Lessons From Scott Adams
Losers have goals. Winners have systems.
-Scott Adams
Scott Adams passed away last week. He created Dilbert, correctly predicted many anomalies, including Trump winning 2016, and besides Dilbert, wrote about persuasion, hypnosis, and philosophy.
The Adams Way
The last time I felt impacted by the death of someone I didn’t personally know was Norm Macdonald. Adams was someone who didn’t fit the norm and was hard to put in a box. He lived life according to his own creed.
It’s a rare trait. Take an intellectual like Steven Pinker. They’re smart enough to know what’s correct and write long books explaining it to their leftist friends in palatable ways. That part is fine as we need people on all sides being rational. The part about people like Pinker that irks me is when they attack others building new institutions. Pinker’s support and subsequent withdrawal from UATX as an advisor to then him attacking it, shows what a weakminded, spineless person he is. How dare a new institution stand for values that contradict his socialist overlords. Pinker couldn’t stand the criticism from his far left friends, pulled his support, and now he’s actively attacking UATX. Talk about a sad life not worth living. Adams was the opposite.
Adams had the courage to say what he believed until his death. Adams lost 75% of his social circle just for explaining Trump to people (how dare he humanize a presidential candidate). I respected Scott Adams as an intellectual because of his nuanced takes and humility. Adams tried his hand at building startups as well, he thus had a respect and better understanding of that world. He got it.
Make Life Relatable
Create a lens that resonates with others. Dilbert was this for corporate America. Dilbert popularized the cubicle drone employee + idiot manager archetype. The Peter Principle (1969) did this back in the day; Dilbert modernized it with white-collar corporate culture. It still resonates.
Quantity begets quality. Adams launched Dilbert in 1989 and didn’t go full-time until 1995.
Adams made his writing personal.
Avoid career traps such as pursuing jobs that require you to sell your limited supply of time while preparing you for nothing better
-Scott Adams
A lot of what Adams writes about is scary to people who lack understanding of the human condition. I’ve always been obsessed with the human condition, and I’m a fan of Adams’ theories and how he utilizes them himself. Adams says persuasion matters 100x more than substance. If you’re unpersuasive, you can’t impact the world. You can’t get people to believe in your ideas, or to work with you, or vouch for you. Persuasion is necessary for anything of value.
Similarly, Adams emphasized that what you say is important, but not as important as what they think you are thinking. People need to understand why you care. That’s step one in persuasion.
Hypnotism
Adams was a trained hypnotist. Hypnotism only works on those who want to be hypnotized.
Great writing hypnotizes people. It makes them feel. Some novels turn the rest of the world gray, while the book feels amazing. Top performances in comedy or theater can also hypnotize. The audience chooses to enter a light form of hypnotism. It’s entertainment. It’s why they attend.
Hypnotism is always opt-in.
Trump
What catapulted Adams back into the mainstream was his prediction of Trump’s 2016 win, when Nate Silver said Trump had less than a 2% chance of winning the election. Adams knew giving Trump a 98 percent chance of winning would attract attention, even if all the coverage attacked him. Giving a lower number for Trump’s chances would have been more accurate but less attention-getting. Adams intentionally chose the mirror image of Nate Silver’s statistical analysis to contrast with the famous prognosticator.
Adams said Trump was successful because of talent stacking. Trump isn’t the best in the world at any one thing, but he’s great at enough things, media, branding, publicity, business, having a thick skin, etc., that it makes Trump the best at winning the nomination and general election for president.
You win by stacking complementary, above-average skills. Don’t chase single skill world-class status like Tiger Woods, as that’s nearly impossible and a loser’s game.
Adams applies this to himself; he used his cartoonist skills alongside his MBA, persuasion skills, and experience in corporate environments to create a wildly successful comic strip that spawned spin-off books, a television series, a video game, and merchandise. His business skills gave him the tools to create a business satire cartoonist and the skill set to manage the business that evolved from that strip.
The combination of your skills should be rare.
Frames
Adams talked a lot about frames. Frames change lives.
Here’s a short video Adams made on how to never be lazy. State orientation fails, and action orientation wins. But as Adams explains, it’s more outcome-oriented than action. If you focus on the hard actions, it’s similar to state orientation (where you think about how you’ll feel in the moment).
“If I knew how hard it was going to be, I never would have done it,” says almost every founder ever. Starting something new requires a bit of naivete, as the list of things that can and will go wrong is always 100x the list of things that go right.
Frames and systems are the easiest and best way to organize your life. In memory of Scott Adams, let’s strive to be more outcome-oriented.