Interview: How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big with Scott Adams

You're listening to optimize with brian johnson.

More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I am thrilled to be chatting with Scott Adams, who, among many other things, is the creator of Dilbert, one of the most popular comic strips ever. He humbly says, over the last quarter century, I will say ever, at the time he wrote the book that we're going to talk about today, he had created 9,000 comic strips. And I just find that in and of itself, astonishingly inspiring for all of us as we choose what we're going to dedicate our life force to. He also wrote a great book called how to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. Subtitle Kind of the story of my life. We were just chatting before about how that may not have been the best marketing title, but I think it's the absolute perfect title to describe your life. As you can imagine, the book is both hilarious and wise. It's packed with wisdom. I'm really excited to chat about some of my favorite big ideas. And Scott, I really appreciate you taking the time.

Thanks for having me. I'm delighted.

Well, let's start at the top. How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. What was going through your mind when you decided that was the title?

Well, I think it came after I did an accounting of my own successes and failures, and I made a list to see how many times I had tried stuff just in the economic sort of business realm and failed. And I think I got 36 items on my list. There were legitimate business enterprises. Sometimes it was buying real estate high and selling it low, which very few people can do consistently. But I've managed to do that. In each case, there's some strange timing involved. There wasn't entirely something I could control, but likewise, the things that work are usually just lucky timing. So there's some magic in trying a lot of things. But my book takes it to another level beyond just if you try a lot of things, you might get lucky.

Well, that's great. And you see you unpack many of those failures in a very playful way. And as a recovering perfectionist, it's very helpful to be consistently reminded of the fact that we are not going to achieve the great things we want to achieve in our life in one straight path up that we're going to learn from the obstacles and the failures and all those good things.

Yeah. One of the most interesting things about life and about capitalism is that really capitalism is this big failure machine. It's a whole bunch of people who are doing things that aren't quite working out the way they planned or the way they hoped. The business isn't going where they think, but in the meantime, everybody's getting paid and they're buying stuff and goosing the economy. So it's sort of the miracle of capitalism that failure is the primary energy, that the primary that drives it. So as soon as you wrap your head around that, you start to understand what I call a system instead of a goal. A goal would be, I'm sure we'll talk about this a little more. But a goal would be a specific moonshot. In five years I'm going to be doing this in this exact way. Whereas in the context of a system, you know that lots of things are going to go wrong. You're going to pivot 10 times, you're going to find another opportunity you weren't even looking for. A relative is going to offer you a great thing. So in the systems view, you're just trying to make yourself more valuable no matter what you're failing at. So the most important thing is picking projects that you can fail elegantly and come out with more contacts, more confidence, maybe more skill.

Mm, that's great. That's exactly the first idea I wanted to explore because you make such a great distinction between systems and goals. And I quote you saying that to put it bluntly, goals are for losers. So talk to us about, and you talk about the fact that of course, as human beings we're goal oriented, et cetera, but can you talk to us about why it's so important to make a distinction between goals and systems?

Yeah. First, let me say that goals are not useless, they're actually very useful in the narrow situation where your environment is constrained. There's not many variables, there's not much time. So, for example, if you enter a bowling contest, obviously you want to win the contest. It's a short term, it's constrained situation. The goal is fine there, but if you're looking at your career, you don't know what's going to happen. It's not the farmer's life 200 years ago where everything stays the same. Next year, who knows? We're going to have nano robots in our bloodstream and all bets are off. You know, don't invent a new car part if there aren't going to be any cars. Everything's unpredictable now. So one of the problems with goals, if you have long range goals in this complex environment, chances are it's not going to happen just the way you want There might be something better that happens, but your specific goal might not happen. And that could be kind of discouraging because the entire time you're saying to yourself, man, I have this very specific goal and there's some other good things happening, but I'm trying to ignore them as hard as I can, even though they might be better things than my goal, because I'm focused. That's the whole point of a goal, right? You don't set a goal unless you're going to focus. So focus is the very thing which allows you to not see the other opportunities. I just realized that not see sounds like Nazi when you say it fast, but I don't know if that means anything.

Well, so let's talk to us about systems. And even as you approached, you share your story, right? So you knew you wanted to be a professional cartoonist. So can you talk to us about how you navigated that? What would appear to be a goal, or at least a vision or purpose or destination you want to arrive at? How did you integrate this wisdom in your own process?

Well, there are lots of individual things I tried that had a pretty specific objective, but the larger picture is I'm trying lots of things, and I'm also trying to do things which in failing will build me another skill that makes me more valuable the next time I go in. If you study startups, for example, there's a fairly well known sort of rule of thumb that says your first startup that you try, your odds are, let's say, 1 in 21 in 10, it's pretty bad. But the second one you try, after that first one fails, and it usually does, your odds sort of double. They're still not great because, you know, the startup world is not a high odds thing, but it doubles. So that shows you the power of a little bit of experience and having made some connections. So in my case, I always knew that even during my corporate jobs that I was heading towards something entrepreneurial. I didn't know what that thing would be. Cartooning was one of dozens of things I tried. It just happened to be the one that caught on and the one that worked. So I. So I followed it. But along the lines, I developed several skills that have the unique characteristic of not being that terribly special. For example, if anybody is familiar with Dilber, they can probably confirm when I say that I'm not being modest, when I say I'm not an artist, right? When I first submitted my cartoons for syndication many years ago, one of the editors said helpfully, perhaps we could find you an actual artist to do the drawing for you. So that's. That's where my art talent was on day one. I never took a professional course to write, except for a business writing course. It was two days, very useful, but only two days. And I know a little bit about business. I'm not Warren Buffett, but I knew enough to populate with my cartoon, with topics that people would care about. I had, you know, in a business degree that helped me market in a way that was a little bit advanced for other cartoonists. So I was strong within my field. And if you add together that and a few other things, you get a person who's sort of in the top 20%, maybe in the top 10% of several skills, which, when you bundle them together, make me quite unique because there, if I have a. If I give a speech, for example, in a room full of, let's say, a thousand people, in a group of 1,000 people, there are probably 50 to 100 people who are better artists than I am. Probably 50 people who took some advanced writing course have read far more than I have. People who are better at business, they have more experience right down the line. But find the one who has the same half dozen weird things that I cobbled together to make my experience unique, and good luck finding that.

So then your system, in that you say it's not so much the goal of succeeding in business, needs to be replaced with the system of being a serial entrepreneur, right? Where you're going to go, you know, fail forward, basically, and just get better and better, and we'll see how all these skills come together in the future, right?

So at this point in my life, I've created this sort of virtuous situation where I have so many connections that it's hard for me to sit in a room with other people at the end of it, not say, do you know you should be talking to this guy that solves your problem and his. So that stuff just happens every time I'm in a room now because I know enough people that I can do that. So, in fact, I've tried to take that skill to Berkeley, where I'm an alum, trying to organize their help, organize their startup system, sort of a disorganized ecosystem. And I'm working on that. So it's just, again, I have no specific goal for the Berkeley ecosystem, where I'm spending lots of time just trying to improve that system. But in the process, I'm meeting a ton of people who are very useful to my own startup, to my life as a cartoonist. I'm in the throes of building a little video and photography studio within my house. This is something I have zero knowledge about, but it turns out it's useful for everything from the Berkeley project to my startup to the Dilber world and five things I haven't thought of yet. In about a month, I will be in the top 20%, maybe the top 10% of people who know how to use photography and lighting. I will be nowhere near professional level, but I can still do most things. I could do a little video promotional thing in my house, whatever. So here again, I probably will never make a viral video that sets the world on fire because of my little set of equipment I'm buying. But I'm going to be in every conversation when it comes up. I'm going to know what somebody needs to do and it's a problem that every startup has. How do I make a little cheap video to show my thing? So this is just one more example of something that doesn't have a specific goal. It has a whole bunch of things that could be good about it. But the only thing I know for sure is that I personally will be far more valuable in a month and.

That bringing back to the system lens, that's what you're doing is you're constantly getting a little bit better and a lot of different things that interest you, following that trail, wherever it leads you, not knowing exactly where it's going to go.

Yeah, I would say, I would actually subtract the word interests me. You have to have a sufficient base level of interest. But I don't want to get toward anything that's like passion. When I try to accumulate skills that are based on usefulness and broad application. Right.

That's awesome.

Yeah. So I'm not going to spend too much time developing some tight little skill and flower arranging if it doesn't have some help to the rest of my life.

Yeah, it's a great distinction. Passion versus skills. I chatted with Cal Newport who wrote a book called so Good They Can't Ignore you. And he makes a great distinction there. Then, just to celebrate our Berkeley connection, I started my first business after dropping out of Berkeley Law School. So it served me well. I realized that wasn't it.

I don't know if you know this, but law school was my original ambition.

I remember reading that.

Yeah, I was pre law, at least in my mind. As an undergraduate.

You were wise enough to know that you were able to run through that process in your mind fast enough to realize it wasn't worth it.

You know what it was, is that the law, at least a lot of it, is sort of a win lose proposition. You know, if I do a good job, somebody, somebody is going to have a little less of the pie. It's quite often the case. But with cartooning, nobody's really losing, Right. You could argue I'm taking somebody's space in the newspaper, but really, if anybody's good, they have all the space they need. Being good is the hard part and.

Developing the skills to get you there. So one of the things you talk about in terms of your keys to success is making the distinction between deciding and wanting. And you say that a lot of people want and wish for a lot of things, but there's a big difference between that and deciding. Can you unpack that for us?

Yeah, I heard this from. I wish I could attribute the original quote. There was some millionaire who was profiled on some show years ago. And it's just one of those things that sticks in your mind forever and it just, then it just becomes a part of you. Literally. It becomes your own philosophy over time. And that is that distinction that you mentioned between wanting something and we all want to be a billionaire. We want to be able to fly by flapping our arms. There's lots of things we want. Right. But when you decide you've said, I don't even care what it costs, I'm going to figure that out later. Does it cost me an arm? I've already decided, goodbye arm. Is it going to take me 10 years? I've already decided, goodbye 10 years. So I find in my life that there's this intense stubbornness that is a real asset. And it has a lot to do with whether you think you're trying to do something or if you've just decided to do it. And there aren't that many things in this world that if a adult human with education and willpower puts their complete 100% focus, you know, I don't care what this costs. You can knock down a lot of doors like that. It's just the person who says, I'm going to knock real hard a couple times, but if that doesn't work out, let me back off. Now I'm quick to point out I'm a big proponent of quitting when it's time. And you know, there's, there's a skill to know when, when that's the right time to quit. It's a whole other discussion. But certainly if you've decided and you know you want it, you can, you can kind of Force a lot of things to happen that you wouldn't imagine when you're at square one.

Yeah, I love that. Was there a time in your cartooning career, professional career, where you just. You made that decision and it moved from wish to decision?

Yeah. So getting the big break in cartooning is a process where you submit your samples, usually through the mail in those days. I'm sure it's by email now. And if somebody gives you a contract, in this case, a big syndication company, it was United Media at the time. Now it's moved to Universal. You're thinking, I've got this big break. What was your original question? I've completely forgotten.

Yeah. So we were talking about deciding versus wishing, and I was just.

Yes. My example was that once I got the contract, until then, it was just one of the things I was trying. It wasn't the thing I had dedicated my life to. But once I got the break, I made myself a promise. And the promise was this. I would never be able to say that I should have worked harder to get a better result. I wanted to simply take that off the table. So I made a decision. Not so much that this was going to be the thing that would work, because who knows, right? It was simply the thing I said. There's one variable that I'm going to completely control for. Everything else I can't control for. But the variable of did I work hard enough? That's off the table now. I'm taking that off forever. I spent 10 years without a day off working both my day job and Dilbert at nights and weekends and mornings. During that time, I got a book offer. So I was doing three jobs. I was working full time. I had a book I was writing and I was doing Dilber. And during those times, they were what I called my running years. And I had a small condo in Dublin, California. And in order to get all of that done, starting at four in the morning and finishing late at night, I had to run anytime I stood up. So if I was just going to get a glass of water or go to the bathroom, I actually ran. And I made no exception. And I did it for years. I ran in my house every time I went somewhere. And without that, I don't know if I could have done it. I mean, I was that close to redlining and dropping dead or being buried by it all, but that's the difference. I never once said to myself, hey, maybe I'll give this decision to work this hard a second thought. All right? Because it was a decision. It was no Longer in play. Did that make a difference? I'm sure it did. I'm sure it did.

That's amazing. And I love the way you frame it, too. If that didn't guarantee the success, but you were going to have that commitment to the system side of it, of, look, my systems are. I'm going to work as hard as I possibly can to make this have a chance at succeeding. And that was, again, the systems orientation. You weren't constantly saying, is this working the way I wanted it to? Is it working the way I wanted it to? It was, am I working the way I want to?

Exactly. Exactly. Am I doing the things that I'm going to feel right about when I look back at this?

That's so awesome. And then it's funny, too, because one of the things I want to chat about is exercise. And you playfully described the fact that we are moist robots with superpowers. If we know how to properly program the interface. And you talk in depth about the importance of exercise and nutrition and rest. So I just imagined you running where not only was that giving you the time, it was also giving you the vitality and the energy.

Yeah, absolutely.

To do it. Can you talk to us about what you've discovered on that front in terms of the Moist Robot and programming and all that good stuff?

Yeah. First, a little background. I'm a trained hypnotist. I learned hypnosis skills in my 20s. I thought maybe it'd be a career, but it turns out to be yet another skill to layer on top of things. So that really formed the basis of my Moist Robot philosophy. And the Moist Robot really just says that your body is mechanical thing, like any other robot in the sense that it is not immune from cause and effect. You know, if you put the right food in it, you get a pretty predictable result. If you put the wrong food, you get another result. And that our mind is maybe a little bit. A little bit of an illusion, really. We're just kind of bouncing around. But within that context, you can still change things. And the things you can most easily change, the things you have a lot of control over, are your diet and your fitness. So within the realm of the Moist Robot philosophy, I described a way to approach diet and fitness, which, by the way, I don't recommend anybody use because I'm not a doctor and you shouldn't look at it that way. Right. So in the book, when I talk about diet and exercise, it's in the context of explaining how a system works. Since everyone's different, your system should Be different than mine. But you should know what a system is, all right? That's the important part. And the most important distinction is I have a coworker, a co founder on my startup that I'm working on who runs marathons, and he's been in Ironman and stuff like that. Everything that works for me doesn't work for him, and vice versa. There's no way his system and my system can ever be together, because running just hurts for me. I just hate it. So here's the system I came up with. If you were to take all of the elements of fitness that are important, imagine you went to the library and it's just books on books. Now, some of it's repetitive because there aren't that people talk about the same stuff a lot. But you can dig forever about what you should eat and when and what kinds of reps and lightweights and heavyweights. Are you a man or a woman? Are you young or old? Do you have a health problem? There's a billion things, but it turns out that there's one thing, it just floats above all of the other things in the fitness realm. If you get the one thing right, everything else actually takes care of itself over time. And that was sort of my recognition with myself. And that one thing is that you do it every day. And when I say it, I mean you're active. And I don't over define that as, did I run 10 miles every day, but rather, sometimes it's cleaning the garage, sometimes it's a long walk for the dog because that's all you have anyway. But what's important is that you're taking it from the realm of thinking about it every day. Do I exercise how I exercise? And you try to move it as much as possible into the realm of habit, move it into the brain that is no longer subject to your rational mind coming up with reasons why you shouldn't do it. So what I do is I simply do it every day at the same time I'm going to do it. I'm actually in my exercise clothes. I'm going to do it right after we're done. And I've committed it to such a habit that at about 11am every day, my foot is tapping and my body is starting to vibrate. And if I go the extra step, which is a trick my hypnosis instructor taught me, actually, and I put on my exercise clothing, especially the athletic footwear, my body just keys into this program that it's used to, it just says, oh, I know what that feeling is that means we're getting ready to go exercise, and it just boosts the subroutine like any good computer. Now, if you don't believe that's true, the next time you absolutely don't feel like exercising, just put on your exercise clothes, give yourself permission to not exercise, and just walk around the house for a little while. Chances are pretty high chance, probably an 80% chance you're going to start saying to yourself, well, I got my clothes on. Might as well at least walk around the block. Might as well do something. And you'll find that once you've built the habit, you end up going to the gym. You hang around other people who are equally interested. You have conversations, you say, what did you try? You tried that thing over time, trial and error. You learn what works for you. Now, if you looked at my actual exercise routine at the gym, you would say, that doesn't look like what most people are supposed to be doing, and it isn't right. It's just something that happened to work for me in particular. Now, your users are not going to see the video on this, so we're talking live on Skype, and I'm going to do something terribly narcissistic. I'm actually going to show you my six pack.

Let's do it. I was going to say you got the Nike swoosh rocking it.

So I don't know if. I don't know if you can see here, but. So I'm 60 years old, meaning, well, I'll be 59.

I'll report he's looking jacked.

In the coming year. Chances are you've never seen anybody my age who isn't doing something professional that would look anything like the way I've sculpted my body. And I put no effort into it. I eat anything I want all day long. And again, on the fitness side, the trick, the system, if you will, is that I've learned over the years and I put great effort into this, learn how to flavor the foods that are already good for me. So if I said to you, or let's say not you, but let's say some regular person who's not paying attention to their diet, if I said, start eating healthy tomorrow, everything they put in their mouth would be sawdust and cardboard and plastic. That's what it would taste like, because they wouldn't know how to flavor it. They wouldn't know how to prepare it. And if they did, maybe it would take so long that they say, damn it, this is also hard. Mine is. I don't even cook things. Most of the things I eat are raw, so there's no preparation time. I know how to get enough proteins. I've solved for that. But anyway, the point is that if you simply learn how to flavor the good foods and if you go any way to learn which foods are good, that you change your effort from one of willpower, which is painful and will eventually talk you out of eating well, into one of knowledge. So my system summarized for diet is that I convert the need for willpower into simple knowledge that I accumulate over time. I'll give you an example. The listeners can play along with us. Let's say I go to the salad bar and you and I both want to eat healthy. Maybe we're watching our waistlines and it's a terrible salad bar and all it has is a white potato and some plain pasta. And if I were to say to you, which do you pick? Now, I say this in front of an audience and I won't put you on the spot, but I think you actually know the answer is that the glycemic index of those two things turns out to be quite different. Now, neither of them are health foods per se, but if you picked a potato and I picked the pasta and you kept picking those choices and I kept picking my choices, you would think that you and I were eating the same food. And you must have that. I must have a fast metabolism because I'm not gaining weight. The truth is I just knew that the glycemic index of pasta was low compared to a white potato. So I chose correctly. I used knowledge. Maybe you had to use willpower because now you've got to eat less. I didn't eat any of that. So if you combine some kind of a system of learning for your diet and just say, I can eat as much as I want whenever I want, that's really what I do right now. It's just, it'll only be good stuff. And over time, I'll make sure I know how to flavor it. And then for fitness, you just make sure you do it every day and you're going to be around people who care about that stuff and give you tips and you'll pick it up by osmosis.

Yeah, there's so much in there. And thanks for the six pack show. But a couple of things I want to highlight the distinction you made, which was another one of the things I wanted to make sure we talked about of if you want to make anything a habit, don't say you're going to do it Monday, Thursday, and every Other Wednesday, do it every day. And you know, you say the worst thing you can possibly do is to decide which day you're going to do it, install the habit, put it into the system robot style so that it just gets done. And then even with nutrition too, you make the distinction of losing 20 pounds is a goal. Consistently getting a little bit better and eating well is a system. Right. So we want to orient toward that and have the same willingness to fail that you do entrepreneurially. Where wow, when I ate that, I tested it and that just didn't quite work. And I tried this approach and I felt that way, let me try something else. And we're getting a little bit better.

So let me compare that approach to someone who was trying just the willpower, let's say the, you know, just the push the put the spoon down, push the chair away from the table approach. Let's say you're doing that one and I'm doing my system. I'm learning stuff and you're using your willpower. Now let's say at the end of two months you've lost ten pounds because people do, right? People can lose a lot of weight with their willpower. But you check back in a year, chances are, because willpower is hard to maintain, you may have gained back your weight. Let's say I've gained back my weight too. Let's say at the end of the year we did nothing. Like we both struck out. But you know you're going to try it again, right? People don't diet once in their life and say, well, I tried it once when I was 25 and that didn't work out. The second time we try it, I'm starting from second base. I already know what to eat, but I don't know enough. I haven't taken it to whatever level is sufficient to make a difference for my body. So I might be two steps away. You're starting from scratch again with your.

Goal, that didn't work and even in some cases a couple steps behind scratch because now you're feeling worse and you don't feel like you know what you need to do versus you have an experimenter's lab coat on. You're willing to test different things and really know that the systems will deliver the long term results.

And, and I don't have a specific time frame in mind. So that in my example I really wouldn't be checking in a year. I would just say, do I know more today than I knew yesterday? That would be my metric.

Yeah. And it's the Deciding versus wanting. It's not a. You know, oh, I kind of wish I was doing this. Whatever I'm going to do whatever it takes for however long it takes to get to a place where it's effortless for me to maintain an energy level that's. That's optimal.

The book that I would recommend that people read is called Habit, Charles Duhigg. And he talks about the fairly recent science of habit and how you do want to move those some elements to habit as much as you can. Let me just say one other thing about that, about exercise, about doing it every day. Several times a year, I do this. I put on my exercise clothes. I'm still not really feeling it, but I figure I'll drive to the gym because it usually works out. I get there, I park, I walk into the gym, I go into the middle of the gym. I literally stand in the middle of it. I look around, and sometimes about four times a year, I say, nope. And I literally turn directly around and walk straight out the door, get my car, and drive home. And here's the key. It's a success.

You won.

It's a success because I'm working a system. My system is, did I go every day? And if only four or five times, I have to turn around. Well, that's really just common sense within the system. It's not those days. I really just didn't have it. So I never have the sensation that my exercise isn't working. I only have the exercise that maybe something blew up that day.

Yeah, that's awesome. Charles Duhigg, the power of habit. And you referenced even putting on your shirt when you were describing that. I was thinking of Charles Duhigg, and he would describe that as a cue. So we have a cue which then subconsciously triggers the habit. And that in our model here, we have the robot that, you know, NASA supercomputer, subconscious mind that we've hypnotized by putting on the clothes is now going and effortlessly doing that which we otherwise had to struggle to do.

Yeah. In hypnosis, we would call it a trigger.

Cool.

Or a key. Or a key. A key or a trigger. Those would be two words. And so the things that I learned in my twenties in hypnosis, which at the time was not grounded by a ton of science, it was pretty much experimental. People would say, look, we keep doing this, and we keep getting this result. Try it for yourself. See if it works. So that. That pretty much was all the rigor of science we had then. But over time, almost all of it except some of the weird trance claims, which I don't subscribe to. Pretty much all of it has been demonstrated by studies at this point, especially the habit stuff.

That's awesome. One of the ideas I want to make sure we touch on is you talk about where are you going to be at 6:20am on a Saturday in 2017. This just fired me up. You know, just this idea that you talk about Barry Schwartz and the paradox of choice of let's just constrain the number of choices we have. And you can't remember the last time you had to think about what you're going to do when you wake up in the morning and you jokingly say, I'm happier than the person that's spending two hours mapping out their day. I've already done two hours of work. Can you talk to us about consistency as it applies to creativity and just those rituals?

Yeah, so creativity is kind of a special case. Most creative folks, especially if they're in their writing, if they're doing any writing at all, usually prefer either late night or early morning, which I call really the same segment of the day, sort of the dark hours. And I don't know why. I assume it's just something with the biorhythms or, you know, the natural cycle of your body, but if you try to violate that, you're just in trouble. I. I've never done a useful thing in the afternoon in my life, and my body just doesn't support that for some reason. So some of it just makes sense. But I love that morning ritual because of the certainty my mind is the most clear. I have the fewest distractions. By 8am this morning, I had worked four hours. And if I quit, if I had knocked off at 8am an hour before a lot of people show up for work, it would have been a completely successful day because I'd written a blog and two comics and all my social media. Now, as it turns out, I have 100 more things to do today. So, you know, I'll be going late into the night, as I often do in my case, I make sure that everything I do is within the pleasant realm. And the people I'm working with, I like to be with and intellectually stimulating. So these long hours are almost entertainment to me in some sense. But the discipline of always knowing where you're going to be, as you said, removes choice. It gives me certainty about my schedule. When somebody says, how long does it take you to build this many cartoons? To hit this deadline, I don't have the Gas. I always know I use the same method for a lot of my work. For example, the socks I'm wearing, you know, I just buy a lot of socks of the same type. You know, I only pretty much only wear these, these color Nike shirts with three different shades. That's about it.

You're extravagant. I have one. I'm wearing a white T shirt right now, and I have a dozen of these. Too much color can make you confused. Right.

Well, but I don't have to decide. I do them in order that they're hanging on the rack.

But just using. And you jokingly say you don't waste brain cells on these things, like you want to dedicate it to something that actually matters. You don't need to use those precious little brain cells to compute what you're going to be wearing on a daily basis, right?

Yeah. In my case, I'm sort of an extreme case in the sense that I've reached that point in my career and life and training and skill where the number of good ideas that have commercial value floating through my head is at an all time high. So being distracted because I can't find where my pen is to write down something is like a serious problem. Right. So one of my systems is that I put a pen and pad within seven seconds of every place in my house. So there has to be a working pen and something to write a note on seven seconds from any place I could be in the house.

That's awesome. It's the little things that matter I want to talk about. Why not be the first? So you cured yourself. Was it focal dystonia is how you describe it?

Well, I had both a focal dystonia and a spasmodic dysphonia. They're part of the same family. One involved my pinky finger and my drawing hand, and the other was my vocal cords.

And you were told by your doctor when you asked him, what can I do? And he basically said, find another profession. Right. With this focal dystonia, or the dystonia that was on your hand, and you talk about the odds and you were told that it was basically incurable, no one had ever cured it. And you make the really, really powerful distinction of you didn't care, you decided that you were going to be the first one ever to do this, then you did what it took to make it happen. Can you talk to us about that psychology and just how we can embrace that?

Well, you know, there's this fine line between optimism and, you know, insanity. Right. So there's some things that you have a valid right to be optimistic about. And there's some things you really kind of don't have a right to be optimistic about because the world is now serving up those kinds of odds. But I had a. I had a strange life up to that point. Here I was a famous cartoonist in probably one of the most competitive fields known to humanity. How many brand new big cartoonists are launched every 10 years? Within 20 years, I was kind of the biggest one, Right? So what are the odds of that? What are the odds that the first time I read book it would be a number one bestseller? So, and those are just some examples or other things in my personal life. And I'd use something called affirmations for a while that made a number of very unlikely things happen in my life. And so my sense of what the odds were was completely skewed based on my experience. And it started to feel like maybe I didn't have bad odds for things, maybe I was just terrible at estimating odds. And certainly that was true with everybody I observed who wasn't me. You know how you always imagine, well, I'm pretty good at estimating how things are going to go tomorrow, but those other people, they're picking the wrong politicians and the wrong policies and what's wrong with all those other people? So if you're at least even a little bit aware of yourself or even a little bit aware of the world, these other people are all pretty smart and everybody's had different ideas about everything. So once you sort of release on your ability to predict your release on your assumption that you really understand how the world is put together, it frees you and it frees you for optimism, among other things. And so there's a lot that goes into the psychology of saying I'm going to be the first one who fixes a problem that nobody's ever fixed. Right. But I had a track record and I decided and I was either going to. You know, during that time, I also taught myself to draw left handed because again, I decided right, you imagine how hard it is to teach yourself to draw left handed. But I did. And some of the Dilbert comics that are published were drawn left handed. It took longer and I imagined it would take a long time to get it up to speed. Now, during that time, I actually became ambidextrous just accidentally because I offloaded things like mouse hand and I played tennis a little bit left handed. So that was an interesting experiment, but the psychology probably is a little bit of you can't bring yourself to imagine it it's sort of an unimaginable bad news. If a cartoonist is told that your hand will never work, you know, at least just for drawing, it can work for everything else. So there's some disbelief, there's some optimism, and there's some track record that says, I'm not sure I can understand the odds of anything.

It's amazing. And Bernie Roth, who's up there at Stanford, one of the early design thinking guys, he talks about this too. He's like, look, if you're in that 1 or 2% that make it, then your odds of success are 100%. This idea, the humility, the playful humility. If we're not being idiots about this and thinking that we have 100% success rate just because we think we can, we know we might not succeed. Yet we're willing to dare to dream and to do what it takes to make it happen. And we'll see, and we'll focus on the systems and do the little things day in and day out with that track record belief, as you said, of, you know what? I've done some things that are pretty remarkable. Let me just go test this out. Can you share affirmations you talked about, I think a little bit in the book. I actually didn't highlight it, but you mentioned that. Do you still use affirmations? What would you coach people thinking about on that?

So affirmations are the practice of. I didn't invent this. This is a practice that's well known for decades in which people simply write down a simple sentence that says what they want or what their goal is. So this would be a goal way of thinking, usually. But to make it less goal, instead of saying, I will get rich and make exactly a million dollars by this date, you can say, I'm becoming wealthier every day, or you can make it a more system oriented general thing, or I'm developing a habit to go to the gym. So you can make it a system if you want. What I was doing was. A friend had introduced me and it was this wacky idea that you just say what you want and somehow if you did it over and over and you repeated every day, 15 times a day, writing a little sentence of the form, I, Scott Adams, will succeed in some specific way, that somehow if you did that, the universe would listen and open up and start delivering its riches in ways that would look like coincidences. I, of course, am. I'm more skeptic than skeptics. I mean, I'm so skeptic. I think skeptics are idiots because they're not open minded enough. You're not skeptical about your skepticism. And that's the problem. Right? So when I heard this, you can imagine what I thought, which is, you know, stop talking to me. There's just noise coming out of your mouth. How do I make this stop? But she was a member of Mensa. She was literally genius. She was persuasive. And I should tell you that she was classmate in the hypnosis class at the time. So the fact that she was persuasive should not have been a surprise. We were literally learning how to be persuasive. So I said, okay, look, you know, you made your argument, it's free. It doesn't cost me anything to write things down. I'll try it, I'll report back. I will show you that this is garbage. You don't have time in your half hour for the long version of the story. But I picked some extraordinarily unlikely things to try to affirm. There were things in my personal life and when they happened, I did what she had already warned me would happen. I said to myself, it's probably not because I'm writing it down. It's because in one case, I guess I'm more handsome than I imagined. A person was attracted to me who was way out of my league. And yes, I was writing down that affirmation, but I probably just misunderstood how my game, you know, I was probably a better catcher than I thought or I was smarter than it, or I did something right. So I kept upping it and trying more and more different things. And the point I became convinced is when I had some inspirations about stocks to buy. And the first one was Chrysler stock when they were in the depths of bankruptcy, were trying to come out when nobody thought it was a good idea. I got this weird thought that I should buy a bunch of it. And that was going to be my affirmations coming true. I didn't buy it. But it went on to become the biggest stock of that year. When they turned around and climbed out of bankruptcy. I tried it again with the second stock. It became a story stock of the year. The odds of those two things happening given that there's, let's say 10,000 stocks you could pick. So I picked among the best one and then I think the second best one soon after that out of 10,000 without research. So of course, if you're listening to this thing. Yeah, yeah, people do that, right? There are coincidences. But by now I'd racked up a few Coincidences. And so that's when I decided to affirm that I would take my GMATs and get a very specific score, which was the 94th percentile, and got exactly that percentile after taking all my practice tests. And then having taken the test before in a previous year and got no better than the 77th percentile. Gigantic change with just doing some practice tests, none of which were that high in practice. So it was after that experience, the last of a long series of these. Not a long series, but half a dozen things that come not just true, but exactly true. I mean, in ways they were just scary. And indeed, it seemed like the universe was serving up opportunities to me. So that's when I changed my affirmation to, I, Scott Adams will be a famous cartoonist. And when that happened and when I got a book deal, I changed it to Scott Adams would be a number one best selling New York Times author. And that happened as well. So now I had something like eight experiences in a row. Some of them I could actually calculate the odds. So 2,000 people try to become a cartoonist every year. Five of them get picked. Of the five, four of them are out of business in five years. So one out of 2,000. Some of the other things had that quality that you could put some kind of a number on if that's your experience. And by the way, my explanation for this is not magic. I should throw that in quickly. I don't believe that the universe really did serve up opportunities necessarily. What I do believe is that maybe my focus was better. Maybe I started noticing things because of that focus. There were opportunities I might have ignored. Maybe it allowed me to try harder. Maybe it was more of this deciding instead of wanting things. So I just pushed harder. Maybe it was my subconscious telling me that I do have the talent for these particular endeavors, but I don't realize it consciously. So it's allowing me to write these things 15 times a day, but interestingly, not allowing me to write other things that might not have worked. So maybe it's just a message for my subconscious in the way these things happen. So there are lots of explanations for it. None of them require magic. So by the time my hand function was lost to focal dystonia, and then years later when I lost my ability to speak to a rare disease, also incurable, that turns out was part of the same family of problems, I just didn't see it that way. You know, I just said, I'm going to be first. And especially with the voice problem, I said, I'm going to be first. But I'm not going to be done. All right? After I fix me, I'm going to fix it for everybody. I'm going to. Whereas I said in my book, I'm going to burn down the jail, free the well, free the prisoners first, burn down the jail second, and then I'm going to shoot the warden. So in that order. Now, eventually, I found the one doctor in the world who developed a surgery that could fix this thing, and that's why you can hear me today. So I wasn't first, but the world generally didn't know that this was a curable problem. There was only one guy doing it in one place at UCLA, Dr. Gerald Burke. And now I'm helping bring that message to other people. So I like mentioning it in the book. I mentioned it here. People magazine did a spread. I'm part of their. Part of the organization that works on this problem. National Society of the nsda. So this is the part where I'm freeing the prisoners and burning down the prison. And I don't think the surgery will work for everybody, but I'm going to keep pushing at it until it's time to shoot the warden.

Yeah, it's awesome. It's one of the things we reflected on briefly before we started our chat today is just, you know, I both come from backgrounds where we didn't have a lot of people telling us what we could do. And you said in the book that that's exactly the sort of inequality that pisses me off and motivates me at the same time. So I feel that through your work in our chat and in your book and everything you're doing of. It's not just about us, like, let's play for something bigger than ourselves and give back and use these opportunities to. To get stronger and to serve more profoundly. I appreciate you sharing all those stories. I'm curious, are you still using affirmations or is that kind of a. Is that an active practice or is that kind of slipped away?

I'm embarrassed to say this, but my life is so good right now. I would tell you my average weekday, you know, just pick a day. Wednesday is so much better than most people's best day they've ever had in their life. And I'm in perfect health. I just don't have a problem in the world right now. So as you say, my focus has turned outward. I probably couldn't spend all the money that I've already made personally, but I still work insane hours. I still work every day. And now my focus is on what Can I do for somebody else? Because every penny I make from now on is going to be directed to something useful that's outside of me.

Well, it's Abraham Maslow comes to mind. He says the self actualizer apparent dichotomy between work and play dissolves like, are you working? Are you playing? Are we working? Playing right now? Let someone else decide that. Right. As James Michener said, I'm just living. This is just what I get.

So the way I like to describe it is that you're born as a baby and you're 100% selfish and you need to, because you can't really take care of yourself. As you become a teenager, you're sort of halfway in between. Then you're raising kids and your focus turns outward and your kids, but you're still a little selfish. Ideally, at about the time you die, you have none left. You've literally given it all. So if I could imagine a perfect end to my, you know, my physical body. I do plan to transform into software and live forever, but that's another story. But a perfect end to my physical body would be nothing left. So that's what I'm shooting for.

Right on. Is there anything that we've discussed or anything that we haven't talked about from your book that you want to make sure we highlight?

I think you've done a tremendous job of hitting the high points. If you get the systems versus goal idea, that's probably something you want a deeper dive about. So I would say that's the best part of it.

That's great. And then that kind of leads to how I like to wrap up these chats. If you could only share one piece of wisdom with someone who's passionate about optimizing their lives, what would that one piece of wisdom be? It might be something we chatted about, it might be something outside of that.

Yeah. This is where I like to throw in my philosophy of life. That's condensed from everything we've talked about and everything else. It comes down to two words, be useful. It turns out that if you're doing things and even if you're failing, if you've built new skills, chances are those skills are not just useful to you, they're going to be useful to someone else. So if your life is moving in a direction where your usefulness to other people is either increasing or your potential for that is increasing, chances are you're going to be happy. Our happiness is somehow directly linked to am I doing the right thing? And you know, the right thing because it just feels right in your body. You physically your stress goes away. You can do amazingly hard things if you're sure they're the right things. But if you think you might be doing the wrong thing, like your assignment at work may be a complete waste of time, you can never feel right about that. And if you're not right with other people, you can never feel right about that. And if you're finding one way to be right with everything, ask yourself if you're useful. And if you're not, find a way.

To be right on. Scott, I appreciate you taking so much time and just who you are and what you've committed to in your life and thrilled to be connected.

Brian, thanks for the opportunity. I appreciate it very much.

Isn't it a bit odd we went from math to science to history but somehow missed the class on how to live? For some wacky reason, optimal living 101 never made the schedule. Of course it's too late to go back and change that and you're too busy to read full time to catch up.

Yet.

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