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THE DILBERT GUY
Scott
Adams, the man who understands every cubicle-dwellers worst nightmares, on
how to set yourself up for success
Earlier this month, newspaper readers across the
world were surprised when Dogbert, Dilbert’s anthropomorphic talking pet
dog declared that Asok the intern was gay. This was to ‘commemorate’ the
recent Supreme Court ruling criminalizing homosexuality in India.
Explaining why the work place focused comic took a stand on this issue, its
creator Scott Adams says, “It’s part of a larger pattern where the
government has overstepped. I’ve been campaigning for allowing
assisted-suicide and have rallied against President Obama’s closing of
medial marijuana dispensaries. What all of these have in common is
government overreach – into our privacy, bedrooms and health choices.” He
points out that in a sense it’s not too far removed from Dilbert as this
too, like the situations Dilbert finds himself in, are the result of a
bureaucracy and control.
On a larger level, Adams says that after his father
passed away a few months ago, he feels free to take on more dangerous
material as he is no longer worried about embarrassing his parents. “My
career is at a point where I don’t need to make money if I choose not to.
If I can make the world better at a personal cost to myself then I’m in a
weird position where I can absorb the personal cost easily and the benefit
to the world might be worth it,” he says.
Dilbert, which captures the travails of a nerdy
engineer in the corporate bureaucracy has had a successful run of 25 years
now and is among the most widely syndicated comics, appearing in over 2000
publications in 75 countries and 25 languages. Scott Adams Inc, the
business entity has also expanded to cover rights to the ten Dilbert books
and Dilbert merchandise.
At 56, Adams is at a stage in his career where it
makes sense to look back and reflect. This eventually took shape as a book,
How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My
Life, a book he describes as something that takes an entire life to write.
Explaining the series of incidents that shaped his life, he starts with the
time he was still in college and had applied for a job at an accounting
firm. He assumed that he must go dressed as the student he was and not
dressed for the job he wanted, in a suit and tie, and was promptly thrown
out. “Every moment of my life was like that. I realised that there’s no
such thing as common sense, only experience. I was in a unique position to
write about it partly because of my many, many personal failures which gave
me a large enough canvas to draw upon, and also because I’m a professional
simplifier. What I do best is take complicated things and boil them down to
their simplest form,” he says.
The first thing almost everyone does before
embarking on something new is to talk to someone who has done it before
about how they did it and how it worked out for them. Of course your
situation will be different but this helps narrow down your options and
eliminate any dumb choices along the way. Adams wasn’t quite so lucky. “I
came from a small town and didn’t have any mentors. I didn’t know anyone
who had been to college except for my teachers. The book is my attempt to
add something to the universe that could be useful to someone else,” he
says.
Perhaps the most important bit of advice he gives
is to set systems and not goals if you really want to succeed. “Goals are
fine when your objective is simple and not very far — say trying to shoot a
target at a shooting range. In the real world there is a lot of complexity
and it’s impossible to predict economic forces, technological changes and even
life changes,” says Adams. The risk then in focusing on a goal is that you
may end up overlooking opportunities that may be better for you than the
goal you’ve set yourself. A system moves you from low odds to better odds.
If you’re working on a project and the final result isn’t what you want, it
would be considered a failure. However, if you approach the project such
that you will pick up skills and make contacts that will be useful to you
in the future, you are bettering the odds of succeeding at a later stage.
“Ultimately, luck will be the biggest factor in anyone’s success but you
can do whatever is humanly possible to make yourself ready for it,” he
says.
Another way of improving the odds is to focus on
layering complementary skills rather than excelling only at one thing.
Adams started his career in the corporate world and even did a parttime MBA
to move up the ranks. Now while it didn’t get him too far in the business
world, it gave him enough fodder to fuel Dilbert. From being one in a thousand
who knows how to do one thing very well, you could go to being one in
twenty who can do three things, drastically improving your odds for
success. Being an expert helps, but more often than not, having multiple
skills might prove to be more useful.
Adams also cautions against following your passion.
“My problem with passion is that it’s not a quantifiable thing. The worst
thing in the world is sitting around waiting for passion to happen. People
do that,” he says. Instead, people need to work on themselves, on their
health, energy and overall happiness. If you are healthy and your body is
working, it will give you the energy to power through failures, work long
hours and take on challenges. “Over time, I’ve observed that when I’m doing
well at something, my excitement levels increase, and if I’m not doing
well, then the passion decreases. I believe passion comes from success, but
it doesn’t cause it. People tend to have it backwards,” says Adams.
Maintaining a healthy diet and being fit form an important
part of his book, perhaps because of the health issues he faced that
could’ve potentially ended his career as a cartoonist and speaker. Equally
important is the pursuit of happiness. “The only reasonable goal in life is
maximizing your total lifetime experience of something called happiness,”
he says in the book, also providing the mechanism to do this.
Adams ran up an impressive list of ventures before
and after finding success with Dilbert, ranging from videogames to
restaurants to grocery delivery and patents for keypads. The trick to
surviving these, he says, is not to get discouraged by these failures,
rather learn from them. “I failed in my corporate career but that became
the material that turned into Dilbert. Before Dilbert happened, I spent a
great deal of time learning how to program. The videogames I created didn’t
do well, but the skills allowed me to get promoted at my day job and
ultimately the same skill was the biggest key to turning Dilbert into a
successful comic — specifically when I started running my email address
with the strip. This was in ’93 when email wasn’t a very well known tool,”
he says.
There was a basic business principle he had learnt
while doing his MBA — connect with the customer — something cartoonists didn’t
do. Adams’ meagre business and technology skills allowed him to get in
touch with readers who wrote in to say that they enjoyed it when Dilbert
was doing stuff at work, not so much at home. “That’s when I changed it to
a workplace focused strip and that’s when Dilbert really took off. If it
wasn’t for failed careers and projects, I wouldn’t have been able to grow
it in this manner,” he says.
Going ahead, Adams is clear that whatever else he
does on the work front would be geared towards making the world a better
place. He’s set up a new business, calendartree.com, that allows people to
share schedules in an easier manner. He agrees it won’t cure cancer, but it
will make people’s lives easier. Besides, if it does well, he could sell it
for a billion dollars and donate the money for curing cancer.
In keeping with his principle of learning something
from others, Adams is trying to follow Salesforce.com founder Marc
Benioff’s approach to charity at calendartree.com. One percent of the
profits, equity and employees time at Salesforce.com goes to charity and
Adams admits that Benioff was a huge influence on him in wanting to do
something similar.
Towards the end of his father’s longdrawn illness,
Adams got extremely involved with the assisted suicide campaign. He points
out that one big change that needs to happen is that the question needs to
be rephrased. Instead of asking ‘Do you think doctors should be able to
kill patients in certain circumstances?’ the question needs to be ‘Do you
think the government should have a veto over a healthcare decision you,
your family and doctor made?’ “From now to the end of time, anyone who
googles the topic will see my name and argument come up. Everyone who is
important in this debate will see it. So my rephrasing the question did
make a difference,” says Adams.
Ultimately, Adams would want people to see the
ideas in the book as additional tools in their toolbox and not a rigid
to-do list. “One single prescription can’t fit every disease but this
template can be a good starting point before evaluating another approach,”
says Adams. People might end up doing things differently, but it’s better
than ‘floating in the middle of the universe’ the way Adams was at age 19.
b y Priyanka Sangani CDET140228
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