Cubicle Wisdom

D Shivakumar

This is a wonderful book from the creator of Dilbert. I expected a fun, tongue-in-cheek book from Scott Adams. Surprise! This is anything but a comic book. It is about Adams’s career and the mistakes he made before stumbling upon the calling of “a professional simplifier”, an expression he uses to describe a comic-strip creator.

Adams tried his hand at many things before he launched Dilbert. He tried to be an entrepreneur many times over. He worked for a phone company, he attempted a version of YouTube years before YouTube took off, he tried his hand at selling groceries direct to home, and he experimented with a keypad for phones. He then sent a comic strip to Playboy and the New Yorker, because they paid the most. Both magazines rejected him, but he succeeded with Dilbert. This is a book that’s honest, self-critical, humble and offers a point on traditional markers of corporate careers like passion, luck and success.

Adams argues that successful people are not goal-oriented but are system builders. A system is something you do on a regular basis, which increases the odds of happiness in the long term. A lot of people look good on paper but do not achieve success because they do not sacrifice something. Successful people don’t wish for success, they decide to pursue it and, in the bargain, pay a price for their success. Successful people give back more than they consume to society.

Adams classifies people into three groups — the selfish, the stupid and those who are a burden on others. Attitude affects everything you do in the quest for success and happiness. A positive attitude is an important tool. Exercise, food and sleep are the mantras to elevate attitude and raise energy. Energy is a far better predictor of success than passion. Passion is a double-edged sword since it blinds the person and prevents him or her from seeing reality. Energy allows you to give your best. It paves the way for positive thoughts. Adams opines that successful people have a high ratio of happy thoughts to disturbing thoughts. Negative thoughts lead to negative words, actions and results. Success, in turn, feeds energy, something you need to be good at a number of things. Successful people know that every new skill they acquire doubles their odds of finding success.

Successful people also use persuasive phrases like, ‘Would you mind?’, ‘I just wanted to clarify’, ‘Is there anything you can do for me?’, ‘Thank you’ and ‘This is just between you and me’.

Patterns of success include lack of fear, the right education and exercise. So, how does one start on the path to success? For Adams, it is about affirmations.

Affirmations are simply the practice of repeating to yourself what you want to achieve while imagining the outcome you want. It is good to write down the affirmation, “I want to be a CEO”, and pin it in your room, to remind yourself every day. Affirmations work because optimists tend to notice opportunities that pessimists miss.

When you practice affirmations and then succeed, it feels like lady luck has smiled on you. At one level, that’s true. The biggest component of luck is timing.

When the timing is off, no amount of hard work or talent matters. When Dilbert appeared, corporate America was downsizing and Dilbert was seen as the hapless worker whom companies were laying off. This created a connect far stronger than advertising or publicity. A few years later, The Wall Street Journal asked Adams for a guest editorial about the workplace. This piece was titled ‘The Dilbert Principle’ and was appreciated by readers. It turned into a book and speech requests followed.

Adams is careful to warn us that nothing in this book should be taken as advice. Happiness is the only useful goal in life, he argues, and your own happiness depends on being good to others. He has brought happiness to millions with Dilbert and it’s not a surprise that this axiom works for him. This book is about failing and winning. See failure as a friend. Failure is the raw material for success. Invite failure home, learn from it, and pick its pocket. And you are on your way to success.

D Shivakumar is the head of Pepsico India.