Scott Adams's Blog, page 301

What Makes Stuff Go Viral?

What makes one piece of media content go viral and another a dud? I’ve been living that question for most of my career. If you count the 365 Dilbert comics I create each year, my blogging, my writing for other publications, and my books, I’ve seen a lot of my own content go viral, and far more it go nowhere. Is there a pattern?

I’m tempted to say there is, but that would not explain the fact that no one can produce a viral effect on demand. If there were a formula to it, one could hit winners most of the time. I would love to tell you I know in advance how readers will react to my writing, but I can’t. My recent post on science’s biggest fail went viral and I didn’t see that coming. This is what my blog traffic did when that post went live. 

I’ve read a number of books and articles about how to generate viral responses. Everyone seems to have a slightly different take once you get past the obvious. I thought I would share my non-standard view on what makes things viral. This is based on pattern recognition, not science, so please adjust your opinion of my credibility accordingly.

My observation, based primarily on my own viral creations, is that there are three separate targets you need to hit to generate a viral reaction. The topic needs to already be in people’s minds, the quality has to be “good enough,” and it has to appeal to folks’ egos. Let me step you through it.

Top of Mind

Topic is tied to the headlines: Any topic that is already in the news and getting a lot of emotional reaction is a good bet for going viral. You don’t have to guess whether people care about the topic because the media has already done that work for you. 

A famous person is involved: Famous people interest us for all the wrong reasons. But it’s a fact of life, and the attraction to fame and power probably has evolutionary causes that are baked into our DNA. As a semi-famous public figure, I have that base covered every time I write. If you aren’t famous, it helps to write about someone who is. But it isn’t required.

Quality Minimum

Good enough execution: It goes without saying that you need a minimum level of quality in your presentation or no one will want to share it. But that standard is flexible. Amazing content can compensate for average style. And great writing can bring average content up a level. In a perfect world, you want both great writing and great content. But content will always be the most important element so long as the writing is good enough.

Emotional hook: People need to care about the topic in an emotional way. You want people to feel something: love, laughter, outrage, or whatever. To generate a viral response you need to move folks on an irrational level. If your topic is interesting and true, but not gripping in any emotional sense, that is good enough to get you paid as a professional writer, but it is not enough to create a viral piece of content.

Appeal to Ego

Say it Better: People like it when you say what they are already thinking but you say it better than they were thinking it. It creates a feeling of intellectual clarity in people who had only vague feelings and biases before. People enjoy that sensation and it makes them feel more rational and intelligent. Best of all, they can forward your writing and bolster their egos by associating themselves with it. 

As an artist, your bias might be to create new things and challenge people to find a way to enjoy it. (Technically, that makes you more of an asshole than an artist, but stay with me on this.) For a viral response you don’t want to challenge people’s thinking. You want to IMPROVE on the ill-formed thoughts they already have. It makes them feel smarter. And when you feel smart, you want to share because that’s what egos do.

Usefulness: Experts agree that if something is useful it is more likely to be shared. People love to help others when it involves no significant effort and it can make the person doing the helping feel smart, important, useful, and generally an awesome human being. Useful information plays to everyone’s ego in just the right way.

Natural Audience: The more specific the audience, the more likely your content will be forwarded. I discovered this by doing comics that mentioned specific job titles and seeing those get passed around the most. If your content makes fun of people who collect stamps, for example, you can expect it to be thoroughly shared within their ranks. You want people either to say, “That’s me!” or “I know that person!” Those are the two reactions most likely to cause you to share. The reaction you don’t want is “That’s interesting.” 

The reason you will never see a foolproof formula for creating viral content is that every situation is unique. What works for one piece of content might not be necessary for the next. And most of the raw ingredients for going viral are rough substitutes for each other. For example, the more famous the celebrity involved, the less we ask of the content. And the better the writing, the less we need in terms of “wow” factor in the underlying ideas. And so on.

The bottom line is that you always know after the fact why your content did not go viral. But you rarely know beforehand.

And it goes without saying that people will share anything cute, hilarious, or dangerous-looking. 

Okay, so how did my post about science’s biggest fail map to my viral formula? I think it hit all the variables one needs for a viral response. Here is my scorecard:

Topic from Headlines: measles vaccinations, climate change, diet science (a threefer!)

Famous Person: me

Good enough execution: The writing is functional and clear. Good enough!

Emotional hook: vaccinations and climate change are life-and-death issues

Say it Better: I focused on why science has a credibility problem instead of focusing on the science of vaccinations or climate change. That change in focus allowed both sides to say, “Yes! That!” It feels like clarity.

Usefulness: The post was designed to be useful for anyone trying to understand why so many folks are rejecting science. You can’t solve a problem until you trace it to the proper root cause. 

Natural Audience: I hit four natural audiences in one post: science lovers, science skeptics, fitness/diet enthusiasts, and mansplainers who salivate for these topics.

Now compare my post that you are reading right now on the same viral scoreboard. This post has no emotional content. It is simply an attempt to be useful and interesting. And it has no natural audience because few of you are trying to make viral content on a regular basis.

I’m still as semi-famous as last week, and I hope I explained things well, but my formula for viral posts suggests this one will get a ho-hum reaction and little sharing. I’ll update you on it later to see if I am right.

Scott Adams

@ScottAdamsSays (my dangerous tweets)

@Dilbert_Daily (Dilbert-related tweets)

My start-up

My book on success: ”…am only half way through and by far it is the best, most original book I have read on the subject of success. And I have read many of the classics. ” - Tod

Newest Dilbert Book 

Internet Warlords Versus Governments

What would happen if 30% of taxpayers in the United States suddenly decided to ignore their complicated tax returns and instead pay a self-imposed flat tax? 

And let’s say these folks are working together, so they pick the same flat tax rate. And lets say there are some credible economists supporting the rate they pick. 

What the hell happens then?

This is the sort of thing I can imagine happening because of the power of social networks. People would only need to believe that other people are rebelling in the same way at the same time to feel safe, like a virtual mob. If 30% of the taxpaying public rebels as one, and their demands are entirely reasonable and supported by economists, would the government try to penalize them?

It couldn’t.

When one citizen breaks the law, you jail him. When 30% of citizens break the same law at the same time, the law changes. It almost has to. There aren’t enough jails.

I don’t have an informed opinion on flat tax rates. I’m more interested in the idea that citizens have the power to change tax rates without working through the government. Will we ever see citizens pull the trigger on that sort of power?

I think we might. All it takes is a charismatic figure to get things going. And the revolution doesn’t need to be about taxes. If 30% of the public ignores any kind of law at the same time, the law will likely change. 

The larger idea here is that governments might become captive to organized Internet “warlords” that control specific areas of legislation. At the moment, big money is the corrupter of governments. But the Internet warlords of the future just need a web page and social media. Money might become a lot less important.

We like to think our system of government is stable and permanent. The reality in 2015 is that we could be one web page away from an entirely new form of government and not see it coming.

Scott Adams

@ScottAdamsSays (for the dangerous tweets)

Dilbert on Facebook

@Dilbert_Daily (For Dilbert stuff)

Science's Biggest Fail

What’s is science’s biggest fail of all time?

I nominate everything about diet and fitness.

Maybe science has the diet and fitness stuff mostly right by now. I hope so. But I thought the same thing twenty years ago and I was wrong. 

I used to think fatty food made you fat. Now it seems the opposite is true. Eating lots of peanuts, avocados, and cheese, for example, probably decreases your appetite and keeps you thin. 

I used to think vitamins had been thoroughly studied for their health trade-offs. They haven’t. The reason you take one multivitamin pill a day is marketing, not science. 

I used to think the U.S. food pyramid was good science. In the past it was not, and I assume it is not now. 

I used to think drinking one glass of alcohol a day is good for health, but now I think that idea is probably just a correlation found in studies. 

I used to think I needed to drink a crazy-large amount of water each day, because smart people said so, but that wasn’t science either. 

I could go on for an hour.

You might be tempted to say my real issue is with a lack of science, not with science. In some of the cases I mentioned there was a general belief that science had studied stuff when in fact it had not. So one could argue that the media and the government (schools in particular) are to blame for allowing so much non-science to taint the field of real science. And we all agree that science is not intended to be foolproof. Science is about crawling toward the truth over time.

Perhaps my expectations were too high. I expected science to tell me the best ways to eat and to exercise. Science did the opposite, sometimes because of misleading studies and sometimes by being silent when bad science morphed into popular misconceptions. And science was pretty damned cocky about being right during this period in which it was so wrong.

So you have the direct problem of science collectively steering my entire generation toward obesity, diabetes, and coronary problems. But the indirect problem might be worse: It is hard to trust science.

Today I saw a link to an article in Mother Jones bemoaning the fact that the general public is out of step with the consensus of science on important issues. The implication is that science is right and the general public are idiots. But my take is different.

I think science has earned its lack of credibility with the public. If you kick me in the balls for 20-years, how do you expect me to close my eyes and trust you?

If a person doesn’t believe climate change is real, despite all the evidence to the contrary, is that a case of a dumb human or a science that has not earned credibility? We humans operate on pattern recognition. The pattern science serves up, thanks to its winged monkeys in the media, is something like this:

Step One: We are totally sure the answer is X.

Step Two: Oops. X is wrong. But Y is totally right. Trust us this time.

Science isn’t about being right every time, or even most of the time. It is about being more right over time and fixing what it got wrong. So how is a common citizen supposed to know when science is “done” and when it is halfway to done which is the same as being wrong?

You can’t tell. And if any scientist says you should be able to tell when science is “done” on a topic, please show me the data indicating that people have psychic powers.

So maybe we should stop scoffing at people who don’t trust science and ask ourselves why. Ignorance might be part of the problem. But I think the bigger issue is that science is a “mostly wrong” situation by design that is intended to become more right over time. How do you make people trust a system that is designed to get wrong answers more often than right answers? And should we?

I’m pro-science because the alternatives are worse. (Example: ISIS.) I’m sure most of you are on the same side. But can we stop being surprised when people don’t believe science? Humans can’t turn off pattern recognition. There’s a good reason trust in science is low. Science failed my generation on the topic of food and exercise the same way science failed my parents generation with cigarettes. 

Some of the problem is visual, I assume. I can see with my own eyes my fellow-citizens getting fat but I can’t see a scientist making a useful breakthrough in a lab. The successes in science are often hidden from view and the problems are not. So that has to be factored in. While science is mostly good and useful, there’s a tendency to more easily remember the mistakes than the breakthroughs.

And we all know that studies funded by private industry are suspect. There’s plenty of that too.

Science is an amazing thing. But it has a credibility issue that it earned. Should we fix the credibility situation by brainwashing skeptical citizens to believe in science despite its spotty track record, or is society’s current level of skepticism healthier than it looks? Maybe science is what needs to improve, not the citizens.

I’m on the side that says climate change, for example, is pretty much what science says it is because the scientific consensus is high. But I realize half of my fellow-citizens disagree, based on pattern recognition. On one hand, the views of my fellow citizens might lead humanity to inaction on climate change and result in the extinction of humans. On the other hand, would I want to live in a world in which people stopped using pattern recognition to make decisions?

Those are two bad choices.

Scott Adams

Now in paperback: .”Absolutely the best business/work self help book I have ever read … and trust me I have read hundreds." - Lisa Pruett

Twitter
for Scott: @ScottAdamsSays

Outragists are the New Awful

Over on Twitter (@ScottAdamsSays) I coined the word outragism and defined it as the act of generating public outrage by quoting famous people out of context.

Creating the word is only the first part of my strategy.

My plan is to arm victims of false accusations with a word that has equal weight to the accusation. For example, if you are falsely accused of being a Nazi sympathizer because you watch the History Channel, the accuser is using full verbal firepower and all you have is a weak denial about your interest in history. It isn’t a fair fight.

I coined the word outragism so victims of it will have a powerful word of self-defense. But defining the word isn’t enough. I also have to add a few levels of stink to it so no one wants it hung around their neck.

The word outragism and its cousin outragist are designed to sound bad right out of the gate. If you add ism or ist to any word it makes every man, woman, and beast in the general vicinity look like a potential asshole. Even pianist sounds vaguely dickish. So outragist has that going for it.

I will now use a mental trick to apply a second coating of awfulness to the new word. All I need to do is type a true statement that has the word outragist in it along with some already-terrible words. I could say, for example, that I am aware of no outragists that have yet confessed to being pedophiles. Or I could say that I can’t rule out the possibility that outragists love Obamacare, ISIS, and high taxes all at the same time.

That should do it. We’re locked and loaded now. Next time you see an an act of outragism, start labeling. 

How often does outragism happen? Checking the headlines today… okay…found one. Here’s a story about a rich guy who pledged to give away 80% of his wealth. He is concerned about job loss and he is spending lots of time and money hosting a conference to discuss ways to improve the economic situation for people who are not him. 

Is that how the story got spun? Nope. The outragists waded in, modified the context by reengineering the order in which the information is presented, and turned a wealthy philanthropist into a rich asshole who is boarding his private jet while complaining that poor people buy too many things. I didn’t have to be in the room during the interview to know he didn’t say anything like that. The alleged quote is ridiculous-sounding, and the billionaire says it was a misquote. But the damage is done. The outragists won this round.

Scott Adams

Personal Twitter: @scottadamssays​

Dilbert Twitter: @Dilbert_Daily

Your Phone Interface is a Legacy Train Wreck

If you were to design a smartphone interface from scratch, without any legacy issues, would it look like a bunch of app icons sitting on a home screen?

No. Because that would be stupid. Would you want your users to be hunting around for the right app every time they want to do simple things? That ruins flow. And it unnecessarily taxes your brain by making you shift your mental model each time you switch apps. You’re always thinking Is this the one with the swiping left or the one that scrolls down? 

There is a lot of background processing in your brain just to move from app to app. I sometimes skip simple tasks on my phone because I can’t go app-diving one more time or my head will explode. My brain seems to have a finite capacity within a given day for “hunting for the right app.”

When you have my kind of job, losing flow is devastating. I’m a fan of new technology, but objectively speaking, the smartphone is the biggest threat to creativity since communism. My phone interrupts me all day long. And if I have a new idea that I want to jot down before the next interruption, it is nearly impossible because of the app-hunting legacy model of phones. I usually forget what I was thinking because I get interrupted or my mind moves on before I even decide what app to use for my note.This is all worsened by the fact that modern life is making my attention span shrink to nothing.

So what would a proper smartphone interface look like?

It would be a blank screen. Like this, except with a keyboard at the bottom. 

Let’s say, for example, you start typing (or speaking) on the blank screen…

"Kenn…"

Your smartphone starts guessing that you are either writing an email or a text message because “Kenn” is almost certainly short for Kenny and you have been communicating with someone by that name. A hovering menu appears at the top right while you continue, offering you the chance to choose your app (email or text) whenever you please. You can do it now or wait until you stop typing, to preserve flow.

Halfway through your typing, the OS understands that this is probably an email message because your recent messages to Kenny were all email. The OS starts wrapping an email interface around your message as you type. It also automatically attaches your history of email back and forth to your new message, at the bottom.

The idea here is that you start working first, to maintain flow, and only later do you select the app. And by the time you need to select the app, the OS has done a 95% accurate job of doing it for you, so you simply proceed without ever actively selecting the app.

Does this work for all sorts of apps? I haven’t thought through every possibility, but I think so. Let’s see some more examples and I’ll tell you how the OS would guess the right app and auto-surround your work with the most relevant options.

If you type…             Then….

———————-              ——————————————————-

wea…                        Local weather info pops up

wel…                         If Wells Fargo is your bank, the sign-in page

                                 appears

eat                            A restaurant search app or search engine pops up

saf…                          Safari browser pops up

Goo…                        Google search box pops up

Stev…                        Either text or email (hover menu choice)

Ala…                           Open alarm clock

tw…                             Open twitter

My bagel is…               Hover menu for Facebook, Twitter, 

Pick up…                      Reminder app opens for your to-do list

Thurs…                        Your calendar pops up to show next Thursday

Stop saying I am reinventing the DOS operating system. DOS was dumb. The smartphone can see your work as part of a larger context. It will know what you need based on the situation. 

Smartphone users are experienced at typing because we do so much texting. We do it quickly and effortlessly. So my suggested blank-screen interface goes with our strengths instead of making you play a game of Where’s Waldo to find the right app before every task.

How did we get the app-centric terrible interfaces of today? I think it goes back to the dawn of personal computers. In those days it was no big deal to first pick the software (Word or Excel) and then spend a few hours within an app doing one task. There was no mental tax involved in switching apps because you only ever used one or two. So the app-first model became normal.

Fast-forward to the original Apple smartphone. The business model required an open market for software providers, and they each got their own little branding, navigation strategies, and real estate on your screen. It works great until you have fifty apps. The app-first interface is a total failure at this point. It works, but the cost is so high I am having legitimate thoughts about abandoning my smartphone for good. (I won’t pull the trigger, but why am I even considering it?)

If you don’t like the blank screen with a keyboard interface, here’s another idea that is better than current phones: Use faces for the interface.

By that I mean my home screen icons should be the faces of people I deal with most often. If the icon with Bob’s face shows a little “2” on it, I know I can click to see two messages from Bob, or perhaps I have one message and one meeting today with Bob, or one task to do for Bob. 

The main insight here is that humans reflexively arrange their tasks by the human that benefits from it. Sometimes the human is yourself, so your face is on the front page too. I doubt you can think of a task that does not relate to a specific face in your life.

And finally, a word to current makers of smartphone operating systems. If my OS interrupts me to ask about updating software, you failed. Please keep working on that until you get it right. Make your machine conform to my flow, not the other way around.

Speed is the New Intelligence

If I told you the government was planning some sort of new program to benefit its citizens, your initial reaction might be, “uh-oh.” Governments aren’t smart. And the last thing you want from a dumb entity is “more.”

Governments have smart people working for them. But when you sum up the parts of government, you get less than the whole, thanks to bureaucratic inefficiency, political in-fighting and whatnot. 

But what if that were about to change?

A smart friend told me recently that speed is the new intelligence, at least for some types of technology jobs. If you are hiring an interface designer, for example, the one that can generate and test several designs gets you further than the “genius” who takes months to produce the first design to test. When you can easily test alternatives, the ability to quickly generate new things to test is a substitute for intelligence. Will users on your website click the burnt orange button more often than the green one? With a tool such as Optimizly or Mixpanel you can test that hypothesis in minutes.

Smart people in the technology world no long believe they can think their way to success. Now the smart folks try whatever plan looks promising, test it, tweak it, and reiterate. In that environment, speed matters more than intelligence because no one has the psychic ability to pick a winner in advance. All you can do is try things that make sense and see what happens. Obviously this is easier to do when your product is software based.

That gets me back to the government. Over time, the practices of private industry infect the government. So we can expect the government to evolve to a mindset of trying something that makes sense, measuring results, and quickly iterating. President Obama essentially said that was the plan with Obamacare. It was an imperfect plan that the President said could improve in time. Did past presidents talk like that? It sounds a lot like a Silicon Valley start-up. You try something, see how you did, and adjust from there.

Obviously the government has always tried to measure its results and improve. But have we ever before launched a major program with known flaws and the intention of improving as we go? That seems new to me, at least in terms of degree. (Historians, please fact-check me in the comments. Wars don’t count.)

Thanks to the Internet, and Big Data, governments have powerful new tools. Now a government can try something, rapidly fix it on the fly, and end up with something good that was hard to predict. In other words — and this is new — a government could launch a program that citizens are skeptical about so long as it had a credible plan to measure results and tweak it to perfection.

Governments are dumb by design because any brilliance that slips into the system will be beaten down by the chorus of average minds and the distortions of political interests. But if speed can sometimes be a substitute for intelligence, things look hopeful. Because as governments become more software-based (Obamacare lives mostly as software, right?) you will see a world in which speed (plus testing and tweaking) are more important than intelligence. As a result, the perceived intelligence of governments should increase simply because the speed of iterating and testing will increase.

We are also seeing the measure-then-fix method play out in states with medical marijuana laws and doctor-assisted suicide laws. The states are seen as test beds. If things go well in the state of Washington, for example, that gives cover for the Federal government to follow their lead. And because we have fifty states, and each is capable of being its own test bed, we gain government speed through all of the individual tests that can be watched, tweaked, borrowed, and spread.

The biggest obstacle to a smarter government is the voters. It will take some time before a national politician can say some version of “We don’t know what will work, so our plan is to launch ugly and figure it out as we go.” In today’s world, that doesn’t sound leader-ish enough. But someday any other approach will appear backwards.

So here’s the summary:

1. Government programs are increasingly becoming software entities.

2. We can quickly measure, tweak, and adjust software.

3. In this environment, speed is more important than intelligence. (Or if you prefer, speed improves the intelligence you already have.)

Therefore, over time, governments will become far more effective. States will be understood as test beds for national programs. And new government programs will be launched with admitted flaws and a plan for iterating toward improvement. Obamacare might be seen as the first in this model.

That feels like good news to me. 

Reaction to Bad News

When something unexpected and bad happens to you, what is your initial reaction?

I hate to admit this, but my first reaction is usually excitement. Nothing good or interesting happens when everything is working as expected. In chaos we find opportunity, as the saying goes. When one door closes, another opens, or so they say. And of course we have all absorbed the wisdom that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. But are those old saying enough to make you actually feel good when things around you are going to hell?

I sometimes wonder if my excitement in the face of problems is a common reaction. I know I conceal my excitement when I’m surrounded by gloomy pessimists who think the world has ended. It feels rude to exhibit happiness within the context of something going totally wrong. It makes me wonder if other people are closet optimists too, politely hiding their glee when they encounter huge problems.

I don’t know what made me this way, but when things go wrong, it automatically triggers my creative energy and I suppose I enjoy that rush, as well as the freedom that comes with destruction.

When my computer started giving me illegitimate errors saying my copy of Windows is counterfeit, I learned there was literally no practical solution (in my unique case) short of wiping the hard drive. Bad news, right?

But it caused me to add a second monitor to my system just to hold the error message pop-ups. After a week with the second monitor my productivity was way up because I put my useful work on top of the error windows. So I came out ahead.

At the same time, the Windows errors were enough to push me to switch to an all-Apple shop, which I had been putting off. So that is good too. I’m almost ready to cut over.

When i lost my ability to speak for more than three years I did a ton of vocal and speech exercises trying to get my voice back. In the end, the solution was a new and risky surgical procedure. Once I healed, my voice was more functional than ever because I learned proper speaking technique. In the old days, no one could ever hear me speaking above background noise. Now I do it easily because it turns out that technique matters more than loudness in that situation. And since we live in a noisy world, my new vocal abilities are a huge benefit to me nearly every day.

I would be hard-pressed to come up with an example of bad news in my life that didn’t lead to something positive. But perhaps that is selective memory.

My curiosity today is about your reaction to bad news in your own life. Does it excite you or depress you?

Scott Adams

Twitter for Dilbert content: @Dilbert_Daily

Do Open Networks Boost Your Odds of Success?

Every time I hear of a study suggesting that doing (whatever) is important for success, I ask myself if the authors interpreted the correlations correctly.

And I rarely think they did.

Take for example this recent article describing how people with “open networks” are far more successful than those with “closed networks.” In this context, it means that the more new ideas you are exposed to, the more likely you are a success.

That interpretation makes perfect sense to me. Seeing lots of new ideas is probably a good thing in most situations.

But another interpretation is that the folks with the personalities and resources to succeed are more likely to also have open networks. It doesn’t necessarily mean one causes the other. 

The good people manufacturing mature products, such as concrete, probably don’t see many new ideas. And I would guess they don’t attract the world’s most ambitious and talented employees to their industry because the upside potential feels limited. 

My ambitious personality ruled out any field with no upside potential. So I cartoon, write, and work on my Internet start-up. Each of those career choices benefit from open networks and a high flow of new ideas. I choose my projects for their upside potential; the open networks just come with the deal.

To be fair, the article says open networks “predict” success as opposed to causing it. (“Predict” sounds like language used by the people doing the studies and it does not assume causation.) But the article hints at causation because it treats the correlation as important.

My observation is that smart people tend to gravitate toward jobs that have a lot of new ideas swirling around. When smart people succeed at higher rates than others, do we need to drill too deeply to understand why?

Scott Adams

Twitter: @ScottAdamsSays

Adams Law of Slow-Moving Disasters - update

Regular readers know about my law of slow-moving disasters. The idea is that society always avoids global disasters that are slow-moving because we rise to the challenge even when it seems impossible.

Peak oil didn’t happen

Y2K was a big nothing

Malthus was wrong that we would run out of food

And so on…

One of our slow-moving disaster situations is the growing resistance to antibiotics. That’s a situation that looked like it could kick humanity’s ass. But science has once again risen to the challenge, or so it seems. See this story about new breakthroughs.

From Magic to Science (sort of)

When I young and trying to figure out the world, nearly every piece of popular “advice” people offered was complete bullshit. Let’s look at a few.

Advice is Useful: I used to think there was such a thing as “advice” that existed as little nuggets of valuable knowledge. If you were lucky enough to have lots of these advice nuggets you could piece them together and create and awesome plan that was likely to pay off.

As an adult, I can see that generic advice for specific individuals almost never makes sense. Every situation is unique. If I taught you everything I know it would not help you become the next Dilbert cartoonist. The environment changed since I made my run. And your mix of natural talents is unlikely to be similar to mine.

You’re probably thinking that some sorts of advice are universally applicable, such as the idea that hard work produces good results. But if I look around me, two of my richest friends work the fewest hours because they picked careers that allowed that to happen. I know rich people who have broken laws, become drug users, been dishonest, you name it. If you throw darts at a board with good and bad advice ranging from “get good grades in school” to “knock up your high school girlfriend” I can find examples of folks who made every situation work.

What do all successful people have in common? Beats me. I haven’t seen a correlation. I’ve seen lots of business plans in the past year and one of the best was from a guy that had a hard time getting through high school.  The entrepreneurs with advanced degrees are pushing science forward and taking their 10% chance of commercializing products that can change the world. The high school graduate looked at the legal weed business and said, “I can do a lot of things wrong and still make money as a legal grower because the margins are so high.” Which entrepreneur do you bet on? If you think you know the answer, you don’t understand the nature of start-ups.

Be Yourself: You used to hear the “be yourself” advice a lot. Apparently there is some sort of “real” you buried beneath the layers of social training. And that personality you keep hiding is amazing. The reality of course is that there is no real you anywhere. You are just a coincidental outcome of nature plus environment. (Optionally, add God to the mix if you like.)  If you were dumb enough to act “yourself” you would be a horrible friend. You’d be naked, unwashed, and rude. And you’d be masturbating in public way too much. So do us all a favor and keep your genuine self a secret, please.

Follow Your Passion: I won’t belabor this point because you’ve read my thoughts on this. Again, most of my rich and successful friends exhibit nothing that looks like passion. They had talent and energy and a desire to do whatever worked. Passion is magical thinking. Passion can’t be managed and it can’t be defined. And in my experience, passion is what you get when something works. When I was a kid, I was passionate about playing in the NBA. So were a million other kids. Passion isn’t a substitute for being tall, smart, or anything else. In fact, passion is the one thing you can remove from most success stories and get exactly the same result. In my case, Dilbert was one of several dozen business ideas I’ve tried. It worked because the timing was right, not because of my passion. I had about equal interest in everything I tried.

Willpower: I write about willpower as if it is real. But that’s a limitation of language. Science says you can manage your willpower by how much sugar you eat. And science says willpower is a limited resource during any given day.

The reality is that willpower is like the horizon. You can see it and talk about it, but in the end it is a perception and not something that exists in the physical world. My view is that we’re all particles bumping around according to some mysterious rules of physics. When your hunger is high, you eat. When it isn’t, other activities are more inviting. There is no willpower; there are just options and for a variety of rational an irrational “reasons” we choose one over the other. The end.

Have Goals: I wrote a whole book on why goals are for losers. I won’t repeat it here. The summary is that goals are perfectly harmless and sometimes helpful for simple situations, such as getting a good grade on a test. But when planning your multi-decade future, everything is an unknown, so your best bet is a system that improves your odds in some general way.

You Can Pick Winners: We used to think we could look at a business plan and use our impressive intellects to pick winners out of the pack. Now we know it can’t be done except probably by chance. There are always too many unknowns, and luck is always the biggest factor among the worthy candidates for success.

Fast Forward to 2015…

Today we have replaced a lot of the magical thinking of old with something that looks a lot more like science, at least in terms of testing ideas and seeing how they turn out, and not believing in things that can’t be seen or measured. Now you see more of this sort of talk…

Systems vs. Goals: Develop a system that improves your value in the world in a general way and make it easier for luck to find you.

Habit: You can rewire your brain by repetition and reward. So rewire your brain in ways that can improve your odds of success.

Manage Willpower: Willpower isn’t real in the old-timey sense that we can scrunch our foreheads and generate more of it when needed so long as our parents raised us right. But it does seem true, according to studies, that using your so-called willpower in one situation leaves you less self-restraint for the next, in any given day. So the modern view is that you manage willpower like a limited resource instead of a super power you can summon on command.

No One Can Pick Winners: Today, investors in the start-up world understand that no one is smart enough to consistently pick winners. You can’t think your way to success. Sure, you can weed out the totally-bad business ideas from the rest, but within the universe of plausible start-ups, no one is good at picking winners. So the scientific workaround for that is…

A-B testing: You keep trying different things in rapid succession and track how users respond.

Pivot: Start-ups start with one idea and quickly pivot to another if the first doesn’t work out. Your odds of success are still low with each idea, but every attempt betters your skillset and your odds.

I’m telling an incomplete story here, but the general idea is that a scientific mindset is slowly replacing the magical thinking about “success” that dominated my generation.

Scott Adams

Here’s a link to the paperback of How to Fail Almost Everything And Still Win Big

Co-founder of CalendarTree.com     

Twitter Dilbert: @Dilbert_Daily

Twitter for Scott: @ScottAdamsSays