How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life (21 page)

Many years ago,
in my late twenties, I asked a doctor to look at a strange lump that had formed on my neck, about half the size of a Ping-Pong ball. I asked what it might be, and he said, “Well, two possibilities. It’s either cancer or … I don’t know what else it could be. I’ll schedule you for X-rays.”

I have a vivid memory of sitting in the doctor’s waiting room with the other patients who were there for the same reason:
maybe
cancer. The doctor would enter the room with some X-rays in hand and call out a name, and if the news was good, he would announce it before the patient even rose from his chair. “Mr. Gonzales? Good news. Your X-rays are clean.” A few minutes later, “Mrs. Johnson, the X-rays look great. It’s all good.”

Then it was my turn. “Mr. Adams? Please step into my office.”

Yikes.

The doctor showed me the X-rays and said that from the looks of it, it was probably some sort of neck cancer. I slumped in my chair.

The doctor explained that it
might
be something harmless. He explained that sometimes a lump looks just like cancer on an X-ray but it turns out to be just “one of those things” and no big deal. He scheduled me for a biopsy to settle it once and for all.

The appointment was set for the following week. For seven days I was like Schrödinger’s cat, maybe dead and maybe not. I lived alone in San Francisco and didn’t have much of a social-support structure.
It was just me and my one-room apartment. My bed was also my couch. It was a long week.

At the appointment, the nurse technician described the biopsy procedure. Time slowed to a crawl, and I could hear my own heartbeat. The technician explained that he would put a needle into the lump and draw out some fluid. If it was blood, I probably had cancer. If the fluid was clear, it was just “one of those things” and no big deal.

The needle went in, and time slowed again as the technician sucked out the liquid just beyond my peripheral vision.
Say something, you bastard!
He knew the result in the first second. He made me wait until he was done.

The needle was full of clear fluid. “I guess it was just one of those things,” he said. “Let me get the rest of it.”

I left the hospital a few minutes later with a tiny bandage and a new outlook on life. Food tasted better for weeks. Annoying people were no longer annoying. Trees were fuzzy balls of wonder. Cold air was refreshing instead of painful. And I learned that sometimes experts get it wrong on the first try.

Dealing with experts is always tricky. Are they honest? Are they competent? How often are they right? My observation and best guess is that experts are right about 98 percent of the time on the easy stuff but only right 50 percent of the time on anything that is unusually complicated, mysterious, or even new.

Years later, when a psychologist offered me Valium to fix my voice problem, I recognized the situation as the type in which experts are wrong half of the time. That made it easy for me to say no to the Valium and keep searching for a less-druggy solution. When I made the decision, it felt like intuition, whatever that is. But I think it would be more accurate to say it was the result of pattern recognition plus optimism.

If your gut feeling (intuition) disagrees with the experts, take that seriously. You might be experiencing some pattern recognition that you can’t yet verbalize.

When I worked
for Crocker National Bank, my coworkers and I had a good laugh at a summer intern who espoused a wacky theory about success being a function of the neighborhood you choose to live in. His plan was to get into the best apartment he could afford in an upscale neighborhood, no matter how many roommates that might require him to have, and let some sort of vague magic do the rest. He was willing to work hard, go to school, obey the law, and take all of the normal steps to success. But he figured that could only take him so far. The real kicker was his brilliant plan to live among rich people until he could become one by association.

I recall cleverly mocking him to the delight of all who were within earshot. He seemed like such a rational guy in every other way. But this rich-by-association scheme was just plain stupid. Upon interrogation, I learned that he wasn’t suggesting he would network and make important contacts with his well-to-do neighbors. There was no defined mechanism to explain how proximity to rich people would make him successful. The best he could offer was his observation that life had patterns and this was one of them: You become like the people around you.

A few years later I learned more than I wanted to know about the workings of Alcoholics Anonymous. My ex-girlfriend had a need for its services and I learned that it works better than most alternatives for people with drinking problems.
¹
One of Alcoholics Anonymous’s rules involves keeping away from people who are bad influences. That
seems obvious when you think about it, given the power of peer pressure and that sort of thing. In this situation, whom you associate with makes a big difference. But this is a special case and quite different from the rich-by-association hypothesis. Still, there was enough similarity between the two cases that it began to register with me as a potential pattern.

More recently, I saw a study that said hanging around with overweight people can cause you to gain weight.
²
I would not have imagined that to be true. But I can imagine several mechanisms that would explain it. If each of your friends is fifty pounds overweight and you’re only sporting an extra ten, you probably don’t feel much pressure to change. And if your corpulent friends keep steering you toward fast-food joints when you’re together, that can hurt too. So it seems entirely plausible that hanging around with overweight people can influence your own waistline. Still, that’s very different from the rich-by-association theory, which has no obvious mechanism.

After
Dilbert
launched, I continued working my day job at Pacific Bell for several years. Since then, my old boss, Mike Goodwin (who was also the guy who named
Dilbert
), wrote and published a book about his father’s experience in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. (Spoiler alert: It didn’t go well.) The book,
Shobun,
was his first attempt as a writer. It didn’t strike me as a huge coincidence that two cubicle rats from Pacific Bell both became published writers. The world is full of such ordinary coincidences.

After I left Pacific Bell, I learned that another fellow who sat across the cubicle wall from me subsequently wrote a book about his stint in prison for murder. He’s out of jail now, and because I have a policy of being kind to people who strangle acquaintances with belts, I’d like to say he’s a fine fellow and his book is excellent. It’s
You Got Nothing Coming: Notes from a Prison Fish,
by Jimmy Lerner
.
What are the odds that three people in one little corner of Pacific Bell could all become published authors? I understand that coincidences are normally just that, but they seem special because we don’t get to see all of the things that
don’t
happen. Still, my pattern detector perked up. Here were two guys who worked with me and ended up following a similar model. Did their proximity to me matter in some way, perhaps by example or inspiration? Or would they have written books anyway? There’s no way to know.

But there’s more to the story. Back up several years to my time as a
supervisor in the technology wing of Crocker National Bank, before
Dilbert
was even an idea. One of the employees I managed came to me one day and announced his plan to write an article about a spreadsheet trick he had discovered. His plan was to submit it to a trade magazine and see if it would pay. He had no experience as a writer, but his idea was clever and worthy of sharing. I encouraged him to submit his work, and to my surprise, the magazine accepted it and paid him a hefty (at the time) fee of $1,500. It even rewrote most of the article, which it called editing and he called butchering. Still, he proved that a guy in a cubicle can become a published writer and make money at it. He went on to write several more articles that also got published. Did my association with him make it more likely I would later pursue a career in cartooning? I think it did. It made success outside my field seem accessible. It made it real.

Humans are social animals. There are probably dozens of ways we absorb energy, inspiration, skills, and character traits from those around us. Sometimes we learn by example. Sometimes success appears more approachable and ordinary because we see normal people achieve it, and perhaps that encourages us to pursue schemes with higher payoffs. Sometimes the people around us give us information we need, or encouragement, or contacts, or even useful criticism. We can’t always know the mechanism by which others change our future actions, but it’s pretty clear it happens, and it’s important.

Years ago I mocked an intern for thinking his choice of neighbors would influence his career. If he’s reading this, I’d like to offer my apology. I can easily see that where you live might influence the energy you put into your career. If you live near optimistic winners, those qualities are sure to rub off to some extent. And I advise you to consider this fact a primary tool for programming your moist-robot self. The programming interface is your location. To change yourself, part of the solution might involve spending more time with the people who represent the change you seek.

For example, you’ll find it much easier to exercise in an environment where others are exercising. When you watch others exercise, it activates the exercise subroutine in your own brain. Likewise, it’s often easier to work when others are working in the same room, so long as they don’t bug you too much.

Given our human impulse to pick up the habits and energy of others, you can use that knowledge to literally program your brain the
way you want. Simply find the people who most represent what you would like to become and spend as much time with them as you can without trespassing, kidnapping, or stalking. Their good habits and good energy will rub off on you.

The only reasonable
goal in life is maximizing your total lifetime experience of something called happiness. That might sound selfish, but it’s not. Only a sociopath or a hermit can find happiness through extreme selfishness. A normal person needs to treat others well in order to enjoy life. For the sake of argument, let’s assume you’re normal(ish).

If you want to boost your happiness, it helps to understand what happiness is and how it works. You might think the science of happiness is fairly obvious, but it’s not. Pursuing happiness without understanding the mechanisms behind it is like planting a garden without knowing the basics of fertilization, pest control, watering, and frost. It’s easy to pop a seed in the ground, but it takes a deeper understanding of the gardening arts to grow something wonderful. Happiness,
like gardening, only
seems
simple. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the tomato plant in my garden. I gave it water and sunlight. What more could it need?

Let’s start by defining happiness and agreeing on what causes it. My definition of happiness is that it’s a feeling you get when your body chemistry is producing pleasant sensations in your mind. That definition is compatible with the science of happiness.
¹

It’s tempting to imagine happiness as a state of mind caused by whatever is happening in your life. By that way of thinking, we’re largely victims of the cold, cold world that sometimes rewards our good work and sometimes punishes us for no reason. That’s a helpless worldview and it can blind you to a simple system for being happier.

Science has done a good job in recent years of demonstrating that happiness isn’t as dependent on your circumstances as you might think. For example, amputees often return to whatever level of happiness they enjoyed before losing a limb.
²
And you know from your own experience that some people seem to be happy no matter what is going on in their lives, while others can’t find happiness no matter how many things are going right. We’re all born with a limited range of happiness, and the circumstances of life can only jiggle us around within the range.

The good news is that anyone who has experienced happiness probably has the capacity to spend more time at the top of his or her personal range and less time near the bottom. In my case, my baseline is on the fence between happy and unhappy, so staying near the top
of my narrow range makes all the difference. To do that I treat myself like the moist robot I am and manipulate my body chemistry as needed. I also try to improve my situation and circumstances wherever I can, but I see that as 20 percent of the solution. The big part—the 80 percent of happiness—is nothing but a chemistry experiment. And it’s hugely helpful to think of it that way. You can’t always quickly fix whatever is wrong in your environment, and you can’t prevent negative thoughts from drifting into your head. But you can easily control your body chemistry through lifestyle, and that in turn will cause your thoughts to turn positive, while making the bumps in your path feel less important.

Let’s get to the mechanics of manipulating your body chemistry. Obviously your doctor can give you a pill to change your mood. Antidepressants are big business. And you can change your chemistry by drinking alcohol or doing recreational drugs. The problem with each of those methods is that it comes with risks and side effects you’d rather avoid. I advocate a more natural approach.

For starters, the single biggest trick for manipulating your happiness chemistry is being able to do what you want,
when
you want. I’m contrasting that with the more common situation, in which you might be able to do all the things you want, but you can’t often do them
when
you want.

For example, you might enjoy eating a delicious meal. But if the only time you were allowed to eat delicious food was right after you’d already filled your stomach with junk food, the delicious meal would not make you happy. A mediocre meal when you’re starving will contribute more to your happiness than an extraordinary meal when you’re not hungry. The timing of things can be more important than the intrinsic value of the things.

Napping is another perfect example of the importance of timing. A good nap can be a wonderful thing, but if the only available time to nap is an hour before bedtime, a nap would do you little good. You need to control the order and timing of things to be happy. It’s important to look at happiness in terms of timing because timing is easier to control than resources. It’s hard to become rich enough to buy your own private island but, relatively speaking, it’s easier to find a job with flexible hours. A person with a flexible schedule and average resources will be happier than a rich person who has everything except
a flexible schedule. Step one in your search for happiness is to continually work toward having control of your schedule.

Parents understand what I’m talking about. Most parents love their kids and are glad they had them. At the same time, kids remove almost all of the flexibility in your schedule, especially if you’re the stay-at-home parent. It’s no wonder that parents who seem to have everything—nice house, great kids, and good friends—still find themselves in misery during the years their kids are young. Those parents might have all the “stuff” they could ask for but no flexibility to enjoy what they want when they want.

As I write this chapter, I’m sitting in a comfortable chair with my trusty dog, Snickers, while enjoying a warm cup of coffee. I just came from a good workout, so I’m feeling relaxed and in the mood to write. By any definition, what I’m doing is work, but because I can control the timing of it on this particular day, it doesn’t feel like work. I’ve transformed work into pleasure simply by having control over
when
I do it.

In your personal life and your career, consider schedule flexibility when making any big decision. Realistically, sometimes you need to suck it up and work long hours, watch the kids, and do your duty. Just remember to keep your eye out for ways to maximize your schedule freedom in the long term. It’s something you want to work toward. You won’t all become work-at-home cartoonists, but you can certainly find a boss who values your productivity over your attendance.

That brings me to the next important mechanism for happiness. Happiness has more to do with where you’re heading than where you are. A person who is worth two billion dollars will feel sad if he suddenly loses one billion because he’s moving in the wrong direction, even if the change has no impact on his ability to buy what he wants. But a street person will celebrate discovering a new Dumpster behind an upscale restaurant because it means good eating ahead. We tend to feel happy when things are moving in the right direction and unhappy when things are trending bad.

The directional nature of happiness is one reason it’s a good idea to have a sport or hobby that leaves you plenty of room to improve every year. Tennis and golf are two perfect examples. With either sport, an average player can continue improving well past the age of sixty. Slow and steady improvement at anything makes you feel that
you are on the right track. The feeling of progress stimulates your body to create the chemicals that make you feel happy.

When you choose a career, consider whether it will lead to a lifetime of ever-improved performance, a plateau, or a steady decline in your skills. As a cartoonist, my drawing skills have slowly improved over most of my career, and that is a source of happiness for me. If you are lucky enough to have career options, and only one of them affords a path of continual improvement, choose that one, all else being equal.

The next element of happiness you need to master is imagination. I wrote about this in the context of raising your energy, which is closely related to happiness, but it bears repeating in this chapter. Pessimism is often a failure of imagination. If you can imagine the future being brighter, it lifts your energy and gooses the chemistry in your body that produces a sensation of happiness. If you can’t even
imagine
an improved future, you won’t be happy no matter how well your life is going right now.

I find it useful to daydream that the future will be better than today, by far. I like to imagine a future that is spectacular and breathtaking. The daydreams need not be accurate in terms of predicting the future. Simply imagining a better future hacks your brain chemistry and provides you with the sensation of happiness today. Being happy raises your energy level and makes it easier to pursue the steps toward real-world happiness. This is another case in which your imagination can influence the real world. Don’t let reality control your imagination. Let your imagination be the user interface to steer your reality.

The next important thing to remember about happiness is that it’s not a mystery of the mind and it’s not magic. Happiness is the natural state for most people whenever they feel healthy, have flexible schedules, and expect the future to be good.

As I write this next paragraph, a few days have passed, and now I’m sitting at a table in my health club. I exercised, I had my healthy reward snack, and now I’m thoroughly happy, even though I’m working at rewriting and tweaking this chapter. Taking care of my body always influences my happiness more than whatever task I’m involved in. That’s an important point because normally when you feel unhappy, you blame your mood on whatever your environment is serving up to you. It’s easy to blame your environment because you know you can interpret
almost anything as bad news or potential bad news. Just add pessimism and cynicism to any observation and you can manufacture bad news out of thin air. If you know anyone who routinely interprets good news as bad, you know how easily it can be done. I’m here to tell you that the primary culprit in your bad moods is a deficit in one of the big five: flexible schedule, imagination, sleep, diet, and exercise.

I’ve explained to a number of people my observations about how exercise, diet, and sleep influence mood. The usual reaction is a blank expression followed by a change of topic. No one wants to believe that the formula for happiness is as simple as daydreaming, controlling your schedule, napping, eating right, and being active every day. You’d feel like an idiot for suffering so many unhappy days while not knowing the cure was so accessible. I know from experience that you might accept the idea that daily lifestyle choices are perhaps a small part of what causes your bad moods. But you probably think the majority of your crabbiness is caused by the idiots and sociopaths in your life plus your inexplicable bad luck on any given day. Based on a lifetime of observation, my best estimate is that 80 percent of your mood is based on how your body feels and only 20 percent is based on your genes and your circumstances, particularly your health.

Ask yourself this question: At times when you’ve exercised earlier in the day, eaten well, hydrated, and had enough sleep, what percentage of those times have you found yourself in a good mood? I’ll bet you don’t know the answer to that question because it’s not the sort of thing anyone pays attention to. But now that I’ve put the idea in your head, you’ll automatically find yourself noticing the link between daily body maintenance and your not-so-mysterious happiness. I predict you’ll observe that your good moods are highly correlated with exercise, diet, and sleep.