#164 Scott Adams – Transcript

Scott Adams is the creator of Dilbert, one of the most popular comic strips of all time. In addition to creating Dilbert Scott has been a Bestselling author and successful entrepreneur.

His many bestsellers include The Dilbert Principle, and How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big and his newest book Loserthink. For long time listeners of the show you know how big of a fan Sean is of Scott and on this episode they cover some his favorite topics such as Systems over goals, talent stacking and Scott’s creative process. If you want to learn how to win big in life this episode is for you!

Sean DeLaney: Scott Adams welcome to What Got You There You There. How are you doing today?

Scott Adams: I’m doing great, thanks for having me. 

Sean: No, of course, very excited about this conversation. This is one I’ve been looking forward to for a long time, but I don’t think there’s a better place to start than grabbing our favorite beverage and taking a simultaneous sip 

Scott: Got my beverage right here, so I’m with you.

Sean: Where did your love for coffee, and this routine come from?

Scott: Well, my love of coffee started in college. I know some people call it coffee, but I’m from Upstate New York, so I still call it (in a thick New York accent) coffee and so I got addicted to coffee in the usual way. It just helped me get through the mornings but when I started doing it on Periscope, it caught on and so I just went with it one of the things that you learn as a creator, is that your audience tells you what the product is, you think you know, then you go and say, “I’m gonna give you this and then the audience quite quickly says, “No. How about you give us this instead? So you really have to follow the audience if you’re smart about it. 

Sean: Is that how you most identify right now as a creator?

Scott: Yeah, primarily. I mean the Dilbert comic is another example of that. People ask me to do more workplace comics in the early days of the strip when it was just a generic comic at the time, and I listened to the audience, they wanted it to be a workplace strip, so I turned it into that. So I’m sort of a creator who has a degree in business. I got an MBA, so I tend to listen to the audience more than the average artist, who has artistic integrity, might.

Yeah, I don’t have to worry how to have all the artistic integrity. I’d rather give give the audience what they actually know they want. 

Sean: You mentioned the MBA, you also were valedictorian of your high school, correct?

Scott: I was, but that’s not nearly as impressive as it sounds because there were only 40 people in my graduating class. 

Sean: Being the top 1 of 40 isn’t too bad, though. We were talking about coffee, there for a second. I am intrigued though about routines. Typical morning, what does that usually look like for you?

Scott: I wake up without an alarm clock these days, so I let my body tell me when it’s time to get up this morning, it told me, at around 4 AM, which is typical. So between four and six usually, I wake up. First thing I do is I get my coffee and then I look at the headlines and get ready to do my daily Periscope, live stream and that happens 7 AM my time. So, it’s 10 AM eastern standard, and I try to do it at the same time every day, and I always start with the simultaneous sip. Everybody joins me to sip their coffee at the same time at least once and I’m a trained hypnotist. And one of the things you learn is that people can become very, very hooked on habit.

So I knew that coffee was attractive to most people I knew that if they did it at the same time it would become habit-forming. And that’s part of the fun since I write about and talk about persuasion. I’m not hiding the fact that I do this for effect, and people understand that.

Sean: You mentioned habits. What about the rest of the day? I’m always intrigued about what different creators, do throughout the day. It might even be the evening. Just things that you found success doing.

Scott: The biggest most important trick that I found is if you can get to the point where you have some control over your schedule, then you can match your energy state. Just how you feel with the type of task.

So in my case, I’m by far the most creative and energetic in the morning, so getting up extra early bank sense for me ’cause I can optimize my creative time by sometime around noon and then it lasts for several hours. My brain just doesn’t work in any creative ways; it’s all about task. What’s my to-do list, what’s on my calendar, who do I have to call?

And so I make sure that my boring tasks are in the afternoon and then I’ve noted that it’s easier to sit down and draw for a long time. If I have to do a bunch of drawing for the Dilbert comic, it’s good if I’ve exercised that day ’cause that calms me down, gets my body nice and tired, and relaxed, and that’s a perfect energy stay for mindlessly drawing stuff.

Sean: So it’s 10 AM right now. Where are we in terms of you being brain-dead or are we gonna have a little bit of functionality or for a little bit?

Scott: Oh no, you’re good. I’ve done my Periscope for the morning at a little extra work I’ve got at least an hour of a good mental clarity here. 

Sean:That’s fantastic, I’ll take it. So the way I actually first came to your work, besides Dilbert, was actually your talk around systems vs. goals and growing up, I always heard that you have to set these goals and follow them and then your concept of systems vs. goals just hit me like a eureka moment. I would love if you could just talk about the philosophy around that and even how that came to be for you.

Scott: Yeah, so that was in my book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, and I talk about the idea that goals can be limiting. If you have the big complicated world with almost infinite possibilities, if you focus on one goal, what happens if you achieve it? There’s a good chance that something else popped up that would have been better to do if you had pivoted in time.

So the first thing that goals do that’s bad is it blinds you to other opportunities which might be percolating, and they might be popping up all over the place and you’re just not noticing, ’cause you’re focusing. The other problem with goals is that you feel as if you’re in a continuous state of failure until you achieve your goal. At which point you just set another goal and jump into more failure, whereas a system, the way I define it in anyway, is something that you do on a regular basis that improves your odds of success but not in a specific way that you would call a goal.

So, for example, going to college and getting a major in let’s say English, Literature or something like that. You don’t know exactly where that’s gonna lead but it can give you lots of opportunities in lots of different places. So it’s generally considered a good system, but likewise, you can build systems for your fitness, your diet, your career and all of them will be a little bit different. Everybody can build their own system as long as you’re doing something every day, this leading you closer to a place where your odds of something good happening or a better, that’s usually the best you can do in a complicated world and that you always feel like you’re making progress. 

For example, one of my systems involves exercising every day. Now that might include just cleaning the garage one day. It doesn’t mean I necessarily go to the gym, but I have to stay active every day, and I have a system where I do that at about the same time every day also related to my energy state. I try to do that around noon, if I can, and I just plug away at it, and then every day I say to myself, Well, how am I doing in fitness and I say, “Did I go to the gym today? Do I work out today? Did I take a walk? Yes, success. 

So, I define success as working my system and my best example of that is numerous times every year, let’s say, half a dozen times every year, I will drive all the way to by gym across down, I’ll get out of my car, I’ll walk into the gym and I’ll stand there in a foyer by the big rock wall, and I’ll look at all the people exercising and I’ll just look around and I’ll say, “Nope, not today,” and I will literally turn around, walk directly out the door and get my car and drive home and do something else because there are some days your body it just can’t do it, it just isn’t there.

And the big part of my system is that I don’t make myself do unpleasant things for exercise. And if I knew it was gonna be unpleasant that day, that would be far worse than taking a day off ’cause yeah, your body needs to rest every day with that anyway, so I call that a successful day, so if I go to the gym, walk in, say, “Nope,” and drive home that is 100% successful. ‘Cause what I was trying to achieve is to make sure there’s never a day when my habit doesn’t drive me towards exercise and my habit did; drove all the way to the gym, even though I didn’t want exercise. That’s a good habit. I mean to me that’s like A plus plus plus day that’s the best day you can have. If your habit drove you to the gym when you didn’t even wanna go.

So that mindset is just so much more productive. It’s like, yes, I learned something today, didn’t achieve any particular goal, but I know that now, I’m more valuable today. I exercised, I ate right. So whatever those systems are, and you can feel like you’re nailing it every day, because you probably are. 

Sean: Yeah, I feel like that might have been one of the biggest fundamental shifts for me in the past five years, is this new approach. And something you said a minute ago is feel you are in a continuous state of failure when you’re striving for those goals. Do you think this system is what’s allowed you to continue the success with Dilbert that you just never felt satisfied and you were always able to produce, and continue more great work?

Scott: Well, I built a lot of systems into keeping myself creatively fresh and not burned out, so I’ve been doing Dilbert now in 30 years, and it’s hard to do anything for 30 years without getting burned out. So for example, one of my systems is that I continually look for ways to cut corners. So I was one of the first cartoonist to start on a computer, so I do all the drawings now on a Wacom Cintiq. It’s a computer screen that you can draw directly on and it just turns it into a digital file. But I also created a font of my own handwriting, so that what used to take a long time to put ink on all the lettering of all the words. I just type it.

It’s a huge time saver. So in a thousand different ways, I just continually chip away at anything that’s inefficient, I just work on that until it’s efficient. So now I can do my primary job and one maybe two hours a day, and I’m done with that, and then that frees up time to work on other projects such as writing books. 

Sean: When developing this efficiency do you think that comes from a place of being lazy?

Scott: No, it comes from a place of being born into a certain situation. So my mother was a farmer’s daughter and we lived near the farm she grew up on, and I used to go there to work.And one of the things you learn if you work on a farm, is that you really, really, really, really need to figure out how to do things efficiently because you’re using your body all day and if you don’t make it efficient, you just can’t get the work done that needs to be done on the farm.

So my uncle, the farmer would just continuously be teaching us all these little systems he developed over the years of how to do things with less muscle work and get it done right the first time and everything, and that just stuck with me so I’ve just always had that mindset. I think it was one of the best things I learned young.

Sean: No, thanks for sharing that story. I always love hearing about the origin story of someone. So around that time, what did you actually think you’d end up being or doing as an adult?

Scott: It depends on when you ask me. If you asked me any time between the ages of six years old and 11, I would have said I’m gonna be a world famous cartoonist. From the age of 11 to, well, in my late 20s or so, I would have said nobody can become a famous cartoon. You know three people in the world, there are seven billion people, probably six billion at the time. That’s not realistic, nobody can do that. So I tried to be a lawyer, went to school thinking I would be pre-law, that didn’t excite me enough to continue. Then I thought it would be some kind of entrepreneur or business person or a banker. I ended up being a banker for a while, and it wasn’t until my banking career and then later my career at the phone company hit a wall.

And I’ll tell you why, ’cause enough time has gone by, I can tell this story. I couldn’t tell this for years, the actual story, but in both my banking job and my phone company job, my boss in each of them individually called me into the office and said, “I got bad news for you. The word has come down I can’t promote white men anymore.”

You hear that story and you say, “That’s not true.” And I promise on my honor that was a direct conversation in two different places and I quit the first, the bank, because my boss said in direct language, “We have too much imbalance. We don’t have really anything like diversity in senior management. And so the word is come down, we’re just not gonna promote any white man, until we fix that.” And I said, “How long would that take?” And she said, “Well it took 200 years to get us to hear so,” or words to that effect. 

And so I left my first job and went to the phone company, got on the management track. So I was sort of identified as someone who might be senior management, some day, I think, “Wow, things are working out.” And one day, my boss called me in his office and gave me exactly the same speech. “Hey, we just got caught. We don’t have enough diversity we’ve gotta fix it. I’m sorry to tell you, we won’t be able to promote white men for the foreseeable future.”

So that was the point where I said, “You know I’m gonna see if I can just try some things in my free time,” because the minute I heard that I had a lot of free time.

I used to be the guy who had put in a lot of extra hours because I thought, “Well, that’ll help me get promoted, I’ll learn more, I’ll make more contact.”

And once I was told directly that none of that mattered what mattered was my DNA basically I couldn’t change it, so I thought, “Well, I’ll try to see if I can give some comics published,” ’cause I’d always had an interest in cartooning, my whole life, I thought I’ll see, if I could get some comics published in some magazine somewhere, and that didn’t work out but eventually syndication in newspapers did work out, and I worked my day job for several years. Well, I got the cartoon and going and then I transitioned.

Sean: I would love to dive into you taking advantage of this free time in a minute. But why did they identify you for senior management?

Scott: Well I was finishing up my MBA at Berkeley, so it’s one of the top business schools. I had a degree in economics and I played the corporate game really well. I would love to hire me. You know if I worked for a corporation, and I could hire me, I would hire me in a heartbeat ’cause I really did take the work seriously. I wanted to do good work, I played by the rules, did everything you’re supposed to do, it just didn’t work out for me.

Sean: So you mentioned in the free time you start seeing if you get some of the cartoons published. What made you even think you had that opportunity?

Scott: So when I first started thinking about getting some comics published, I had no idea how to do this. And it’s hard for anybody young listening to this to understand what it was like before the internet. Imagine before the internet, if you had a question, like, “Well how would I become a cartoonist?” You kinda couldn’t find out. You didn’t really, you wouldn’t necessarily have any way to find that out.

So one day I was thinking about that and thinking I didn’t know how to do and I just wanted to do it and one day I turned on the TV, I was flipping through the channels, and there was the end of a TV show about how to become a cartoonist on some PBS station, and I missed almost the entire show, but as the closing credits were rolling by, I grabbed a pencil and I wrote down the name of the host, and figured out where the studio was and I sent him a letter just a snail mail letter and I said, I missed your whole show, but I’d like to be a cartoonist. Can you give me some advice? A couple weeks later, I get a hand written two-page letter, from the host of the show who is a working cartoon who was at the time as well, his name is Jack Cassidy. And he told me what books to buy, what materials to use, and then he gave me this valuable advice. He said, “It’s a really competitive business, meaning cartooning, and you will be rejected a lot, but don’t give up.”

So I thought, “Well okay, I know I have everything I need now. I got the inspiration and I got the books, I got the materials, so I put together my best cartoons and sent them off. As I said to some of the major magazines, the New Yorker, Playboy, they paid the most, so I just started there, and they rejected me, so they send back the rejection letters and I thought well alright, I gave it my best shot.

Yeah, what are you gonna do?

I gave it all my efforts didn’t work out, so I put all my art supplies in a closet and I just forgot about it. And concentrated on playing tennis in my spare time. And a year goes by, and I go out to my mailbox and there’s a second letter from the cartoonist, Jack Cassidy, who had given me the original advice a year earlier, and we’d had no contact. I hadn’t even thanked him for his advice at the time, so it was really weird that there’d be a second letter a year later.

I opened his letter and he said he was cleaning his office up and there was a big pile of documents and he came across my original letter to him with some samples that I’d sent and he said that he was just writing to make sure that I hadn’t given up, and that was the only reason he wrote.

There was no other point he just said, “I just wanna write, make sure you haven’t given up.” And I thought, “Well, maybe he sees something, even I don’t see.” Maybe he sees more here than the editors who rejected me, at those magazines see. So I thought I would raise my sites and try to become a syndicated cartoonist. Which means that you make a deal with a company called a syndication company, and then they sell it to newspapers all over the world. So your big break is if one of those syndication companies and they’re only a few of them, I think there were four or five that matter at the time, and then they’re fewer of them now.

And I set off my samples and rejection started pouring in.

I thought I had all the rejections and I said, “Well now I’ve tried twice.” Put all my materials back in the same closet, and forgot about it.

Few months go by, and I get a phone call from a woman who said that she was an editor for a syndication company I’d never heard of. She said she was from some company called United Media, and I didn’t recognize that name, I hadn’t sent my samples to anybody by that name and she said she saw my samples, I didn’t know how, and wanted to offer me a contract to be a syndicated cartoonist. Now, keep in mind, this is the biggest break you could ever have for a cartoonist. But I didn’t understand who this company was and I didn’t trust it ’cause it seemed like kind of a scammy and out of the blue call maybe some kind of trick here.

So I said, “You know, I’m flattered by your offer, but I haven’t heard of your company, this United Media company. Do you have any references or is there anybody you’ve worked with that has ever been published in any way?”

And there was this long pause and then she said, “Yeah, we handle Peanuts and Garfield.” And when she got to about the 12th name on the list of international superstar cartoonist I realized that my negotiating position, had been compromised.

I didn’t know what I was doing.

So it turns out the reason I didn’t recognize the company is that she called me under the corporate name instead of the syndication company’s name, so I didn’t recognize it, but I said, yes to that deal as indicated. Dilbert was a big failure for the first several years, it was only in, I know a few dozen newspapers total, which is not nearly enough to make any kind of a living, and it wasn’t until I put my email in the strip, I put my email address between the panels back in ‘93, I think, and this is before even people had email most people didn’t even have email back then. And so when I put my email address in the comic, it caused all the people who did have email, the early adopters, but didn’t have anybody else to write to because they didn’t know anybody who had the email either and they would see my email, and they would write to me ’cause it was the only address they knew and they would say, “Hey we kinda like your cartoon but we like it a lot when Dilbert is doing business stuff if he’s in the office.” And at the time, he wasn’t in the office, hardly at all, he was just doing generic stuff at home, and so I thought, Well, if everybody’s saying the same thing, it was almost universal, almost everybody said the same thing.

So I said, “Well, the audience has spoken.” So I just moved it into the office, and it took off after that.

Sean: I’m really intrigued by that feedback loop that was created by the email. Had you been receiving any type of advice, like that prior to putting your email in there?

Scott: Absolutely not. One of the big problems as a cartoonist is there are so many layers between you and the actual customer.

So the person reading it got it from the newspaper, perhaps the newspaper went through an editor, went through the syndication company, printing company, and then me. So I had no contact and no, no feedback at all. The only people who would give me feedback were people I talk to and they’re all stinking liars. The last thing you wanna do is ask your friends or your family like “Hey how’s this look?” And they’re like, “Oh that’s great, you gotta do something with that that’s terrific”. It just doesn’t mean anything. 

Sean: Yeah, my mom’s a big fan of my podcast.

Scott: I remember when New York Times did a major feature story on me, and I was so happy to tell my mom I thought, “Well at last, I will impress my mother,” ’cause she’s hard to impress and is like, Mom, feature story. And I think it was the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, forget which one, as she goes, “Oh, we don’t get that one.” And I’m like, “Really, really? Maybe you make a little effort, maybe you can make an effort to get that one.” And then she landed the kill shot, she goes, “Do you think he’ll ever be in People?” In her world if you weren’t in People magazine, you hadn’t made it yet. Later, I was in People Magazine a number of times so she was happy.

Sean: So in terms of these feedback loops, once this happened, did you start viewing life differently in terms of how you could develop these feedback loops in other aspects of your life?

Scott: Well, remember my background was not art, it was business and in the business realm, certainly anybody who’s got an MBA, will tell you this as the bedrock basic rule of business, is if you don’t have a channel to your customer, you don’t have a business model because you’re just shooting blind. And that’s not gonna work too often, except by pure luck.

So as a business person, it was obvious to me, I had to create that channel and as luck would have it, my day job was working with email and the Internet, before anybody even knew what those things were, and so it was obvious to me that the way to do that was to put my email in the comic, which, by the way, this tells you how early those days were in terms of our understanding of the internet and how that works, is that there was a real push back from my syndication company ’cause they thought the newspapers wouldn’t print the strip if I had my email address because the thinking was they’re gonna say, “That’s advertising and they pay us to run the strip, they’re not gonna let us put in advertisement in there and pay us for it,” like nobody’s gonna do that.

And one of the advantages I had, and again, this is another thing that business training teaches you, is that my comic was basically failing at that point.

And so when your product is failing, that opens up options so you can do things that would have seemed too risky under normal conditions, and you could try things that established comics can’t do ’cause they don’t wanna take a risk.

So I said, “Well you’re right, maybe that is a risk, maybe a newspaper will cancel,” But it’s not gonna be worse than what’s happening now, because I was on a trajectory to go out of business.

So they agreed with the risk management proposition and say, “Well you can always just see what happens and stop doing it if it doesn’t work.” but that turned out to be the key that unlocked all the value.

Sean: You mentioned a minute ago and you said, “If luck would have it,” what’s your take on luck?

Scott: Well, I also wrote about luck in my book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, and my take is that you can manage luck, but only indirectly. And my best example is that I was born and I grew up in a small town in Upstate New York, Windham, New York. If had I stayed there, the odds of getting a lucky were very low ’cause there wasn’t much energy, there wasn’t many things happening.

So the first thing I did as soon as I got my degree, is I traded my car for a one-way ticket to California, a plane ticket, and said, “I’m fully free, I don’t have any strings attached, anywhere, I’m just gonna go where there’s the most chance of luck finding me.”

So I went to San Francisco and I thought, “There’s plenty of energy, here, people, business, money, contacts.” If I can’t get lucky here, I’m not trying. Then the next thing you do is you have to do a lot of things you have to interact with the environment. And one of the things I talk about in my new book that’s just out, Loserthink, is that if you don’t know how to do something, but you wanna do it, let’s say you wanna start a business or learn how to do something, whatever, the best way to learn how to do something is to do it wrong because you’d be amazed how much free help that attracts if you do something wrong in front of other people and they know how you should have done it, they’re gonna tell you and they’re not gonna charge you for it.

You could get all the free advice you want, by doing bad work, in public. And I’ve used this method a number of times, because when I first was a cartoonist my drawing was terrible. The writing wasn’t focused, but I did it in public and people kept telling me what was working and what wasn’t, and then I could sort of craft it and improve it over time.

Likewise, when I started doing my Periscope live streaming, most of the comments in the early days were: “You know you’re really ugly, you should move the camera a little bit back, maybe you should move that camera back, Scott. No, really, seriously. Listen to us move the camera back. The less of you, we see the better.” Now. They were right, completely right, yeah, when you reach a certain age, especially if you’re not wearing any kind of TV makeup, maybe you should move the camera back a little bit.

So, it’s funny, the advice like that is so simple. But I didn’t think of it on my own, I probably would not have made that change except for the free advice I got by doing things incorrectly in public.

So that’s… That’s how you can generate luck.

It’s not exactly luck that I expose myself to a situation which had a high chance of somebody telling me what to do right while I did it wrong in public.

So any time you can just go out there and mix it up, make some mistakes, embarrass yourself, create some action, meet some people, just anything that’s energy. As long as other people are exposed to it. The odds of luck finding you just go way up.

Sean: You were talking about trading in the car for the plane ticket what was the end of that story?

Scott: Well, there’s a pre-story to that which is my senior year of college, I was going to an interview at an accounting firm and it was, I don’t know, an hour-and-a-half drive or something from my college and I had a very unreliable car that broke down on the way back from the interview. It was February and it was very cold and it was a new road and there was no other traffic on it, so my car breaks down, and here’s the kicker. I didn’t bring a jacket, ’cause I didn’t have any jackets that look professional and I was just gonna be in the car, I’ll just go from car to building, I don’t really need a jacket, but once it got dark and it was February and it was winter, it got really cold. So I left my car because I knew if I stayed in it, there wasn’t enough traffic, to be even sure anybody would ever drive by and save me. And I started getting my limbs were starting to stiffen and I could barely walk at one point it was so cold so I decided to run for it. 

So I knew that I couldn’t run backwards where I had been because I hadn’t seen any civilization in so long that I knew I wouldn’t be able to go that far, but I didn’t know exactly what was ahead of me. Maybe there was something over the next hill I didn’t know, so I decided to run for it, got out of the car with my no jacket, middle of the winter, I just started running, I could feel my ankle started to just turn to concrete. It was so cold that they were starting to no longer even bend.

And I’m not really a long distance runner or anything. I was in pretty good shape, but I’m not a distance runner, and I started, started to think I might not make this. I might actually be dead by morning because there’s no civilization and I’m not gonna be able to run to warmth. I didn’t know what to do, and I decided that night, or as I was running near death wondering if I had frost but it already… I said to myself, “If I survive this…” Can I swear on your show? 

Sean: Yeah, of course. 

Scott: Because for authenticity, you have to know the exact thought. And I said to myself, “If I survive this night, I’m gonna sell my fucking car for a one-way ticket to California and I’m never gonna see another fucking snowflake as long as I live, if I survive.”

A traveling shoe salesman, came by and saved me. I flagged him down, I mean I stood in the middle of the road. He wasn’t gonna go anywhere without picking me up and he saved my life, literally. And a few months later I graduated and I traded my car straight up for a one-way plane ticket, to my sister. It was an inside job, but… And then I went to California and I think only once, I was forced to be near a snowflake a few times but I’ve been pretty true to my promise not to be in cold weather.

Sean: Yeah, I live in South Florida for a reason, trying to avoid the, the snowflakes. One thing that really intrigued me is, you were talking about how you developed your system, even better and your work in Dilbert became better. So what does your creative process actually look like today?

Scott: So today, every comic starts with an idea for the situation. What is the dilemma, the problem, the topic, and for those my most recent method is I just send out a tweet and say, “Hey, what’s bothering you about your work? Tell me in the comments.” And then I’ll look through comments and I’ll see usually issues that are familiar to me, from my own experience, work experience or other, and they say, “Oh that’s familiar to me. It’s probably familiar to other people.”

So the first test is that at least two people have to have the same thought. So if somebody says, “Oh, we have this weird situation at work.” And it’s so weird that nobody’s ever had that situation, I don’t use that ’cause nobody could relate, but if it’s something as soon as I read it, I go, “Oh, my God, that’s so familiar. That happened to me when I was working too.” Then I usually have something and then I say, alright, which characters would be involved in this and then I just start writing and I write and rewrite and change characters, and it becomes an iterative process after that, and there’s somewhat of a formula for writing humor, so it’s a little bit more formulaic than it would seem from the outside. So I’ll start with my whatever the vexing problem is that the characters have to deal with. And then I’ll say, alright, what would happen in the real world? And then I’ll say, okay, this isn’t the real world, this the comic world. What would be the most extreme ridiculous thing that could happen in this? And I could introduce robots and aliens and ghosts or anything else goes in some comics.

So I usually try to keep a kernel of truth that’s the part that makes people attracted to in the first place. Then I try to exaggerate, and add a hyperbole or clever words or something naughty, or clever, you always have to add dimensions. It’s sort of like a layering process and lots of iteration until one of them moves me physically.

So here’s a little test. If you’re writing, if you’re creating art of any kind, in this case, I’ll talk about humor, specifically. If it doesn’t move somebody’s body, you’re not done yet.

And when I say move their body, they have to do more than just read it and have a reaction, more than just read it, and go, “Yeah, that’s pretty good.”

I want somebody to cut it out, if it’s printed, and put it on their fridge, that’s their body moving. I want somebody to send it to somebody else in an email attachment, that’s their body. I want somebody to laugh or cry, or snort, more than just a giggle in the chair.

So the first test that I put on my own writing is if when I read my own joke back do I feel it physically and quite often I do, I’ll feel an involuntary (laugh) even as the author of it, even when I know where it’s going. So if I don’t feel it physically, I’m not done, so I write it until I can feel it.

Sean: How different is your book writing process? You just finished up your new book, Loserthink, and I just wonder how that differentiates? 

Scott: Well it’s much, much harder is the first part of the answer. One of the advantages of having an established universe with the Dilbert characters, it’s very much like Seinfeld in its ninth year. It’s way easier to write content for an established a universe, ’cause you’re starting with rules, and then you’re just writing to those rules. Alright, well with this guy think? What would this woman think in this situation? That’s way easier, but if you sit down to write a book, it’s literally a blank page and you can go anywhere.

So that process is first of all, a scarier, more undefined and then you feel your way through it. I sit down and I just start writing and I write poorly, and quickly and try to get some ideas down and then look at them. I say, “Okay, I like the… I like the idea, but not the way I wrote it.”

So then maybe I’ll rewrite it a bunch of times until I like it. The biggest difference I would say is that for the comic if I write one joke a day, that’s really good work, and that’s enough to be a world-renowned cartoonist, one joke a day.

But if you write a book, and in my case, most of my books have humor laced throughout them, you might have to write five jokes on a page for 300 page book, so just the total number of humor points that you have to hit for a book that has humor in it is just through the roof, compared to cartooning.

So, the degree of difficulty is extraordinary.

There’s probably a reason that you don’t see many cartoonists who also are authors ’cause if you’ve got a pretty good gig writing cartoons and you’re being paid for it, it does not look rational to also write a book, ’cause it’s a 100 times more work.

Yeah, these things are already going well you don’t need it. So in my case, I just have greater interest outside a cartooning and my creative, I guess, my muse drags me different places, and that’s also part of my creative technique. I don’t try to create anything that I have to push so if I feel myself pushing or forcing it I know it’s not gonna work and it doesn’t go anywhere. The ones that work well, or if I say to myself, “You know, I think I’ll write a book on this topic,” and then I write say one page and one of two things happens. Either I look at it and say, “It just lays there and it’s just dead to me too, so I’m not gonna go with this.” Or I write it, and I say to myself, “Damn, I wish it were not so close to lunch because I really wanna write another page. And that’s the energy pulling you.

So if you can find an idea that pulls you, then all of the energy that you would normally have to muster on your own to put into it is unnecessary because the project actually gives you the energy it’s feeding you, at the same time, you’re building it.

So short of that I would never be able to write a book. And for every book I’ve written there have been, let’s say, half a dozen books that I contemplated and played with, but they never gave the energy so they, they were still born.

Sean: I’m really fascinated about you following this muse and you get to that point where you don’t wanna go to lunch and you have more energy. How many times have you really followed that energy for a decent amount of time? And then realize this is not a project you wanna work on? 

Scott: Usually you can tell pretty quickly. That’s the beauty of it, is that I don’t think I’ve ever written more than one chapter before I knew conclusively whether this had any potential. A chapter is a lot. I could tell usually in a page or two whether I’ve got a book.

So the energy either comes quickly or it just doesn’t come.

Sean: Hm, so I’m really fascinated by that and your ability to course correct and I know you’ve written before about your biases and understanding blind spots. So then, how do you avoid those biases, and how do you discover those blind spots quickly?

Scott: Well, it depends on the context. If I’m writing cartoons, I don’t wanna discover all of my blind spots, I wanna write about them, because there’s the flaws and foibles, especially the ones I share are just fun content but if I’m… Let’s say I’m analyzing events in the headlines or politics or something in those cases I need to be a little more accurate if I can, a little less bias. And that’s what the book Loserthink is all about. So it’s a whole set of techniques for doing it. I’ll just give you a couple examples. 

So one of the tricks I use, is if the news on the left, let’s say, CNN, MSNBC types, report something as true and the news on the right also reports that it’s true, let’s say Fox News, Breitbart, whatever. It’s probably true, ’cause then the left and the right have both reported as a fact, but you’ll discover that if only one of those two sides report something as a fact, it almost never is, and it doesn’t matter which way it goes, it doesn’t matter if the right says its facts than the left doesn’t or vice versa, if you can’t get both of them to agree on the fact, it’s probably just an opinion.

And that’s probably the best filter you’ll ever have. Now, a lot of people are stuck in their silo, and will only listen to the news sources that largely agree with what they wanna hear.

So if you can’t force yourself to at least sample the other side, you’re definitely in a bubble so that that would be one of many tips in the book.

Sean: Yeah, the book is really interesting. I was able to read a ton of it this weekend, and one of the quotes I really enjoyed, and I love just to hear more about is: “A person who considers ego a reflection of self instead of a tool that one can dial up or down as needed, has fewer pathways to success.” I’m always intrigued by how different successful people handle ego and I love how you relate it to a dial, and I would just love for you to even dive a little deeper on this.

Scott: Yeah, so take and take what we’re doing right now.

So, even to have this conversation since I know lots of people look at it and it’s in the context of, I’m sort of in book tour mode, and trying to make people like my book or like me enough to buy my book, so I’m conscious of how high I should dial my ego, before it’s obnoxious, because there’s a fine point there, because you wanna dial it up so that you feel comfortable doing the sort of thing I’m doing right now, speaking to lots of people in public, clearing my throat, making probably mistakes and things, maybe I got some factual error I wish I could have said differently.

So you need to have enough ego that you feel comfortable taking on challenges that could be embarrassing if you did them wrong, but you wanna have a cap on it, so you don’t seem obnoxious to other people. You always have this balancing act of, where is the perfect ego point? If I’m taking on, let’s say a project that’s not in my sweet spot, it’s not something I already know how to do well. Well, then I my dial might go up and say “Hey I could do this. How hard could it be? I could figure this out.” But it’s more technique, it’s not who I am because I can dial it down too so if I’m in a context where showing too much ego would be all bad, and no good, I just dial it down. 

And the way that you can make that easy, is by understanding and really reframing your understanding of yourself that your ego is your enemy. It’s not your friend, and it’s not who you are. Your ego is probably keeping you from, let’s say that risk that would really help you out. It’s keeping you for what, from taking the chance of failure. If your ego is preventing you from any chance of failure, it’s your enemy. If your ego is something that you’ve learned to dial up when it’s helpful to have confidence and to dial down when it would just be a distraction, or it would be bothersome to other people, then you’ve turned your enemy into your tool.

So that’s at least the way you should think of it because if you’re saying… And I’ve seen people I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people fail in business because they were making ego-based decisions, like I can’t do that, I don’t wanna be associated with that, etcetera.

The best example is one I gave earlier which is when I created the Dilbert comic, it was a pure reflection of my ego because I was drawing comics that I as a consumer would want to read, and so that’s as big an ego as you could have, but it wasn’t until the audience said, “We don’t like those generic ones we like when Dilbert’s in the workplace.” Then I said, “Okay, well it’s time to suck it up and give the audience what they say they want and put my ego on a shelf.” ‘Cause my ego would have said no, this is better. I know how to do this, I’m the artist. You’re the customer. Just read it the way it is. But instead, I did the opposite, I just dialed my ego out of the picture entirely, and said, “Alright tell me what you want.”

You’re the customer, you’re paying me indirectly, so I’m gonna give you what you want.

Sean: When you’re thinking about just your own skill sets, how much self-belief do you have?

Scott: Too much. I don’t know if you can learn this next part.

I don’t remember any time in my life, I didn’t think that I would be wildly successful to the point of being both rich and famous and there’s no time that I thought that wouldn’t happen. In fact, in my 20s, I woke up every day confused because it hadn’t happened yet.

I’m not even joking, I would wake up and I think, “Wait a minute, I work in a cubicle. This isn’t how this is supposed to work out. I’m almost positive there’s something else better ahead of me.”

And so with a little patience, I got there, but… So, that’s unnatural. I’m not even sure I wouldn’t even suggest that people even try to think that way. I think some people are just born with that point of view and it just never goes away. So there’s that. I think it’s just natural.

Sean: You’re closely associated. Friends worked with a ton of successful peoples. Well, how many of them fall into that category of that unwavering self-belief?

Scott: I’ll tell you, there’s a version of that, that they all seem to have and the version of it is that they see the world as something that they can control.

In other words, they believe that they can change their own situation, and in so doing, it will change the world. We’re at least enough of the world to make it conform to what they need. They don’t have to change the entire world but just their corner of the world, and the people who tend to be unsuccessful believed that their fate is determined by events outside themselves. It’s like, “Oh I was born for… What am I gonna do? I was born not attractive. What am I gonna do?

I guess there’s nothing I can do. The world did not serve me up some good luck.

So that’s the main thing. I’m not sure if you wanna call that ego. Or is it more accurate perception, that there’s a whole lot you can do to change yourself and in so doing, you almost guarantee that you change your at least your opportunity for luck.

Sean: Yeah, I like the verbiage there of your accurate perception, will go with that.

So when did you actually finally realize that you did make it, you were out of that cubicle? Would you have a defining moment?

Scott: I joked about this because I call it the lack of a champagne moment. So for my entire career, there have been all these mini moments. I would almost say to myself, I’ve made it. Open the champagne. This is the thing, nobody can take it away from me now. But it never quite worked that way, it was always just these little incremental things. Or for example, the day I got my contract to become a syndicated cartoonist you’d say to yourself. Well, that’s the big break, that’s the champagne moment. But then my editor explains, “Well, we’re giving you a contract, but that doesn’t mean we’re gonna put you in newspapers. We’re gonna work with you to see if we can work together for six months, and then we’ll make a separate decision about being in newspapers.” So I thought, “Okay great, hold off on the champagne until they decide until they decide to sell me to newspapers.”

And then that day came and they said, “We’re gonna sell you to newspapers,” and I’m like “Oh, open the champagne,” and I’m like… well, how many newspapers do you think you can sell me into and like how much money am I gonna make? And they told me, and I realized I can make a few thousand dollars total and I was like, well that’s not quite champagne.

And then every day at a few newspapers would be added to the mix but none of the worst champagne moments. And then I had a book that was doing really well, but it just took forever to become a number one best seller. That was my book, The Dilbert Principle, years ago, but when it came, the closest I came was the day that my book that had been number two on the New York Times bestsellers list, it just sat there for a week at number two, while Dennis Rodman’s book, Bad As I Wanna Be. I don’t know if Dennis Rodman even read the book, I’ve been sure he did, I’m sure he didn’t write, but it bothered me. No end, but I thought to myself. All right, why am I complaining? I’m number two in the whole New York Times list, on the non-fiction.

That’s pretty darn good.

I mean, how am I really complaining about being the second best author at the moment, on this category?

And I tried to talk myself into being okay with it, and then one day by editor called and said, “Guess what? You’re the number one best selling book in the world, at least on the nonfiction list, at least for those weeks.”

And that was my champagne moment, and I didn’t realize even at the time, how much it was, but let me tell you the difference between being the number two best selling author and being the number one best selling author I thought was gonna be like a 1% difference.

It turns out, is closer to a 1000% difference.

Suddenly the sky opened and everybody in the world wanted to talk to me. Hired me, gave me money, pay me, had me speak. Everything changed as soon as I hit number one, and it was almost overnight, so that was a good moment. 

Sean: Yeah, I actually have a lot of different quotes you’ve written or said over the years. And I pulled one, and I think it’s speaking specifically to this and that quote is: “Apparently the thing inside me that makes me work so hard is the same thing that keeps me unsatisfied.” And you see that the desire to constantly push. Was that the biggest career success, you think you’ve experienced? Hitting number one? 

Scott: Probably. It’s the biggest one that had a discrete moment associated with it. You know, where you could get the phone call. It’s like, yes, it’s binary. I’m number one. The comic strip, as I said, it was a whole bunch of small things that added up to a lot, so I didn’t have that moment there.

Yeah, I would say the number one book was my biggest career moment.

Sean: When you’re assessing the career over the years, is there anything you just wish you spend a little bit more time on?

Scott: I don’t think anybody’s ever ask me that question. Do you know how rare it is for me to hear a question I’ve never heard before? So good job with that. 

Sean: Well thank you. 

Scott:Uh,  let me see if I can answer it something I wish I had spent more time on. Do you mean in terms of a skill, or are you talking about work-life balance or just anything?

Sean: I feel like I’ve really gotten a lot over the years, of you discussing certain skills and life skills you’ve spent time on. So yeah, I’d be really intrigued to hear that.

Scott: Well, I would say that the skill that’s most obviously missing is, for me, is a second language where I live Spanish would be the obvious one, and probably a lot more experience traveling.

I was kind of busy, so I didn’t have a lot of opportunities to travel I worked seven days a week for most of my life.

But I can tell that something is missing.

Yeah, when I interact with people who have more of a global experience, they’re definitely different for it and in a good way, they just have seen more things, just a greater level of awareness in general.

So I would say that would be a big blank spot. My talent stack. 

Sean: Yes, talent stack. Something I’ve learned a great deal from. I really appreciate your work. It’s one we’ve covered on the podcast before, so I know the listeners are familiar with that.

You were just talking about people who have traveled, some of the skills they’ll possess. What do you think your superhuman skills are?

Scott: Well, so you use one of those cases where I have to balance the ego thing. Because it would be real easy for me to give you an answer. This sounded like just the ultimate douchebag answer.

But, I also have no shame. That’s one of my… I guess that’s one of my super powers, as I’ve learned over time how to deal with every kind of awkward, embarrassing shaming situation and realize that they’d never kill me.

I wake up the next day it’s like, “Oh, still alive. How about that?” A thousand times in a row. Still live.

I don’t know, I guess this embarrassing humiliation stuff doesn’t hurt after all.

But to answer your question, number one, is my ability to withstand embarrassment, hugely, hugely valuable and useful and is a learned skill.

I didn’t this one, unlike my optimism, I was born optimistic in thinking things would work out for me, but I definitely wasn’t born without a sense of shame. I had more than my share and I had to learn through brute force and lots of practice how to just get over it and I have so there’s that, then the, the, the one thing that perhaps is a super power that you can’t learn. I think you could learn it somewhat, but maybe not to the level that some people are just born with it. And that’s the skill towards simplification and if you look at those things which you have responded to in my writing from the systems versus goals or the talent stacks you’ll notice that they have a common element. Which I’ve taken something which is really a complicated environment and I boiled it down to a simple rule, or two. And that’s what activates it. So it’s not the idea that self that has the power, it doesn’t become activated until you can simplify it to the point where people can talk about it, hold it in their head, compare it to things. So I’m a world-class simplifier and  that talent came through all of my occupations.

Sean: Yeah, if you didn’t bring that simplification up I was gonna inflate your ego there, because your work there’s no author I don’t think where more times I just sit there and go, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

And it’s just so easy to implement these in your lives, so I really do appreciate that. And that’s why I was having so much fun this weekend, being able to read the new book, Loserthink. And so someone who is unfamiliar with your work they’re gonna pick up this book, what are you hoping they take away from it?

Scott: Well, I was trying to give people some tools to escape their own little mental bubbles. So some people, for example, our prisoners of the past, they’re worried too much about things that went before and I teach them how to get out of that, but there are a million little traps. Do people know how to compare things? Do people know the difference between coincidence and something meaningful?

Now, your first impression might be, “Yeah, people know that stuff.” But you’re gonna find a lot of surprises in the book and probably a lot of people will be surprised that they thought they knew things but they’re gonna be surprised when they read the book. So it’s how to get on to your own mental bubble how to see the world more clearly, and more productively but also how to help people and their bubbles. And I kinda took as my starting point all the dumbass things people say on social media because you can find every form of unproductive thinking. And then that gave me fodder to write about. So don’t do this. And the big innovation in this book, the simplification if you will, that brings it all together is the observation that people can avoid these various traps of loser think if they have exposure to different fields, so you don’t have to be an economist to understand the law of supply and demand to know what a song cost is to know the time value of money.

They’re pretty easy concepts to master as a general concept, but if you’d never been exposed to them or if you’ve ever been exposed to any kind of process where you learned how to compare things, let’s say a scientist learns how to compare to experiments on the placebo or the control or whatever.

But if you were, let’s say, an English major and somebody said to the English major, “Hey, how is the President doing?” It doesn’t matter which president, you don’t have to make this about Trump. “So how is the President doing?” The English major would probably say, “Oh great, or poorly,” depending on what side they were on.

As the economist or the scientist if they’re being unbiased, they might say, “I can’t tell…” ‘Cause there’s nothing to compare it to.

We don’t have a president who was doing the same job at the same time to compare to the one we have.

So you don’t know if the other one would have been better or worse I can’t tell.

So that’s just one example. But if you have not been exposed to at least the concepts in a variety of different fields from psychology economics to history, etcetera, you have blind spots that you don’t know our blind spots, and so I reveal those blind spots in a very simple way. 

Sean: Yeah, no, excellent point. The listeners know I’m a huge fan in reading widely and I love you break it down in the different chapters thinking like an artist, thinking like an engineer, thinking like a leader. The book is Loserthink, Scott, I have three quick hit questions for you before we let you go here. You ready for them?

Scott: Ready.

Sean: Who is one of the most impressive people you’ve been around?

Scott: Naval Ravikant, founder of AngelList. I sometimes referred to him, jokingly, but not really joking at all, as the smartest person in the world and he is the best example of a talent stack that you will ever see. He knows more about more things than just about anybody. And so when he gives you an opinion, you’re feeling like all the context is there, it’s sort of amazing. You talk to him for 10 minutes and you walk away, thinking, “I think I just got smarter, I think I’m smarter.”

So what’s your next question? 

Sean: No, someone other than Naval, who would be a great guest for this podcast?

Scott: Um, Mike Cernovich. You would not know him unless you’ve seen his book, Gorilla Mindset, or you see him on Twitter. He has a huge Twitter following and he’s also got an amazing talent stack. Now he’s more provocative, so if he can’t stand an opinion and he doesn’t agree with yours, then he’s not your guy, but if you wanna be challenged and have your brain shook around, he’s your guy.

Sean: There’s no point in living this life if that’s not happening. So, final one, when was the last time you were truly shocked by a performance you saw? 

Scott: A performance? What kind? 

Sean: This could be anything, this could be an unbelievable book you’ve read, this could be a sporting event you’ve seen, this could be at the actual performance.

Scott: Well, I was just reading a book, American Nations, and I recommend it. It was recommended to me as sort of a mind-blowing piece and I didn’t think I was gonna learn anything ’cause it’s sort about the early colonies and blah, blah, blah, and I thought, “Well I went to school. I kinda know the basic deal. What kind of surprise am I gonna get about the colonies?” And sure enough, it’s an amazing book. It’s completely mind-expanding. The basic gist of it talks about how different each of the colonies were and the sub-groups within them. And then you come away with an entirely different understanding of the whole country because you understand it’s an origin story in a way you’d never seen it before. 

Sean: Well I’ll have to check that out. You mentioned having an entirely different understanding, your new book, Loserthink: How Untrained Brains are Ruining America, I’ve always been a big fan of your work I’ve been hoping to have you on for two-and-a-half years. So Scott Adams I really do appreciate you coming on and can’t thank you enough. 

Scott: Thank you so much for having me. You’re actually great at this, by the way, I don’t know if anybody told you that? But it’s hard to have these… I’m gonna do about a million interviews because of the book and they’re not all gonna go this well, so good job. 

Sean: Thank you. It means a lot.