Scott Adams’ Secret of Success Failure (What's the best way to climb to the top? Be 2 failure. By Scott Adams (oct 22, 2013 850 pm. €T "Dilbert" creator Scott Adams talks to WS! editor Gary Rosen about how to draw lessons skis and ideas from your fellures—and why following your pasion I asking for trouble. Photo: Set Adams If you're already as successful as you want to be, both personally and professionally, congratulations! Here's the natso-g00d news: All you are likely to get from this ate sa semientertaining tale about 2 ‘uy who fale his way to success But you might also notice some familiar patterns in my story that wil {ve You confirmation (or confirmation bas) that your own success wasr't entirely luck. Forget passion, Goals ae for losers Dilbert creator Scott Adams reveals his secret to climbing t the top: Suffer defeat. Lots and lats of defeat. Readers, we want to hear from you. Share your bes stares of {allure and well choose afew to feature in an upcoming blog post. IF you're just starting your journey toward uccess—however you define It—or you're wondering what ‘you've been daing wrong until now, you might find some novel ideas here. Maybe the combination of ‘what you know plus what thnk know willbe enough ta keep you aut ofthe wood chipper. Let me start with some tips on what not todo. Beware of advice about successful people and thelr methods, For starters, no two stuations are alk. Your dreams of creating a dry-cleaning empire won'tbe helped by knowing that Thomas Edison liked to take naps. Secondly, biographers never have access tothe intemal thoughts of successful people. fa biographer says Henry Ford invented the assembly line tolimpress women, that's probably a guess. But the most dangerous case of als when succesful people rectly give advice. For example, you ‘often hear them say that you should "Yolow your pasion.” That sounds perfectly reasonable the frst ‘ime you hear it, Passion wil presumably give you high energy, high resistance to rejection and high determination, Passionate people are more persuasive, too. Those are all good things ght? Here's the counterargument: When | was a commercial loan officer fora large bank, my boss taught us ‘hat you should never make 2 loan to someone wh i flloing his passion. For example, you don"t ‘want to give money ta a sports enthusiast wha is starting a sports store to pursue his passion for ll ‘things sporty. That guy i bad bet, passion and al, He's in business fr the wrong reason, ‘My boss, who had been a commercial lender for over 30 years, said that te best loan customer is someone who has no passion whatsoever, just a desire to work hard at something that looks good on & spreadsheet. Maybe the loan customer wants to start a dry-cleaning store or Invest ina fast-food franchise—boring stuff. That's the person you bet on. You want the grinder, not the guy who loves his job. For most people, k's e887 tobe passionate about things that are worklng ou, and that distorts our Impression of the importance of passion. ve been involved In several dozen business ventures over the course of my life, each one made me excited atthe start. You might even callitpaesion “The ones that didnt work out—and that would be most of them—slowly drained my passion as they failed. The few thet worked became more exiting a5 they succeeded, For example, when linvested ina restaurant with an operating partner, my passion was sky high. And on day one, when there was ine cof customers down the bloc, | was even more passionate Inlater years, a the business got pummeled ‘my passion evalved int frustration and annoyance (onthe other hand, Dilber started out as just one of many get-rich schemes | was willing to try. When it started to look sift might bea success, my passion fr cartooning increased because | eaized it could be my golden ticket. In hindsight, itlooks as ifthe projects that | was most passionate about were also ‘the anes that worked, But objectively, my passion level moved with my Success Sucess caused passion ‘more than passion caused success. ‘So forget about pasion. And while you're att forget about goal, te. ust after college, I took my fst airplane trip, destination Calforia in search ofa job. Iwas seated next toa businessman who was probably in his early 60s, suppose I looked lke an add duck with my serious ‘demeanor, bad haircut and cheap sul, clearly out of my element. | asked what he did fora livng, and he told me he was the CEO of a company that made sews. He offered me some career advice. He sald ‘that everytime he got anew job, he immediately tated looking fora better one. For him, jb seeking ‘was not something one dd when necessary. It was a continuing process‘This makes perfect sense Ifyou do the math. Chances are thatthe best ob for you won't become avalable at precisely the time you declare yourself ready. Your best bet, he explained, was to always be looking fora better deal The better deal has its own schedule. believe the way he explained itis that your ja is pot your jb; you ob sto find a beter jb. ‘This was my frst expasute tothe Idea that one should havea system instead of a goal. The sytem was, +0 continually look for better options. ‘Throughout my career ve had my antennae up, looking for examples of people who use systems as ‘opposed to goals n most cases, a5 far as! can el the people who use systems do better. The sytems- driven people have found a way to look at the familiar in new and more useful ways. ‘To putt bluntly, goals are for loser. That's literally true most of he time. For example, if our goal sto lose 10 pounds, you will spend every moment unt you reach the goal—if you reach it at all—feeling as if you were shor of your goal. In other words, goahoriented people exist ina state of nearly continuous failure that they hope wil be temporary If you achieve your goal, you celebrate and fel trrfi, but only until you realize that you ust lost the ‘thing that gave you purpose and direction. Your options are to feel empty and useles, perhaps enjoying the spoils of our success until they bore you, or to set new goals and re-enter the cycle of permanent presuccess fllure ‘havea fHend who isa gited salesman. He could have sold anything fom houses to toasters. The field he chose (whieh 1 won't reveal because he wouldn't appreciate the sudden flood of competition) allows him to sella sevice that almost always auto renews. In other words he can sell his service once and ‘eioy ongoing commissions unl the customer dies ar goes out of business. Mis biggest problem in fe is ‘that he keeps trading his boat fora larger one, and that's a lot of work (Observers cal him lucky. What see is a man who accurately identified his skil set and chose a system ‘hat vastly increased his odds of geting "lucy." In fact, his system ss solid that it could withstand ‘ult abit of bad luck without bucling. How much passion does this fellow have for his chosen field? ‘Answer: ero, What he has Is 2 spectacular system, and that beats passion every time {As for my own system, when | graduated from college, | outlined my entrepreneurial pan, The idea was to create something that had value and—this next partis the key-I wanted the product to be ‘something that as easy to reproduce in unlimited quantities. dnt want to sell my time, at least not directly, because that mode! has an upward limit. And | didnt want to build my own automobile factory, for example, because cars are not easy to reproduce. | wanted to create, invent, write, or otherwise concoct something Widely desired that would be easy to reproduce.MMAYBE NEXT TIME WE DONT FOLLOW OUR PASSION, Scott Adams 'My system of creating something the public wants and reproducing Iti large quantities nearly auaranteeda string of failures. By design all of my efforts were long shots. Had | been goat-oriented Instead of system-oriented,|imagine| would have given up after the fist several falues, It would have fal ike banging my head against a brick wall. But bing systems-oriented | felt myself growing more capable everyday, no matter the fate of the 18 w be working un, A every day cing Use yeas woke up with the same ‘thought, iterally as rubbed the sleep from my eyes and slapped the alarm clock off ‘Today's the doy I¥ you dill down on any success story, you always discover that luck was a huge pat oft. You cant contro ick, but you can move from a game with bad odds to one with better odds. You can make it easier for luck t find you. The most useful tng you can dos stay in the game. If your current getich project falls, take what you learned and try something else. Keep repeating until something lucky happens. The universe has plenty of luck to go around; you jst need to keep your hand raised unt’ Your turn It helps to see failure as aroad and not a wall im an optimist by nature, or perhaps by upbringing—’s hard to know where one leaves off and the other begins—but whatever the cause, I've long seen failure as tool not an outcome. I beleve that viewing the word in that way can be useful for you to, Nietzsche famously said, "What doesn kl us makes us stronges” sounds clever, but t's loser philosopty. I dont want my fallurs to simply make me stronger, which | interpret as making me better able to survive future challenges. (To be far to Nitasche, he probably meant the word "stronger" to Include anything that makes you more capable. ask him to clarity, but ironically he ran out of things ‘that di’ il him)‘Becoming stronger is obviously a good thing, but t's only barely optimist Ido want my failures to ake me stronger of course, but alzo want to become smarter, more talented, better networked, healthier and more energized, finda cow turd on my front steps, "'m not satisfied knowing that lbe mentally prepare to find some future cow turd. want to shovel that tu onto my garden and hope the cow returns every week so | never have to buy frtlizer aga, Fllure Is 2 resource that can be managed: Before launching Dilbert, and after, fled at along seres of day jobs and entrepreneurial adventures Here are just afew ofthe worst ones. include them because successful people generally loss over their most aromatic fallures, and it leaves the impression that they have some magic you don't. \When you're done reaing ths list, you won't have that delusion about me, and thats the point. Success |sentiely accessible, even if you happen to bea huge screw-up 95% ofthe time, ay failures: ‘elero Rosin Bag invention: in the 1970s, tennis players sometimes used rosin bags to keep their racket hands less sweaty In college, | bull 2 prototype of 3 rosin bag that attached toa Veero strip on tennis Shorts soit would always be avalable when needed. My lawyer told me it wasn't patentworthy because it was simply a combination of two exiting products. | approached some sporting goods companies and ‘got nothing but form-leter rejections | dropped the idea. fut inthe process | learned 2 valuable lesson: God ideas have no value because the world already has t00 many of them. The market rewards execution, nt ideas. Fom that point on concentrated on Ideas that | could execute, | wes alteady falling toward success, but Ida’ yt know it. {Gopher Ofer: During my banking career, in my late 20s, | caught the attention ofa senor vie president atthe bank. Apparenty my s sil in meetings were impressive, He offered me ab as his ‘2opher/assstant with the vague assurance that | would meet important executives during the normal course of my work, which would make it easy for him to strap a rocket to my backside asthe saying roughly went—anel launch me up the corporate lace. Cn the downside, the challenge would be to survive his less-than-polite management style and do his idling fora few yeas. declined his afer because | was already managing a small group of people, so becoming a gopher seemed Ike a step backward. belleve the senior viee president's exact characterization of my decision was "[expletive]STUPIDLI He hired one of my co-workers forthe Job Instead, and in a few yeas that fellow became one ofthe youngest vice presidents inthe bank's Nstory | worked for Crocker National Bankin San Francisco for about elght years, starting atthe very bottom and working my way upto lower management, During the course of my banking career, and nine with ‘my strategy of learning a much as| could about the ways of business, | gained an extraordinarily good ‘overview of banking, finance, technology, contracts, management and 2 dozen other useful kil ‘wouldn't have done wt any diferent.\Webvon: Inthe dot-com era, a startup called Webvan promised to revolutionize grocery delivery. You ‘could order grocery store tems over the Internet, and one of Webvan's trucks would load your order at the company’s modern distribution hub and set out to serie all the customers in your area. figured Webvan would do for groceries what Amazon had done for books. Itwas a rare opportunity to {get in on the ground floor. | bought a bunch of Webvan stock and felt good about myself When the stock plunged, | ought some more. repeated that process several times, each ime licking my lips a | ‘acquited everarger blocs of the stock at prices knew tobe a steal. "When the company announced that It had achieved postive cash low atone ofits several hubs, knew that | was onto something ft worked in one hub, the model was proved, and It would surely work at ‘others. bought more stock. Now | ewned approximately, wel, a boatload, [Afew weeks later, Webvan went out of busines, Investing in Webvan wasn't the dumbest thing Ive ‘ever done, but l'sa contender. The los wasn't enough to change my ifestyle. But boy, cit ting psychologically In my paral defense, | knew it as 2 gamble, not an investment pers. \What earned from that experience i that there sno such thing as useful information that comes from 4 company's management. Now Ivers nd let the ving get smocthed out by al the other variables Jn my investments. “These failures are just a sampling, 'm delighted to admit that Ive failed st more challenges than anyone know. ‘As for you, like to tink that reading this wl set you on the path of your own magnificent screw-ups and cavernous disappointments, You're welcome! Andi | forgot to mention it earlier, thats exacty| ‘where you want tobe: steeped to your eyebrows in fallure. I's good place tobe because failure is where succes likes to hide in plain sight. Everything you want ‘out of life isin that huge, bubbling vat of fllure The trick i to get the good stu out Mr, Adams is the creator of Dilbert. Adapted from his book "How to Fall at Almost Everything and Sil \Win Big" o be published by Portfolio, 2 member af Penguin Group (USA, on Oct. 2.