Highlights from a podcast with Dilbert creator Scott Adams
Highlights from a podcast in which Dilbert creator Scott Adams talks about his book "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big"& startup CalendarTree [30:54]
On keeping the voice authentic - So the first, I guess, eight years of my (cartooning) career, I actually had a day job. So I've been pulling from those memories. Plus a lot of people email me and say, could you please embarrass my boss? He desperately needs it and I'm always happy to help.
I honestly think that to be a really great manager, you've got to have at least some minimum level of evil in you because the whole point of managing right and leadership in general is getting people to do something that they didn't want to do on their own. So if it was simply a matter of informing them, then you wouldn't need a manager. So you need somebody to actually manipulate people to act against what they believe would have been their own best interest. Good management is excellent manipulation.
Manipulation is one of those words that makes you think it's automatically bad, but in fact, we're all manipulating our environment for good or bad. That's what we do as humans. But certainly if you're a manager, you're trying to get people to do things differently than they were going to do on their own.
I'm not big on free time.
..in order to be a good cartoonist or a good writer, you have to have another part of your life, which is filling you with ideas. It's giving you the, the complexity and the diversity of thought that you're not going to get sitting in a room staring at your computer. So I need to get out and mix it up with the real world.
I'm actually a kind of a business model nerd.
My favorite thing to think about and talk about it would be, how could I turn something into a business that had never been a business before? My background is not art. I think most people know that when they look at my comic, my background is economics. I have a degree in economics. I have an MBA from Berkeley.
I'm pretty good at simplifying things. That comes from probably a little bit of upbringing, but a lot of practice being a cartoonist and taking complicated things and putting it into three sentences every day.
When I was 20, I really didn't have a mentor. I didn't have anybody who could give me the basic model of success. You know, what's the basic idea. I know I'm going to tailor it myself. So my book, doesn't try to tell people do it this way. What I say instead is there are a lot of people doing a lot of different things. Some of them are working. They're not all going to be the thing that works for you, but here's what I did.
I always try to have three or four little ideas that are going to create passive income that are going to be, you know, if one of them falls apart, it's not going to be a huge deal.
...you have to acknowledge that luck is a giant factor in all of this stuff...if you do 10 things, you've created a situation where lucky can find you a little more readily than if you did one thing and out. You want diversity in all things. I look for the, you throw it out there and you see anybody get excited.
...there's something about a creative distraction that somehow helps the generation of new ideas.
When I started Dilbert, I was doing my day job where I'd have to leave from the office at like six 30 in the morning. So from four to four 30 in the morning, until then I had to do my work and I had to do one every day or else there would be a blank spot in the newspaper. So what I discovered was this was the great freeing discovery of my life and probably the most, probably the single most useful thing that I ever learned, which is that sometimes I'd have this great idea and I'd have the whole hour and a half to develop it. And sometimes I'd have only 10 minutes left and nothing, but I'd say, okay, just do something bad. Just do you know, you don't have the option of nothing. So if all you can think of is the bad idea, do that bad idea....what happened was, and the great realization is that the readers would judge the bad version as highly as the good version sometimes better. In fact, there was no correlation between what I thought was a home run and what the audience loved was a good comic that I just couldn't judge.
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