The Advantages of Failure

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, on underachievement as a good thing

As the author of a cartoon strip that has become legend through its debunking of modern office culture, Dilbert-creator Scott Adams’ recent book seems oddly conformist. There is a flourish of humour running through the pages of How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. But the trademark sarcasm of his characters is mostly reserved for himself. The book shuffles between memoir and self-help, uncertain of which space to occupy.

You can always debate whether a self-help book is a placebo, but if you are a believer, the general rule of thumb should be to read the ones written by those who have lived the talk. For example, there are thousands of books on writing, but Stephen King’s On Writing is worthwhile because King, as one of the few writers who has successfully trod the difficult line between literary and genre fiction, is qualified to preach.

This analogy falters a little with How to Fail because Adams is not talking about his creativity. The book is a manual for success and a map of failure. Adams is incredibly successful; Dilbert runs in more than 2,000 newspapers across the world. But what makes the book legitimate is that he has been equally spectacular at failure.

Consider the summary in the second chapter—failing his first job interview; failing to market a software program to determine a person’s psychic ability; failing to sell two computer games he wrote; failing at a website for crackpot ideas; failing at a video-on-the-net service, years before YouTube; failing at a grocery delivery business; failing at selling a nutrition-packed burrito called ‘Dilberito’; failing at two restaurants he started; failing even at cartooning.

When Adams first approached a syndication company to sell Dilbert, one editor found his artwork so unimpressive that he was asked to ‘find an actual artist to do the drawing’. When another syndication agency did pick Dilbert up, Adams, on his own, offered to be paired with an artist. The editor told him his skills were fine. “The psychological thing that happened [was] the minute somebody important and smart told me that my drawing was good enough, it improved overnight,” he says on the phone from California.

How to Fail contains grand strategies, but also touches on things like sitting with the right posture and tips on grammar. Adams says there is a reason for such minutiae: “I included all that stuff because almost all of it refer to gaps that I had in my own knowledge,” he says. He said ‘brang’ instead of ‘brought’ for most of his life and thought it was a real word.

The book, he says, comes from the need to pass on his experience to young men starting off in their careers. “I grew up in a small town and didn’t have access to successful people. It occurred to me a few years ago that I had accumulated a fairly large set of experiences because I had tried and failed at so many things. I wondered if I could simplify and distil the wisdom to what I would call a template, so that people have some kind of a starting point. It is not necessarily going to work for them the way it worked for me, but it still gives them a launchpad, something to compare with other ideas they have.”

In the Adams approach, goals are ‘for losers’ because those who have them are living in a relentless state of failure until they are achieved. And even if they are achieved, after the initial elation, there is purposelessness. Successful people, he says, have systems that invite luck.

“A system is something you are doing on a regular basis, usually every day. The intention is to move yourself from a place of poor odds to a place of better odds,” he says.

As an example, he talks about a new comic strip in his blog. The character is a news reading robot, borrowed from Dilbert. He has no goals for the strip and just works on it regularly. “I know that if I keep practising publicly, keep trying new things, look at the feedback, modify it—there is a range of potential good things that could happen,” he says. That is the system.

The reward might be a call from a syndication agency, or someone wanting to put the character on a T-shirt. Some magazine or newspaper editor might like what he is saying and ask him to write a guest editorial without the comic. “There are an unlimited number of ways that can go. And I am practising in public, so I have created an opportunity for luck to find me,” he says.

In the early 90s, the little finger of his right hand just refused to draw— it would spasm. This would only happen when drawing or writing; otherwise, the finger seemed absolutely fine. Even when he tried drawing with his left hand, the right little finger would spasm. It was not the finger but the wiring with the brain that had malfunctioned. Doctors diagnosed it as an incurable condition called focal dystonia.

Adams was not willing to give up. His system was to fool his brain by constantly touching the pen to paper and then withdrawing it before the spasm started. ‘I tapped the page hundreds of times per meeting under the table on the notepad on my lap. My idea was to rewire my brain gradually, to relearn that I can touch pen to paper and not spasm. I was literally trying to hack my brain,’ he writes.

He managed to hold the pen for a second, then gradually for longer. One day, just as suddenly, he found that the ailment was gone—his brain had rewired itself. But in 2004, his dystonia came back.

This time, he astutely guessed that the brain might not associate using a stylus on a computer screen with drawing. And he was right. A company called Wacom was making a special monitor for artists and Adams had no dystonia when he worked on it.

“I was going to try everything,” Adams says. “I thought it was a possibility that I wouldn’t be able to draw cartoons again. But I don’t think in terms of absolutes; I think in terms of odds.” For someone who thought he had ‘bad art skills’, the use of a computer also turned him into a better artist.

Adams’ ideas for success strongly emphasise basic things like exercise and diet. He feels all the parts, small and big, are connected. “If you don’t have an understanding of the architecture of success, then you could be doing one part of it without having a good foundation. All of science supports the fact that if you are fit, eating right and healthy, then your mental performance and the number of hours you can work are going to be substantially better,” he says.

The book has tips on humour, business writing, voice training and so on—all of them fairly commonsensical. There are also amusing Dilbert stories to keep your interest up. One of them is how Dilbert’s popularity shot up because of the death of the syndication agency salesman who was supposed to sell it in the western United States. The man didn’t really like it and just didn’t show it to newspapers when he went on sales calls. After his death, the new salesman liked it, noticed its potential and sold it to every newspaper he visited.

Adams is still battling failure. He has been trying to make a Dilbert movie for the past 15 years, but has always come up against unexpected obstacles. Once, lawyers couldn’t close the deal. Another time, the director walked out because of personal problems. But he doesn’t consider these failures wasted: “My next step will be to write a script sometime this year. One of the things I learnt from my failures is that people had a hard time imagining what a Dilbert movie could be. I have learned because I have a system and not a goal. I can write a script that will answer that question.”

You could argue that the objective of making the movie sounds very much like a goal, even if the process is a system. But tying yourself up in semantics is not really conducive to success.

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