scott adams – Page 2

The Scott Adams happiness formula, or life lessons from the Dilbert guy

I’m a big fan of Scott Adams and his irreverent, honest, quirky advice. I read his book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big [Kindle] and wanted to share his happiness formula (in the fulfilling and deep sense of the word and not the light happiness crap peddled by self-help gurus):

Eat right
Exercise
Get enough sleep
Imagine an incredible future (even if you don’t believe it)
Work toward a flexible schedule
Do things you can steadily improve at
Help others (if you’ve already helped yourself)
Reduce daily decisions to routine

Each item is — by itself — a life’s worth of challenges but taken together it’s practical and dare I say MECE? From personal experience #1, 2, 3, 5 and 6 work for me. I need to improve at #4, 7 and 8.

Enjoy!

PS Here are past items I wrote about Scott: on systems and on success

Scott Adams, the Dilbert guy, on why systems trump goals and passion is pointless

Scott Adams at work
Scott Adams is the creator of Dilbert and a guy who has failed at many things in life and still won big.

He first came to my attention with this WSJ article which says to ignore passion and instead focus on building “systems” (which I interpret as creating good habits and applying them over time).

Then he was a guest on James Altucher’s podcast where he elaborated on the same themes. Scott is a funny, honest, successful and very quotable guy. Here are my notes from that podcast.

NOTES

on Dilbert
- Dilbert started as a doodle during his day job at PacBell
- he reached out to a famous cartoonist, who told him: “don’t give up”
- he received endless rejections for Dilbert, including one that suggested he hire an artist to draw the cartoons!
- he usually does 2 comics in the morning (in rough form), and spends the afternoon/evening on less taxing work (e.g., filling in the cartoons)
- “a writer should have element of danger in their writing”
- Dilbert provides employees a voice, making it harder for management to get away with ridiculous stuff
- “the funnier something is, the more you can get away with”
goals are bullshit, live by systems/themes
- why? 100 years ago, goals were simpler to set and execute (eg, a farmer’s goal to clear land by day’s end), but today goals are too complex, if you pick a goal and say “5 years from now, I want to achieve X”, what are the odds the world will be the same in 5 years? instead, improve odds in a general way, through the right systems
- one part of his system is try lots of stuff; he has failed at many, many projects (including investing a minor fortune in Webvan in the late 90s)
- another part is to maximize personal energy through diet and fitness
- another part is combining skills (he isn’t the world’s best at anything, but he has decent drawing skills, decent writing skills, and a corporate insider’s stories/experience, together they make Dilbert unique)
- on why after all the success, he still works hard: “don’t think there’s anything worse than getting rich and quitting”
- have lots of ideas
  - “people can’t tell a good idea”
  - * “bad ideas have value” — they help you think of better ones, your ideas can cross-pollinate, “get to good ideas through bad ideas”
passion is pointless
- you enjoy the things you succeed at, you get better with success (for example, when he got his first cartooning contract, his drawing skills went from abysmal to “not terrible”)
- “people are not great at knowing what they’re good at”
- “passion comes from things that work”

Scott Adams (the Dilbert guy) on how to be successful

Dilbert: Follow Your Passion

Scott shares a very honest and modest story of his own success over at the WSJ.

1. Don’t “follow your passion”

When I was a commercial loan officer for a large bank, my boss taught us that you should never make a loan to someone who is following his passion. For example, you don’t want to give money to a sports enthusiast who is starting a sports store to pursue his passion for all things sporty. That guy is a bad bet, passion and all. He’s in business for the wrong reason.

Cal Newport explains why the phrase is a modern phenomenon.

2. Success drives passion, not the other way around

Dilbert started out as just one of many get-rich schemes I was willing to try. When it started to look as if it might be a success, my passion for cartooning increased because I realized it could be my golden ticket. In hindsight, it looks as if the projects that I was most passionate about were also the ones that worked. But objectively, my passion level moved with my success. Success caused passion more than passion caused success.

3. Systems are more powerful than goals

If you achieve your goal, you celebrate and feel terrific, but only until you realize that you just lost the thing that gave you purpose and direction. Your options are to feel empty and useless, perhaps enjoying the spoils of your success until they bore you, or to set new goals and re-enter the cycle of permanent presuccess failure.

4. Failed? Don’t just get stronger…get smarter

I do want my failures to make me stronger, of course, but I also want to become smarter, more talented, better networked, healthier and more energized. If I find a cow turd on my front steps, I’m not satisfied knowing that I’ll be mentally prepared to find some future cow turd. I want to shovel that turd onto my garden and hope the cow returns every week so I never have to buy fertilizer again. Failure is a resource that can be managed.

Scott ends by sharing anecdotes of his own failures, including a big investment in Webvan, which he subsequently increased just a few weeks before it declared bankruptcy. What did he learn? Diversify your investments. And never listen to company management.

Wonderful article. Please read it. See my linkblog for a stream of articles that I’m reading.