
Make sure there are no noises; you’ve got to get rid of all of it. And I mean you really have to get rid of all of it. Ironically, people can write well, and this is science-proven, in a cafe situation. So if there’s sort of a background noise but you can’t really hear anybody’s specific conversation, that’s actually a really good place to write. For whatever reason, it keeps you awake because you’re in public, but also it is really easy to concentrate even with the background rumble of noise. So test that. That’s why a lot of people write at Starbucks, at cafes. 2
Writing Process
I do most of my writing when I’m not at my keyboard, meaning that if I’m in the shower, I’m thinking about what I’m going to write. If I go for a walk or I go to the gym, I’m thinking about what I’m going to write the next time I am at my keyboard. It is way better to sit at your keyboard with a 75% idea of where you’re going than to sit at your keyboard and say, “Alright, what am I gonna write?” Looking at the blank page with no ideas that you already have is just painful. Don’t do it. If you sit at your computer and it’s five minutes and you got nothing, get up. You’re not a writer that day. Just get up, leave it alone, walk away, take a walk, take a shower, take a bath, go to the gym, think of some things to write about. A general idea, you don’t have to have the sentences, just know where you’re going.
If you sit down to write and you cannot write something good, you’ve got some ideas, you know where you want to go, you start writing and it’s not good, write it anyway. Let’s say you sit at your keyboard, you still have a general idea where you’re going, but you can’t think of how to start. Just start. Just start writing. Write something bad to write something good. It’s one of the best pieces of advice you will ever get. If you can try something good, write something bad right away.
And I’ve actually yelled at people sitting at a keyboard looking at it who needed to write something. It’s like if you’re sitting there, you’re not a writer. These fingers need to be going if you’re at the keyboard; otherwise, walk away. Walk away, write, and then fix it. Write and delete it. Write and fix it. Write it 50 times wrong to get it right one time. You’re not a writer if you’re not writing. This is the most important rule. Writers need to stimulate themselves and then go quiet. Stimulate and then go quiet.
The stimulation is usually from the outside world. You want to be involved in something. Maybe you have a job that’s your inspiration, and in my case, I had a day job for many years that became my inspiration for Dilbert and some of my books. You have to go into the real world. You have to travel. You have to challenge yourself. You have to do something you’ve never done before. Talk to some people you haven’t talked to before. You have to go out there, and you got to stimulate the hell out of yourself. And then when you’ve filled your brain with that stimulation, you got to go quiet. Remove everything, remove all the distractions, and then you can call on that stuff that you’ve stimulated in your brain. 2
Write What You Know
It’s better to write what you know. If you’re writing fiction, of course, that’s not something you know because you’re making up a whole story. So you want to put parts of things you know. Put characters in there that are at least components or composites of people you know. So you’re always writing something you’ve seen, something you know, even though you created something new from those parts. I write about business and work and persuasion because these are areas I know. Writing about an area you don’t know is only good if you’re a reporter and you’re learning it as you go. 2
A Dilbert comic by Scott Adams
Getting Published
Build Your Social Network
Whether you’re doing fiction or nonfiction, it’s hard to get attention, so you want to build up your social network any way you can because those become your initial buyers. They become the attention that you can attract, they become the people who criticize your writing, which makes you better. So you want to build up your social media following to be any kind of different writer in this day and age. The social media and the writing job are really just part of the same thing these days. 2
Trust Your Editor
Your editor will definitely make suggestions to your first draft that you are not going to like, and you will be sure that these are not good suggestions. Trust me when I tell you that the editors are better at this than you are. They’re reading it as readers, you’re writing it as the author. You don’t have the perspective they have, and if your editor is even a little bit good, they’re going to ask you to make very painful changes, but you should do it. Every time I’ve made a change that the editor wanted, I started by saying, “That’s a terrible idea. Oh god, the way I did it first is the only way to do it.” And then I think about it for a week, and then I say, “Damn it, my editor is right again.” Trust your editor; they’re almost always right. 2
Good Idea vs. Talent
For nonfiction, if you’re not very good at writing and you’re not great at forming even a sentence, but your idea is really good, you are still going to get published. The lower-end publications, let’s say trade magazines, local newspapers, college newspapers, and a blog, they’re starving for content. If you have a new idea, a fact that nobody’s talked about, a big idea, something that’s just a good idea, you take that, you write it up, you submit it to whichever publication, and that publication will say, “This writing is terrible, but I love the idea.” They will contact you and say, “We will buy your writing if you let us edit it heavily.” If you’re smart, you say, “Absolutely. Are you still going to pay me the same amount?” They will say, “Yes, we will pay you the same amount even though we’re going to rewrite a lot of it.”
So don’t be perfect, just have a good idea. Your editors can fix that for you. 2
Work Your Way Up
Stephen King’s advice for working your way up the writer’s ladder: What you want to do is write something at the lowest level you can get it published to practice. First of all, you want to practice, practice, practice. If you succeed at some lower level, you have a portfolio, something you can show to somebody at a higher level. For example, if you wrote something for your college paper, you would have something to take to your local newspaper and say, “Look, college paper liked me. Here’s my best article.” If they like it, they might ask you to write something. That’s how you work your way up.
You could start a blog or write on someone else’s blog, and then if you’ve got a good social media following or even if you just pick the right hashtag, got a good idea, got a little viral action on your writing, on your blog post, then you have that to take to a publisher, to a higher-level publication. Publishing things in trade magazines, in other words, some industry corporate idea, is way easier than almost any other kind of publishing. They’re starving for good ideas and they will help you rewrite it if it’s not great. They just want a good idea that fits within their trade magazine and you have a very good chance of breaking in. So you work your way up little by little by small successes. 2
Getting Published And Finding An Agent
Getting published is easier than you think. Rule number one: however hard you think it is to become a professional writer, weirdly, it’s one of the easier things to do if you can write. If you can’t write well, it’s hard to be a writer, but if you can write, it’s pretty easy to get published somewhere and to get paid for it. That’s the first thing you need to know.
If you want to get an agent (book publishers require agents, not that they don’t really require them, but for all practical purposes, they do), here’s how it works: the publisher works with agents, lots of different agents, and they depend on those agents to bring them good books. The publisher doesn’t want to be going out there and looking for books. Sometimes they do that if it’s somebody famous. So in my case, for example, publishers seek me out because I was the writer for Dilbert. So people say, “Well, maybe he would write a book too.” In my weird case, they sought me out.
The best way to write a book is to become famous for something unrelated. If you can be famous for something, anything, then some publisher wants you to write a book, and they come, they might find you. But if you have written something or want to write something and you want to get an agent who can get you a publisher, the first thing you need to note is that the agents act as sort of like your lawyer, a little bit like a business manager but not really, and a little bit like an agent. They do an important service.
Typically, they might take 15% of what you make, but you depend on them to get from the publisher more than it costs to have an agent. So if the agent could not get you a deal that was at least 15% better than you could get yourself, well, you wouldn’t be that happy with an agent. However, if your agent gets you a good deal or shops it to different publishers and gets them bidding against each other, you’ll be very happy that you have an agent.
The agent will also help you with the contracts because they have their own lawyers, they have contracts that they’ve used before, so they will negotiate with the publisher on your behalf. Very good stuff. I have done books with agents, my recent ones, and I’ve done books without agents because I was famous so I could skip that step. The agents do add a lot, so don’t think that your job is to not have an agent because they do add a lot.
What you’re really doing when you’re trying to sell to a publisher is sell to an agent. You want to send an agent a few chapters, maybe one chapter. An agent will not read a whole book. I mean, they will if they get really interested, but think in terms of a few pages, think in terms of a chapter with an outline for your book.
Reframing is simply looking at things in a different way. A reframe doesn’t need to be true in any scientific way; all you’re trying to do is put the focus in your mind on one area as opposed to another for a good result. You’ll see how that works as I work through some examples.
Screenshot from Scott Adams ‘A Micro Lesson on reframing stress and anxiety’ youtube video
Don’t Think About Your Problems: The first reframe is not to think about your problems at the moment. Say to yourself, how much are you going to care about any of this on your deathbed? How many things from even a year ago that bothered you still bother you today? Just think about the long run. Imagine yourself literally on your deathbed, and what are you thinking at the end of your life? Are you thinking about that little slight you had at the office? Probably not, so why worry about it now?
Now, you say to yourself, but Scott, that’s easy to say. That’s the point; it’s just the repeating of it in your mind as if it were true that makes the circuitry in your brain start to take form in a way that will make you think that maybe it doesn’t matter. In other words, you can talk yourself into almost anything through repetition. It doesn’t even have to be something that your rational brain thinks is true. You can still talk yourself into it if it’s useful.
Removing Bad Thoughts: Forget about removing bad thoughts; it can’t be done. You can’t subtract thoughts. As soon as you think you can, you get in this loop where you keep trying to subtract them, and you just keep thinking about them. Instead, add things to your mental shelf space until your shelf is so full of other stuff that it just crowds out the other thoughts. You can’t subtract a thought, don’t even try. You can only add thoughts, and they can over time be more interesting, more provocative, and more absorbing, minimizing the thing that had been bothering you. Once you’ve minimized it, it’ll take care of itself.
Social Media: Think of social media not so much as that hobby, that thing you like to do in your spare time. Don’t think of it as entertainment; think of it as a vampire that exists to suck the energy and attention out of you for somebody else’s financial benefit. Now, is that true? Again, a reframe doesn’t have to be technically true. It doesn’t have to be the only way to look at it. It just has to be true enough that your brain is willing to deal with that thought until it sort of becomes true, and you start thinking, “I don’t want to have a vampire sucking my energy. I think I’ll do something else.” The less time you spend on social media, the less anxiety and stress you’ll have.
Control The Controllable: You’ve heard this before in different forms. There are some things you simply can’t control. If you just worry about, “Well, everything’s going to go to heck because there are a whole bunch of things I can’t control,” you’re going to feel stressed and anxious all the time. Instead, you’ll find that as a good technique for controlling how you feel, control the hell out of everything you can control. That would include things like your fitness, your diet, your sleep, and we’ll talk about that in a moment. So anything in your life that isn’t hard-coded, such as the DNA you were born with, control the heck out of it and watch how much better you feel about your life. Controlling the controllable always works; you’re going to get a better result if you do it.
Reframe Stress and Anxiety as Energy: Do you ever come home from work or feel anxious or stressed? If you do, tell yourself, “Hey, that’s not stress, that’s not anxiety, that’s energy. I’ve got too much energy. My heart’s beating out of my chest, my pulse is too hard. Too much energy—use it.” Use your energy and match it with the thing that’s perfectly suited for a person who has too much energy: exercise. Whenever you feel stressed, tell yourself, “Man, I’m going to have a good workout today.” Is it the only thing that’s true? No. Doesn’t matter. Reframes work anyway. Just make it a little bit of a loop or a mantra in your head. Every time you feel that stress, say, “Wow, I could lift a lot today.” I’ve been using this for years; it works incredibly well. One of the best ones.
Criticism: A lot of us get stressed out or anxious that other people are criticizing us, maybe in their heads. Maybe they’re thinking bad thoughts about us somewhere. The way to think about that is that criticism is not something that’s touching you. It’s not on you; it’s not anywhere near you. It’s literally a chemical reaction that’s happening in a stranger’s skull, and that stranger isn’t even in the room usually. So ask yourself, how much should you be bothered by a minuscule chemical reaction on the other side of the planet or the other side of town even? Reverse it if that’s not good enough. Ask yourself, how much are other people bothered by a thought you had in your head that you did not share? Not too bothered, are they? Because they don’t even know it’s there. They might imagine you have a bad thought, but that’s different. So whenever you feel that people are thinking poorly of you, it might be true—we’ll get to that in a second—but probably it isn’t. Probably they just don’t care. And if they did care, it would just be a tiny chemical reaction in the brain of a stranger or just somebody who’s not in the room.
Learn To Like Embarrassment: That’s something you can learn with practice. The Dale Carnegie course goes directly at this. They put you in embarrassing situations in front of your classmates until you realize that they just hear and say, “Well, that was a good job dealing with that embarrassing situation.” And pretty soon you think, via repetition, even though there’s no logic to it, you start thinking, “Wow, embarrassing situations are kind of fun. Everybody gives me attention. I didn’t really get hurt. Everybody talks about me. They have a story about me. Cool.” I can’t tell you how many insanely embarrassing situations I’ve been in, both as a public figure and privately. Do any of them bother me at the moment? Nope, none. And it’s not because I’m awesome. This stuff used to bother me a lot. I just learned through practice to put myself in lots of embarrassing situations, such as the one I’m in right now. What will people say about this video? I don’t know. Doesn’t bother me. Won’t stop me a bit. So learn to like embarrassment. Don’t just tolerate it. You can actually literally get to liking it. I’m already there. It’s a real thing.
If you’re thinking, “Oh, I don’t want to do that because I’ll get embarrassed. Oh, if I do that, I might get hurt.” You don’t want to do things that are too dangerous, but a lot of things you don’t do because you’re timid. That timidness is your ego trying to protect itself. Why are you trying to protect it? Reframe it. It is more accurate to say that your ego is your enemy. It’s preventing you from talking to people you’d like to talk to. It’s preventing you from asking that person on a date. It’s preventing you from making the first move. It’s preventing you from going for the next job. Your ego is your worst enemy in the world. Kill that thing. Some people do it with mushrooms. I don’t recommend that or any other drug because I’m not a doctor. I’m just giving you some background information.
Get Good At Something: Other people kill it by being successful enough in something that even if they’re terrible at a different thing, well, you’re still Tiger Woods. Now, maybe that’s going a little too far, but if you’re good at anything, it will protect you against things you’re not good at. So find something you can just do more than other people because that’s usually what it takes to be the good one. Could be anything: play tennis, play pool, bird watch, whatever it is. Just do it more than other people. You’ll be one of the good ones, and then when you’re one of the bad ones at something else, you’ll say to yourself, “Well, somebody else put more time into it because they cared about that more than I cared. If I had put as much time into it as Bob, I’d be just as good at that thing as Bob. And how do I know that for sure? Because when I put time into the thing I like, I got pretty good at it.” So you need some experience at getting good at stuff. Do that even if it’s only for mental purposes.
The Most Important Takeaway: Now, here is perhaps the one takeaway that is the most important of all. If there’s only one thing you’re going to remember, remember this: Stress reduction and anxiety reduction are your full-time job. You’re never done. It’s the most important thing you need to do because this is the key that opens up the rest of your life. If you don’t take care of your anxiety and stress, all of the other goodness of life will be less available to you. And I think you know it. That’s why you’re watching this. Right? So never quit, never stop, never stop pushing. This is a full-time job forever.
Have a Social Life: In the social life, what I mean by that is find a way that you will always be around new people or the people you like that you already know. Could be that you join a sport and you meet the people who do that. Could be you get more involved in the school and you meet the other parents or whatever. But have a system for it. Don’t just wonder why you don’t have friends. Do something. Do a thing that puts you in contact with a lot of people. Join a church. It’ll be obvious what to do, but don’t not have a system for it because that goes directly to stress reduction and anxiety. You need social. You need people. They help.
Get In Nature. Science confirms this all the time. You can test this in five minutes. Take a walk. When you’re stressed, just get outside around some trees. See how you feel in five minutes. It’s immediate. This is a really big one, and it hits you right away. This will take down your stress.
Those are your tips for reducing your anxiety and your stress. It’s a full-time job. A/B test it forever until you’ve got something that’s really working for you. I guarantee this will help. 4
Improving Low Self-Esteem
Be good at a few things you can control. There’s nothing better for your self-esteem than knowing that if you work hard on something, whatever it is, you can become one of the good ones. Not the best in the world, but better than other people.
The things you can control the most are diet, fashion choices, haircut, and fitness.
You can control the heck out of those things. If you’re not good at fashion, find somebody who is and get some advice. Don’t know how to exercise? Find somebody who can and have them tell you how. Don’t know how to eat right? Find somebody who knows and have them tell you how.
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. 3
How To Be Happy
Let me explain happiness. So happiness, here’s at the top, that’s your goal. We’d all like to be happy. In order to be happy, there are three chemicals in your body, in your brain, that need to be at the right level. These chemicals can be boosted through lifestyle. If you don’t know that, you don’t understand how happiness works.
Most people that I talk to are under the mistaken impression that happiness is something you can think your way into. In other words, if you put some happy thoughts in your head or you don’t have any problems, somehow it’s a mental process. Your happiness is not a mental process. If you think it is, you can’t help yourself; you’re going to be lost forever.
Screenshot from Scott Adam’s YouTube video ‘Episode 644 Scott Adams: The Happiness Formula’
Whether you have a mental problem that keeps you low in these chemicals, which is typical—depression, anxiety, OCD—there are a number of mental conditions which are at least associated with lower levels of these things. If you treat happiness as a physical process, the end result of which is you feel happy, then you have a mechanism to do something about it. If you think it’s a mental process, there’s nothing you can do about it. You are a victim of your environment. But if you understand that you can do things in your life that will boost these chemicals, and then these chemicals in turn will make you feel good, then you have a mechanism.
Oxytocin is the chemical that makes you feel connected to people, makes you feel in love, makes you feel bonded, and that’s mostly from social interaction, especially touch. You can get it from sex, hugging, playing with your pets, or getting a massage. Children can get it from their parents through touch.
These other things, dopamine and serotonin, are sort of lifestyle-related. If you get a system for all of this stuff—the system for your diet, exercise, and sleep—you’ll have a lot more of it. How many people do you know who believe they’re unhappy, but all they’re doing is they’re doing this stuff wrong? They’re doing the lifestyle stuff wrong, and they think, “Hey, I’m unhappy; there’s something wrong with the way I’m thinking; there’s something wrong with my brain.” Probably not.
There’s probably, and when I say probably, I’m just saying 80% of the time for 80% of you, the feeling of not being happy or fulfilled—all of those feelings—are because you don’t have a system in place to work toward improving these over time.
For diet, for example, it should be a lifelong process of learning about diet and experimenting with what works for you. In my case, if I eat too many bad carbs, I’m unhappy every frickin’ time. Every time. If I have a burrito for lunch, the rest of the day I’m not happy because my energy will crash, and I can’t be happy when I have a sugar crash.
Learn about diet by making it a lifelong system to chip away at it and experiment. Learn that protein is good for you; learn that simple carbs are bad for you. Always. Don’t have cheat days. If you have a cheat day, you don’t understand how anything works.
Exercise. It doesn’t matter what you do, but be active every day. You will find that if you get exercise right, most of your days are better. Everybody who has an exercise routine will confirm what I’m saying: on days that you exercise, you feel happier. It’s pretty much a one-to-one thing.
Get enough sleep. A lot of people think that sleep is somehow out of their control. Sleep is something you absolutely control. Go to bed at the same time, wake up at the same time every day. Don’t watch TV in bed; don’t do things that get you excited; don’t watch a scary movie before you go to bed. There are some very basic things which all you’d have to do is Google some articles about how to sleep and follow the steps. There aren’t that many of them. Every article on how to sleep would be pretty similar. Learn a system for sleep.
If you’re the kind of person who likes to stay up really late on weekends but then during the week you’ve got to go back to your eight-to-five life, you’re just killing yourself. You don’t have much chance of being happy if you think that you can mess with your sleep and still be happy. You can’t. You can have a good evening, but your week is not going to be happy.
Make sure you get some nature. Meaning, get outside. Sun is important, but it seems to be important to your chemistry to just interact with nature. So get out of the house, get around some trees, get around some grass. That helps.
Do what you can to improve your social life. I recommend the Dale Carnegie method of learning how to talk to people, learning how to be good to people. The main thing you need to do to have a good social life is give more than you get. Think generously, and people will say, “Well, that’s somebody I want to hang around with. That person just asked me if they could do me a favor, and I barely know them.” That’s somebody you want to spend some time with. Invite people to your place, set up an outing yourself, buy somebody lunch, solve a problem for somebody, offer to help. Social life is completely under your control.
Stop thinking that people will like you for who you are on the inside. Nobody cares who you are on the inside. They can’t see it. You can’t see the inside of you. They only know what you do. They can’t read your mind. So do things that are generous. If you do that, you will have a social life. It might not be the first day, but you’re going to have one. Get out in the real world, get involved in some groups where there are people, go make yourself a social life.
I find that it’s useful to have a purpose in life. A purpose—the best way to find one is to be useful to society and to other people. If what you’re doing all day is good for no one but you, you will not feel like you have a purpose, and that will eat at your chemical state. It will decrease your happy chemicals.
Find a purpose. It’s easy to find a purpose. Figure out what you’re good at or at least what you can become good at and you’re willing to do, then try it. If it doesn’t work, try something else.
I also find that when I’m learning and growing—in other words, I’m getting better at something—I feel more fulfilled, and my body chemistry feels better. It doesn’t matter what you’re learning or growing at. It could be your career, could be something useful in some other way, and it could be just learning the things that you need to take care of yourself. Could be just learning that.
Build your talent stack, add talents all the time. You should never be—here’s my advice—you should never be in a state of not learning. Period. Now you might be so busy that you have to reduce the time that you’re spending learning something to a small part of your day. That would be normal, but never have a day where you didn’t learn something. You will be amazed what that does to you. You’ll have a sense of moving in the right direction.
In summary, happiness is not some internal mental process that you can just think your way to a better happiness. It is a chemical state. If you get your body chemistry right—mostly these three chemicals are the ones you hear about—you will have a feeling of contentment and happiness. To get those chemicals right, science is very clear on what works. You’ve got to get your diet right, your exercise, your sleep, get out in nature, touch some people, improve your social life, avoid stress. That’s your happiness formula. The main point is to understand that it’s a chemical reaction and that you control your chemistry by your lifestyle.
Once you see that this works, and the only way to see it is to actually practice it, start paying attention to your diet, your sleep, and your exercise, and also your touch and your nature. Start paying attention to what you did that day and then pay attention to how you feel about your day.
Once you notice there’s a one-to-one correlation between doing those things right that get your chemistry right and having a good day, you’re all set. That’s what you need. You need that realization to make it real, and you have to do it and try it to be able to actually feel that it makes a difference. 6
The big five factors in happiness—flexible schedule, imagination, diet, exercise, and sleep.
For starters, the single biggest trick for manipulating your happiness chemistry is being able to do what you want, when you want. Step one in your search for happiness is to continually work toward having control of your schedule.
That brings me to the next important mechanism for happiness. Happiness has more to do with where you’re heading than where you are. It’s a good idea to have a sport or hobby that leaves you plenty of room to improve every year. Tennis and golf are two perfect examples.
When you choose a career, consider whether it will lead to a lifetime of ever-improved performance, a plateau, or a steady decline in your skills. If you are lucky enough to have career options, and only one of them affords a path of continual improvement, choose that one, all else being equal.
The next element of happiness you need to master is imagination. Pessimism is often a failure of imagination. If you can imagine the future being brighter, it lifts your energy and gooses the chemistry in your body that produces a sensation of happiness. If you can’t even imagine an improved future, you won’t be happy no matter how well your life is going right now. Simply imagining a better future hacks your brain chemistry and provides you with the sensation of happiness today. Don’t let reality control your imagination. Let your imagination be the user interface to steer your reality.
Unhappiness that is caused by too much success is a high-class problem. That’s the sort of unhappiness people work all of their lives to get. If you find yourself there, and I hope you do, you’ll find your attention naturally turning outward. You’ll seek happiness through service to others. I promise it will feel wonderful.
Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice, tells us that people become unhappy if they have too many options in life. The problem with options is that choosing any path can leave you plagued with self-doubt. You quite rationally think that one of the paths not chosen might have worked out better. That can eat at you.
Recapping the happiness formula: Eat right. Exercise. Get enough sleep. Imagine an incredible future (even if you don’t believe it). Work toward a flexible schedule. Do things you can steadily improve at. Help others (if you’ve already helped yourself). Reduce daily decisions to routine. 3
Diet and Energy
My proposition, which I invite you to be skeptical about, is that one of the primary factors in determining your energy level, and therefore your mood, is what you’ve eaten recently. Your mood is a function of chemistry in your body, and food may be a far more dominant contributor to your chemistry than what is happening around you, at least during a normal day.
The only way you’ll believe that food drives your mood is by testing the claim in your daily life. By that I mean simply asking yourself how you feel at any given moment and then making a mental note of what you ate recently. Look for the pattern. For the sake of comparison, experiment for a few days by skipping bread, potatoes, white rice, and other simple carbs. Eat fruits, veggies, nuts, salad, fish, or chicken. Now see how you feel a few hours after eating. I’ll bet the idea of exercising will sound more appealing after eating those types of foods compared with the day of your Mexican-food experiment. Generally speaking, when it comes to diet, you want to stay consistent with science but also look for confirmation in your personal experience.
Science has demonstrated that humans have a limited supply of willpower. If you use up your supply resisting one temptation, it limits your ability to resist others. Struggling to do anything has a steep price because you don’t want to use up your willpower and energy on something as unimportant as staying away from the candy drawer. You might need your willpower later for something more substantial. What you need is a diet system that doesn’t rely on willpower. And that means reprogramming your food preferences so willpower is less necessary.
The starting point for good health is diet. Once you get your diet right, your energy level will increase and you’ll find yourself more in the mood for exercise. Under my system, all you need to do is eat as much as you want of anything that isn’t a simple carb and keep on that path for a few months. Think of healthy eating as a system in which you continually experiment with different seasonings and sauces until you know exactly what works for you. You want to be able to look at a vegetable and instantly know five ways to make it delicious, at least two of which don’t require much effort. When you change what you know about adding flavor to food, it will change your behavior. You’ll no longer need much willpower to resist bad food because you will be just as attracted to the healthy stuff. 3
Importance of Daily Activity
Be active every day. My challenge is to convince you that if you get one simple thing right—being active every day—all of the other elements of fitness will come together naturally without the need to use up your limited supply of willpower. The only way that happens is if you make fitness—of any kind—a daily habit. Once exercise becomes habitual, you won’t need willpower to keep going because your body and brain will simply prefer it to being a couch spud. And your natural inclination for variety will drive you to do more stuff over time.
I exercise at lunchtime because mornings are better for my creative work and afternoons are unpredictable in terms of work and family time. Other successful exercisers get up long before the sun to do their workouts. Still others go straight from work to the gym. My system for staying in the mood to be active every day has several parts. I already explained the importance of diet in keeping your energy up. After that, the most important rule is that you should never exercise so much in one day that you won’t feel like being active the next day. To put that another way, the right amount of exercise today is whatever amount makes me look forward to being active tomorrow.
If you want to make a habit of something, the worst thing you can do is pick and choose which days of the week you do it and which ones you don’t. Exercise becomes a habit when you do it every day without fail. Taking rest days between exercise days breaks up the pattern that creates habits. It also makes it too easy to say today is one of your non-exercise days, and maybe tomorrow too. I find it important to reward myself after exercise with a healthy snack that I enjoy, some downtime that involves reading interesting articles on my phone, or a nice cup of coffee. By putting those pleasures at the immediate end of my exercise, I develop a strong association between the exercise and the good feelings. It forms a habit.
But once the sneakers and shorts are on, a funny thing happens, and it happens quickly. The physical feeling I get from my exercise clothes triggers the going-to-the-gym subroutine in my brain, and my energy kicks up a notch. It’s like Pavlov’s salivating dogs. The exercise clothes cause me to think positive things about exercising, and that boosts my energy. Suddenly the idea of exercising seems possible, if not desirable. 3
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Today, I’m going to talk to you about a thing called affirmations. Now, affirmations, I think, mean different things to different people, so I’ll give you my explanation. I’m not talking about the affirmations where you look in the mirror and tell yourself that you’re a good person and, you know, gosh darn it, people like you. That’s the cartoony version.
The real version isn’t much less cartoony than that, but it’s different. The real version is that you just write down or repeat in your mind—you could do it out loud, I suppose—15 times a day some specific kind of an objective that you have. The idea is that somehow, and it’s the “somehow” that we’ll talk about—that’s the fun and weird part—somehow simply repeating or writing down your objective 15 times a day seems to make it happen. Not every time, obviously.
The background: I was a young man in my 20s, and I had a friend who was in Mensa. So Mensa is the high IQ organization, and she was very smart because you have to be to be in there. And she read a book—I don’t remember the title of the book—but she was talking to me on the phone about it one day, and she said it taught something called the affirmations, and it was this idea of, you know, writing down 15 times a day what you wanted.
And she said that she tried it, you know, skeptically, and a series of coincidences happened, like just bizarre coincidences that caused her to get the thing that she was writing down. And I think she tried it a few times, and she talked about somebody else’s experience, and she said, “You know, why don’t you try it?”
Now, keep in mind, I’m highly skeptical. Maybe you’ll think otherwise when we’re done, but, you know, I’m not a believer in any kind of supernatural power or luck, magic, horoscopes—you know, pretty much none of it. I’m just completely skeptical. So how did she talk me into trying something that has no scientific basis whatsoever and seems like absolute crap? Well, did I mention she’s in Mensa? It turns out they’re very persuasive. So here was her argument: it doesn’t cost you anything, and if it works, you’ll be able to basically rewrite your reality.
So I thought I’ll give it a shot. And she gave me this specific advice: she said, “Pick something you know is not going to happen in any way, because what would be the point, right? You’d get your thing that you had been writing down 15 times a day, and then you’d say to yourself, ‘No, that probably would have happened anyway,’ you know?” So she said, “Pick something unlikely.”
I tried “I, Scott Adams, will be a famous cartoonist”. And I became a famous cartoonist. And then I did “I, Scott Adams, become a number one New York Times bestselling author”. And then I did. And there was also a time that I lost my ability to speak, mostly. For about three and a half years, I couldn’t speak properly. It was a condition called spasmodic dysphonia, which was incurable. Long story short, I searched the world and found a guy who had an experimental, fairly newish surgery and fixed it. But that was the subject of my silent affirmations, that I would someday speak perfectly.
Let me show you what the process is. You just write or repeat that thing that you want. And use this form. “I, Scott Adams, will be a syndicated cartoonist”. You could say you’d be wealthy, you could say you’ll find love, you could say you’ll be healthy, you could say you’ll move someplace, you’ll start a family, whatever it is. You don’t want to be too specific because you don’t want to say, for example, “I want that specific promotion”, because what if there’s a better one? You might get the thing that you’re affirming, but maybe there was something better that popped up in the meantime. So try to keep your affirmations fairly general.
So people ask me, you know, does it matter where I write it? Can I type it? Can I chant it? Can I sing it? And none of that matters. It’s only about focusing on the thing that you want and visualizing it. It’s also very important you visualize it. If you don’t visualize it, you’re not putting the most active part of your brain into the game.
Now here’s the part where you should be saying to yourself, why would this work based on your complete lack of science and logic or anything that would connect this to the real world? Why would chanting or writing something down have any effect on the real world? That’s the fun part. Does it?
One possible reason why they work is when you’re doing affirmations you’re tuning your brain. There was a study on luck by this guy, Dr. Wiseman, and he wanted to see if people had luck. Is luck a real thing? Now, most of you are ahead of me, right? Luck is not a real thing. Everybody’s going to have the same luck if you’re really controlling the experiment. And indeed, that’s what he found. Everybody has exactly the same luck. But he did this experiment that was very revealing. He had people divide themselves into groups that considered themselves lucky and groups that considered themselves not lucky. And he gave them all the same newspaper and he said, look through the newspaper and count up the number of photographs.
Now, the people who consider themselves unlucky counted them up and on average they got the right number. It was 42 and it would take them several minutes to complete the task. The people who consider themselves lucky, even though really nobody was any luckier than anybody else, but they consider themselves lucky, they also got the right number, on average 42 photographs, but they were done in seconds. Whereas the people who thought they were unlucky, it took them minutes.
The difference was that on all the newspapers for both groups, on the second page in big writing, it said, stop counting the photographs, there are 42. The people who consider themselves unlucky didn’t see the time saver because they were looking for photographs. They didn’t expect anything to be there except what they were looking for. The people who would consider themselves lucky are always looking for luck. So what he found is that if you open your mind to the possibility that you could get lucky, you actually will notice things that will make you appear lucky. 7
Overcoming Shyness
I credit one of my college friends with teaching me the secret of overcoming shyness by imagining you are acting instead of interacting. And by that, I mean literally acting. It turns out that a shy person can act like someone else more easily than he can act like himself. That makes some sense because shyness is caused by an internal feeling that you are not worthy to be in the conversation. Acting like someone else gets you out of that way of thinking.
The single best tip for avoiding shyness involves harnessing the power of acting interested in other people. You don’t want to cross into nosiness, but everyone appreciates it when you show interest. You should also try to figure out which people are thing people and which ones are people people. Thing people enjoy hearing about new technology and other clever tools and possessions. They also enjoy discussions of processes and systems, including politics. People people enjoy only conversations that involve humans doing interesting things. They get bored in a second when the conversation turns to things.
I also recommend exercising your ego the way you’d exercise any other muscle. Try putting yourself in situations that will surely embarrass you if things go wrong, or maybe even if they don’t. Success builds confidence, and confidence suppresses shyness. 3
How To Be A Good Conversationalist
To be a good conversationalist, all you do is introduce yourself and ask questions until you find a point of mutual interest. I’ll paraphrase the Dale Carnegie question stack as best I remember it. It goes something like this: What’s your name? Where do you live? Do you have a family? What do you do for a living? Do you have any hobbies/sports? Do you have any travel plans?
So ask questions. Don’t complain (much). Don’t talk about boring experiences (TV show, meal, dream, etc.). Don’t dominate the conversation. Let others talk. Don’t get stuck on a topic. Keep moving. Planning is useful, but it isn’t conversation. Keep the sad stories short, especially medical stories. The point of conversation is to make the other person feel good. If you do that one simple thing correctly, the other benefits come along with the deal. 3
Systems vs. Goals
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, its a system. If you’re waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it’s a goal. 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. 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 everytime they apply their system. That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction. 3
Discovering and Developing Your Talent
One helpful rule of thumb for knowing where you might have a little extra talent is to consider what you were obsessively doing before you were ten years old. There’s a strong connection between what interests you and what you’re good at. People are naturally drawn to the things they feel comfortable doing, and comfort is a marker for talent.
Another clue to talent involves tolerance for risk. When I was in grade school, I often drew humorously inappropriate comics involving my teachers and fellow students. I would show them to classmates, and I enjoyed making them laugh, all the while knowing that getting caught by an authority figure meant a serious penalty. I was willing to take a significant personal risk for my so-called art, and this was in sharp contrast to my otherwise risk-averse lifestyle.
When you hear stories about famous actors as kids, one of the patterns you notice is that before they were stars they were staging plays in their living rooms and backyards. That’s gutsy for a kid. A child who eagerly accepts the risk of embarrassment in front of a crowd—even a friendly crowd—probably has some talent for entertaining. 3
Scott Adams book ‘How To Fail At Almost Everything and Still Win Big’
Skills and Success
The first filter in deciding where to spend your time is an honest assessment of your ability to practice. If you’re not a natural “practicer,” don’t waste time pursuing a strategy that requires it. You know you won’t be a concert pianist or a point guard in the NBA. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. You’re not doomed to mediocrity. You simply need to pick a life strategy that rewards novelty seeking more than mindless repetition. For example, you might want to be an architect, designer, home builder, computer programmer, entrepreneur, website designer, or even doctor. 3
The success formula: Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success.
To put the success formula into its simplest form: Good + Good > Excellent. Success-wise, you’re better off being good at two complementary skills than being excellent at one.
I made a list of the skills in which I think every adult should gain a working knowledge. I wouldn’t expect you to become a master of any, but mastery isn’t necessary. Luck has a good chance of finding you if you become merely good in most of these areas. Here’s the preview list:
I started getting a lot of advice from my critics, and it all tended to have the same flavor. What they said was, “Stick to drawing comics, stick to drawing, stick to Dilbert, stick to making bad jokes about the office.”
Here’s the context I want to put on that. The first thing I would say is that anybody who thinks like that, either about themselves or about another person, has what I call the loser philosophy. The loser philosophy is sort of the Homer Simpson philosophy — I think he said it in one episode, some version of “can’t win, don’t try.”
Imagine me sitting in my cubicle some 30 years ago thinking, “Hey, I think I could be a cartoonist,” with no experience whatsoever. None. No drawing classes, just nothing. Well, I did take one drawing class in college, and I got the lowest grade in the class. So it was ridiculous for me to think that I had a shot as a cartoonist.
As you know if you’re watching this, things worked out for me really well with no experience whatsoever. As that started to take off, a publisher noticed an article I wrote in The Wall Street Journal and said, “Hey, how would you like to write a book?” Not a book of cartoons, but a real book about the office and office culture. I had never taken a writing class except one one-day class in business writing. That was it. I had no idea how to write a book, and if I’m being honest, I rarely read books. I’m not even a reader. I mean, I read tons of stuff on the internet, I skim things, so I’m actually reading and absorbing all the time, but I’m not really a big book reader. I can’t remember the last time I read an entire book; I tend to pick parts out of it and read summaries and that sort of thing.
I said, “I’ll give it a shot.” That book became a number one New York Times bestseller with no experience whatsoever.
Later, somebody said, “Hey, we’ve got a lot of Dilbert fans here. How would you like to give a talk to our group?” It was a big energy organization. They asked if I gave public talks, and I said no. In fact, I had no experience with that, it was something I had done exactly zero times — not counting little presentations to the work group, which is very different. But I said, “I’ll give it a shot if you’re going to overpay me.” So, with no experience whatsoever, I went up to Canada, which is where it was, and gave a speech.
I’d have to say it was terrible. I’m not being humble or modest whatsoever. I was trying to be funny, and it was funny, but it didn’t really have much of a point to it. But they were happy because they just wanted to meet the guy who did Dilbert.
As time went by, I got other offers, and I practiced and learned, and I became one of the most highly paid speakers in the world. Twenty years ago, I was offered up to $100,000 to speak for an hour. That was the rate I was getting. So, that was three businesses in a row that I had no experience in, and I ended up doing okay.
Here’s the point: How much experience did Steve Jobs have when he founded Apple Computer? None. How much experience did Bill Gates have when he founded Microsoft? None. How much experience did Henry Ford have when he created Ford Motor Company? None. How much experience did Apple have when it created the first iPhones? They had some related experience and hired smart people, but anybody could have hired smart people.
To me, there is no clearer sign of someone who is not successful and never will be than someone who says of another person, “Stick to your day job.”
Certainly, there are plenty of people who try things and fail, and probably more people try and fail than try and succeed. But the people who are trying things and failing are far more likely to hit something lucky just by trying more than the people who say, “Well, I better stay in my day job. I don’t want to try anything because I’m not an expert. Only experts can succeed,” even when we’re surrounded by examples of people who had no experience and have not only succeeded but succeeded at the very highest levels.
Clearly, there are places where this doesn’t happen. You don’t see someone becoming a doctor on the first try; you need to train for that. You don’t see people becoming a lawyer on the first try; you have to train for that. But there are a ton of fields you can just walk right into.
The guy who wrote The Martian, that novel, he did it just for fun. Facebook is another example. How much experience did Mark Zuckerberg have in creating a social platform? None. But it gets better. How much experience did Mark Zuckerberg have in managing a fast-growing company? None. How much experience did he have in managing an enormous company? None. Zero. None.
How much experience did Jeff Bezos have? I mean, I could go all day if you want. I could do this all freakin’ day long. Sergey Brin? Same thing. Don’t quit your day job is the loser advice. The specific version they say to me is, “Stick to drawing comics.” I actually wrote a book called Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Boy, because so many people have told me to stay in my little box.
I wonder sometimes what causes people to say that very specific thing. There are so many ways that a critic could come after me in just millions of ways, but they all seem to huddle around that very narrow and ridiculous loser point that people should never try new things. I think the answer is some of it is low self-esteem. It’s people who can’t try new things themselves because it would be frightening, and they don’t think they’d succeed, or maybe they wouldn’t. But I think they don’t want other people to succeed outside their box because it would make them feel as though there was something wrong with them because they couldn’t get outside their box.
I may be reading too much into it, and I do often caution people not to assume they can see into people’s inner thoughts. This is just speculation. But what in the world would cause somebody to suggest that someone else not try something in a new field?
Look at it this way: Even if you were pretty sure they wouldn’t succeed, shouldn’t you try it anyway? Obviously, some of you know I wrote an entire book called How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, because the point is if you pick the right things to fail at, you still come out ahead, right? It’s all about picking the right things so that when you fail at them, you still learn a whole bunch, meet some people, make some contacts, and build up your skill stack. So, the next thing you try, which might be another thing you’ve never done before, you’ve got a whole new set of skills to come into it.
Anybody who tells you to keep your day job or, just as importantly, if they’ve ever said it to anyone else, that’s someone who is not successful and will never be successful. That’s the most loser-ish philosophy you could ever have. The best philosophy is don’t stick to your day job. Let me say it again. Here’s the best advice. I don’t give advice, so my philosophy is not to give advice. And again, I wrote a whole book that looks like advice, but I made a big deal of saying, no, this is just some examples. You have to come up with your own advice.
But if I could violate my rule just this one time, I’m going to give you all some advice. It’s the best advice you will ever hear: Don’t stick to your day job.
Now, I don’t mean that you should just quit your day job and, you know, go do something crazy like start a rock band or something unless you’re really good at it. What I mean is you should always be expanding your talent stack. You should always be trying new things. You should always be preparing for the day when your day job disappears.
One of the ways to do that is by continuously adding new skills. Even if they’re just adjacent to what you do now. Even if it’s just learning a little bit about another department in your company. Just keep adding to your skill stack.
And here’s why: The world is changing so fast that the jobs of the future probably don’t even exist yet. If you think you’re safe because you have a good job now, you’re not. The best way to protect yourself is to become so flexible and so talented in so many areas that whatever happens, you’ll find a way to make it work.
So, don’t stick to your day job. Always be learning. Always be expanding your talent stack. Always be ready for whatever comes next. That’s the best advice I can give you. 8
Scott Adams drawing a Dilbert comic
A Model for Success
Focus on your diet first and get that right so you have enough energy to want to exercise. Exercise will further improve your energy, and that in turn will make you more productive, more creative, more positive, more socially desirable, and more able to handle life’s little bumps. Once you optimize your personal energy, all you need for success is luck. You can’t directly control luck, but you can move from strategies with bad odds to strategies with good odds.
Learning multiple skills makes your odds of success dramatically higher than learning one skill. If you learn to control your ego, you can pick strategies that scare off the people who fear embarrassment, thus allowing you to compete against a smaller field. Avoid career traps such as pursuing jobs that require you to sell your limited supply of time while preparing you for nothing better. Happiness tends to happen naturally whenever you have good health, resources, and a flexible schedule.
Get your health right first, acquire resources and new skills through hard work, and look for an opportunity that gives you a flexible schedule someday. Learn as many key skills as possible, including public speaking, business writing, a working understanding of the psychology of persuasion, an understanding of basic technology concepts, social skills, proper voice technique, good grammar, and basic accounting. Develop a habit of simplifying. Learn how to make small talk with strangers, and learn how to avoid being an asshole.
And always remember that failure is your friend. It is the raw material of success. Invite it in. Learn from it. And don’t let it leave until you pick its pocket. 3
The Formula For An Extraordinary Career
Last night I met a script supervisor. She works with directors to make sure a movie has the right continuity, and one scene fits the next. It’s a fascinating job, hobnobbing with top directors, writers, and celebrities. No two assignments are the same. How do you get that kind of career? She earned a degree in anthropology and just “fell into it” through a series of events.
I know the feeling. I majored in economics, got an MBA, worked at a bank, then a phone company, and became a cartoonist.
For every person who studies something specific, such as the law or medicine, and actually ended up in that sort of career, I think there are five who let chance pick their careers. That works out more often than you’d think, but you can’t recommend it as a career strategy. Instead, I recommend a general formula for success. Allow me to explain.
If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:
1. Become the best at one specific thing. 2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.
The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in the NBA or make a platinum album. I don’t recommend anyone even try.
The second strategy is fairly easy. Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it.
I always advise young people to become good public speakers (top 25%). Anyone can do it with practice. If you add that talent to any other, suddenly you’re the boss of the people who have only one skill. Or get a degree in business on top of your engineering degree, law degree, medical degree, science degree, or whatever. Suddenly you’re in charge, or maybe you’re starting your own company using your combined knowledge.
Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rare by combining two or more “pretty goods” until no one else has your mix. I didn’t spend much time with the script supervisor, but it was obvious that her verbal/writing skills were in the top tier as well as her people skills. I’m guessing she also has a high attention to detail, and perhaps a few other skills in the mix. Probably none of those skills are best in the world, but together they make a strong package. Apparently she’s been in high demand for decades.
At least one of the skills in your mixture should involve communication, either written or verbal. And it could be as simple as learning how to sell more effectively than 75% of the world. That’s one. Now add to that whatever your passion is, and you have two, because that’s the thing you’ll easily put enough energy into to reach the top 25%. If you have an aptitude for a third skill, perhaps business or public speaking, develop that too.
It sounds like generic advice, but you’d be hard pressed to find any successful person who didn’t have about three skills in the top 25%.
1 painting, album, film, and book recommendation every week.