Chapter 15 My Speaking Career

Here's an example of how useful it is to have a smart friend. When I was a few years into my cartooning career, a Canadian woman called and asked if I would give a speech to an organization of petroleum engineers in Calgary. I said I didn't do that sort of work, but she persisted, saying the organization had asked for me, specifically, and that there would be a healthy payment involved. I continued to balk because I had very little flexibility in my schedule. At that point, I was still working my full-time job at Pacific Bell and creating Dilbert before and after work, plus on weekends. Traveling to Canada just wasn't a practical option.

The Canadian woman suggested I give her a price for my services that would make it worthwhile for me. If my price was too high, at least she could take it back to her organization and say she tried. She made it sound as if I would be doing her a favor to come up with a price for something I didn't want to do.

But how does one come up with a price for giving a speech? I had no idea where to start. So I did what anyone in that situation would do: I sought out a friend who might have a template for this sort of thing.

At the time, Dilbert was syndicated by an organization within United Media, a large licensing and syndication business headquartered in New York City. I figured correctly that someone in that hierarchy would have experience with professional speaking. I called a Senior Vice President who had once been a bestselling author and had decades of experience that made him far more qualified than I was for this sort of topic.

I put the question to him: "What should I say is my price for speaking?" I told him that I would be perfectly happy to price myself out of the job. He said, "Ask for five thousand dollars. If they say no, you avoid a trip to Canada." I laughed at his suggestion, knowing that I wasn't worth that kind of money. But I had my plan. I practiced saying "five thousand dollars" until I thought I could say it without laughing. I called back my Canadian contact. That conversation went like this:

Canadian: "Did you come up with a price?"

Me: "Yes ... five thousand dollars."

Canadian: "Okay, and we'll also pay for your first-class travel and hotel."

I flew to Canada and gave a speech.

As time went by and Dilbert became more well-known, more speaking requests flowed in, often several per day. I raised my price to $10,000. The requests kept coming. I tried $15,000. The requests accelerated. By the time I got to $25,000, the speakers bureaus started to see me as a source of bigger commissions and advised me to raise my price to $35,000, then $45,000. The largest offer I ever turned down because of a scheduling conflict was $100,000 to speak for an hour on any topic I wanted.

All of this was possible because I had access to a smart friend who told me how to find the simple entry point into the speaking circuit. All I needed to do was overprice myself and see what happened. As simple as that sounds in retrospect, I doubt I would have taken that path on my own. I think I would have politely declined the invitation.

It's a cliché that who you know is helpful for success. What is less obvious is that you don't need to know CEOs and billionaires. Sometimes you just need a friend who knows different things than you do. And you can always find one of those.

Chapter 16 My Voice Problem Gets a Name

Six months after losing my voice back in 2005, I still didn't know what the source of the problem was. It was immensely frustrating. I don't mind a fair fight, but this invisible, nameless problem was kicking my ass, and I didn't even know which direction to punch back. I needed a name for my condition. I figured if I knew its name, that would lead me down the trail for a cure.

But how could I find the name for a condition that was unfamiliar to two ear-nose-throat doctors, two voice specialists, a psychologist, a neurologist, and my general practitioner? There was only one creature smarter than all those doctors put together: the Internet. (Yes, it's a creature, okay?)

I opened a Google search box and tried a variety of voice-related keywords. I found nothing useful. My searches were too broad. Then something interesting happened. It's a phenomenon that people in creative jobs experience often, but it might sound unfamiliar to everyone else. Suddenly, out of nowhere, two totally unrelated thoughts—separated by topic, time, and distance—came together in my head. For some reason, I had a spontaneous memory of the problem with my drawing hand that I had experienced several years earlier. In that case, I lost control of my pinky. Now I was losing control of my voice. Could the two problems be related?

I entered the search string "voice dystonia" because my hand problem was called a focal dystonia. Bingo. The search popped up a video of a patient who had something called spasmodic dysphonia, a condition in which the vocal cords clench involuntarily when making certain sounds. I played the video and recognized my exact voice pattern—broken words and clipped syllables—coming out of the patient in the video. Now I had its name: spasmodic dysphonia, which I discovered is often associated with other forms of dystonia. As I learned with further research, it's common for someone who has one type of dystonia to get another. (Luckily, it doesn't tend to progress beyond that.)

My secret assassin had a name, and now I knew it. It felt like a turning point.

I printed out a description of spasmodic dysphonia and took it to my doctor. He referred me back to one of my ear-nose-throat doctors, who in turn referred me to a doctor I hadn't yet seen in the Kaiser healthcare system. She turned out to be an expert in that exact condition. Within ten seconds of opening my mouth in her office, the doctor confirmed the diagnosis. I had a classic case.

"What's the cure?" I whispered.

"There is none," she replied.

But that isn't what I heard. The optimist in me translated the gloomy news as "Scott, you will be the first person in the world to be cured of spasmodic dysphonia." And I decided that after I cured myself, somehow, someway, I would spread the word to others. I wouldn't be satisfied simply escaping from my prison of silence; I was planning to escape, free the other inmates, shoot the warden, and burn down the prison.

Sometimes I get that way.

It's a surprisingly useful frame of mind.

Chapter 17 The Voice Solution That Didn't Work

The standard treatment for spasmodic dysphonia involves a doctor pushing a needle filled with Botulinum toxin (better known by its trade name Botox) through the front of the patient's neck and hoping it finds the vocal cord region on the back side of the throat. Doctors who give the shot use a mixture of experience, guesswork, and electronics to find the right dose and the right place to put it. If all goes well, a patient's voice can normalize after a few weeks and stay functional for several weeks until the Botox wears off. Then you repeat. It's a creepy process because the needle is so thick you need an initial shot of local anesthetics just to keep you from going through the roof when the second needle goes in. It's not a fun day.

I tried the Botox treatments for a few months. It worked well enough to say, "I do" when I got married to Shelly, which was great, but it wore off in a few weeks. Subsequent shots were not nearly as effective. The problem is that no two shots were ever the same, in part because you never knew how much Botox was still in your system, and partly because the shot never hits exactly the same place twice. And the dose is always either ramping up or wearing off. It only hits the right dose level by accident for a week or so on the way up or down.

The bigger issue for me was that the Botox masked the impact of any other type of treatment I might want to experiment with. I made the decision to stop the Botox and give myself a chance to find a lasting fix.

With the Botox, I knew I could find a way to talk almost normally some of the time. Without it, I was pretty much shut off from the world of the living. I was taking a big swing at a ball I couldn't even see.

Chapter 18 Recognizing Your Talents and Knowing When to Quit

If you have world-class talent—for anything—you probably know it. In fact, your parents probably dragged you from place to place when you were young to develop your skill. But world-class talent is such an exception that I prefer ignoring it for this book. I'm going to focus on ordinary talents and combinations of ordinary talents that sum up to something extraordinary. In the case of ordinary talent, how do you know which of your various skills can be added together to get something useful? It's a vital question because you want to put your focus where it makes a real difference.

One helpful rule of thumb for knowing where you might have a little extra talent is to consider what you were obsessively doing before you were ten years old. There's a strong connection between what interests you and what you're good at. People are naturally drawn to the things they feel comfortable doing, and comfort is a marker for talent.

In my case, I was doodling and drawing obsessively from the time I could pick up a crayon. I never became a talented artist, but my high level of interest in drawing foreshadowed my career decades later. Granted, most kids enjoy art, and some enjoy it a lot more than others. But I was off the chart. I doodled all through my classes in school. I drew in the dirt with sticks. I drew in the snow. For me, drawing was more of a compulsion than a choice. Childhood compulsions aren't a guarantee of future talent. But my unscientific observation is that people are born wired for certain preferences. Those preferences drive behavior, and that's what can make a person willing to practice a skill. A study that got a lot of attention in the past few years involved the discovery that becoming an "expert" at just about anything requires 10,000 hours of disciplined practice.1 Author Malcolm Gladwell wrote about it in his book 'Outliers'. Few people will put in that kind of practice for one skill. But early obsessions can predict which skills a kid might someday be good at.

Another clue to talent involves tolerance for risk. When I was in grade school, I often drew humorously inappropriate comics involving my teachers and fellow students. I would show them to classmates, and I enjoyed making them laugh, all the while knowing that getting caught by an authority figure meant a serious penalty. I was willing to take a significant personal risk for my so-called art, and this was in sharp contrast to my otherwise risk-averse lifestyle. People generally only accept outsized risk when they expect big payoffs. Drawing inappropriate comics made me happy. To me, it was worth the risk.

I owned a very used, very old motorcycle when I was a teen. I paid $150 from my earnings as an entrepreneurial mower of lawns, shoveler of show, and a farmer's incompetent assistant. The motorcycle was dangerous, of course, especially in the hands of a teen. I laid it down a few times on the local back roads. On a number of occasions, I barely missed deer, angry dogs, and other motorists. One day I was barreling across a field and drove the front wheel into a woodchuck hole, thus taking flight and miraculously landing on nothing hard in a field littered with large rocks. I enjoyed having a motorcycle, but it wasn't an obsession for me. And eventually I concluded that it wasn't worth the risk. Clearly I was not destined to be a motorcycle daredevil or motocross star. I wasn't willing to accept a high risk in return for the joy of riding. But when it came to comics, I eagerly accepted the risk of expulsion and great bodily harm that comes with insulting larger kids. My risk profile predicted my future.

When you hear stories about famous actors as kids, one of the patterns you notice is that before they were stars, they were staging plays in their living rooms and backyards. That's gutsy for a kid. A child who eagerly accepts the risk of embarrassment in front of a crowd—even a friendly crowd—probably has some talent for entertaining.

Consider the biographies of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. As young men, both took legal risks in the field of technology. Bill Gates famously found ways to hone his technical skills by stealing time on a mainframe.2. Jobs' and Wozniak's first product involved selling technology that allowed people to steal long distance phone calls. Where there is a tolerance for risk, there is often talent.

Childhood obsessions and tolerance for risk are only rough guides to talent at best. As you grow and acquire more talents, your potential paths for success multiply quickly. That makes it extra hard to know which possibility among many would put you in a position of competitive advantage. Should you pursue a career that uses your knowledge of photography and software, or something that uses your public speaking skills and your gift for writing? There's no way to be completely sure which path will be most fruitful.

The smartest system for discerning your best path to success involves trying lots of different things—sampling, if you will. For entrepreneurial ventures, it might mean quickly bailing out if things don't come together quickly.

That approach might conflict with the advice you've heard all your life—that sticking with something, no matter the obstacles, is important to success. Indeed, most successful people had to chew through a wall at some point. Overcoming obstacles is normally an unavoidable part of the process. But you also need to know when to quit. Persistence is useful, but there's no point being an idiot about it.

My guideline for deciding when to quit is informed by a lifetime of trying dozens of business ideas, most of them failures. I've also carefully observed others struggling with the stay-or-quit decision. There have been times I stuck with bad ideas for far too long out of a misguided sense that persistence is a virtue. The pattern I noticed was this: Things that will someday work out well start out well. Things that will never work start out bad and stay that way. What you rarely see is a stillborn failure that transmogrifies into a stellar success. Small successes can grow into big ones, but failures rarely grow into successes.

To illustrate my point, consider the history of cell phones. Early cell phones had bad reception all the time. They dropped calls. They had few features. They were expensive. They didn't fit in your pocket. Yet cell phones were successful, at least in terms of demand, on day one. Despite the many flaws with cell phones—flaws that lasted decades—demand started brisk and stayed strong. The poor quality of the product made no difference. Cell phones started as a small success and grew.

Fax machines followed a similar path. The early fax machines were slow and spectacularly unreliable. They would eat your original and only sometimes deliver a legible copy to the other machine. Still, fax machines had demand from the beginning and grew until the age of computers rendered them less necessary.

The first personal computers were slow, expensive, non-intuitive, and crash-prone. And still the demand was explosive. In each of the examples, the quality of the early products was a poor predictor of success. The predictor is that customers were clamoring for the bad versions of the product before the good versions were even invented. It's as if a future success leaves bread crumbs that are visible in the present.

When FOX launched The Simpsons in 1989, it was a national phenomenon from day one. Everywhere I went, the topic of the Simpsons came up: "Did you see it?" Interestingly, as much as The Simpsons is rebroadcast in syndication, you won't often see that first season repeated. The reason, I assume, based on clips I've seen, is that by today's standards it would be judged to be embarrassingly bad. The original art looked amateurish, and the writing was violent, sophomoric slapstick. Compared to today, the first Simpsons season was an awful product. Again, the quality didn't predict success. The better predictor is that The Simpsons was an immediate hit despite its surface quality. It had the X-factor. In time, it grew to be one of the most important, creative, and best shows of all time.

My experience with Dilbert followed the same pattern. I submitted my original samples of Dilbert to several comic syndication companies in 1988. United Media offered me a contract and successfully sold it into a few dozen newspapers at its launch in 1989. A year later, sales to newspapers stalled, and United Media turned its attention to other comic properties. Over the next five years, I found a way to generate more interest in Dilbert by writing books and exploiting the Internet. The turning point for Dilbert came in 1993 after I started printing my email address in the margins of the strip. It was the first time I could see unfiltered opinions about my work. Until then, I'd relied on the opinions of friends and business associates, which had limited value because that group of folks rarely offered criticism. But WOW, the general public doesn't hold back. They were savage about my art skills—no surprise—and that was just the tip of the hateberg. But I noticed a consistent theme that held for both the fans and the haters: They all preferred the comics in which Dilbert was in the office. So I changed the focus of the strip to the workplace, and that turned out to be the spark in the gasoline.

But the thing that predicted Dilbert's success in year one is that it quickly gained a small but enthusiastic following. My best estimate, based on shaky anecdotal evidence, is that 98 percent of newspaper readers initially disliked Dilbert, but 2 percent thought it was one of the best comics in the paper despite all objective evidence to the contrary. In other words, it had the X-factor on day one. And this brings me to a lesson I learned in Hollywood, or at least near Hollywood.

In the late nineties, I spent some time in the Los Angeles area trying to get a Dilbert TV pilot off the ground. The first attempt, which failed miserably, involved live actors portraying the Dilbert characters. During that process, I got to observe a test audience watch the pilot and register their opinions in real time. Moving graphs appeared on monitors so we could see the ebb and flow of the audience's enjoyment at each point in the show. I was chatting with the television executive in charge of the project and asked what the cut-off was for an acceptable test audience response. The executive explained that for television shows, the best predictor is not the average response. Averages don't mean much for entertainment products. What you're looking for is an unusually strong reaction from a subset of the public, even if the majority hates it. The Dilbert pilot got an okay response from the test audience, but no one seemed enthusiastic. The project went no further. But during the process, I learned enough about making a television show that the next attempt went far better. The animated Dilbert show ran for two half-seasons on the now-defunct UPN and got decent ratings for that tiny network. When that show got cancelled for reasons I describe later in this book, I emerged with just enough new skills, knowledge, and contacts that my odds of someday getting a Dilbert movie made are far higher. I've been trying and failing to get a Dilbert movie made for about twenty-five years. Every failure so far has been because of some freakish intersection of bad luck. But bad luck doesn't have the option of being that consistent forever. I'll get it done unless I die first.

Back to my point, the Enthusiasm Model, if I may call it that, is a bit like the X-factor. It's the elusive and hard-to-predict quality of a thing that makes some percentage of the public nuts about it. When the X-factor is present, the public—or some subset of it—picks up on it right away. For the excited few, the normal notions of what constitutes quality don't apply. In time, the products that inspire excitement typically evolve to have quality, too. Quality is one of the luxuries you can afford when the marketplace is spraying money in your direction and you have time to tinker.

Consider the first iPhone. The first version was a mess, yet it was greeted with an almost feverish enthusiasm. That enthusiasm and the enormous sales that followed funded improvements until the product became superb.

One of the best ways to detect the X-factor is to watch what customers do about your idea or product, not what they say. People tend to say what they think you want to hear, or what they think will cause the least pain. What people do is far more honest. For example, with comics, a good test of potential is whether people stick the comic to the refrigerator, post it, email it to friends, put it on a blog page, or do anything else active.

You might be tempted to think that sometimes an idea with no X-factor and no enthusiastic fans can gain those qualities over time. I'm sure it's happened, but I can't think of an example in my life. It's generally true that if no one is excited about your art/product/idea in the beginning, they never will be.

If the first commercial version of your work excites no one to action, it's time to move on to something different. Don't be fooled by the opinions of friends and family. They're all liars.

If your work inspires some excitement and some action from customers, get ready to chew through some walls. You might have something worth fighting for.

Chapter 19 Is Practice Your Thing?

One day, a friend's three-year-old was playing around on our tennis court¶ along with a bunch of teenagers. Some kids were shooting baskets at the hoop on one end. A few kids were firing tennis balls at each other, and others were slapping volleyballs around. But the three-year-old was intensely practicing the art of hitting a tennis ball. He would bounce it once, lock his eyes on it, and swing the racket. He hit the ball a lot more often than you'd expect for a three-year-old, but that wasn't the interesting part. I watched for several minutes as he worked alone, ignoring older kids around him. He's an otherwise social kid, but this simple task of hitting a tennis ball captured his focus. He hit it again and again and again.

Then it got stranger. I decided to give him an impromptu lesson on the proper way to swing a racket. Remember, he's three. He barely had language skills. I asked for the racket, saying I wanted to show him how to swing, and amazingly—for a three-year-old—he handed it over. He looked at me and absorbed every word I said. I demonstrated how to hold the racket and how to swing. He tried it and with some coaching duplicated my swing, more or less. He was fully coachable at the age of three. Some adults—maybe most—never have that capability. As I walked away, he went back to his solitary practice amid a foaming sea of teenagers. Again. Again. Again.

I know this kid well, and tennis is the fourth or fifth sport he's picked up the same way. He watches how it's done, on television or in person, then he imitates and practices endlessly. I've never seen him get bored while practicing.

There's no denying the importance of practice. The hard part is figuring out what to practice.

When I was a kid, I spent countless bored hours in my bedroom on winter nights trying to spin a basketball on one finger. Eventually I mastered that skill only to later learn that it has no economic value. In a similar vein, none of my past bosses have ever been impressed with my ability to juggle up to three objects for as long as fifteen seconds, or to play Ping-Pong left-handed. I can also flip a pen in the air with one hand while swiping my other hand under it just as it takes off—which looks cooler than it sounds—then I catch it cleanly after a full rotation. These and other skills have not served me well. It matters what you practice.

My observation is that some people are born with a natural impulse to practice things while others find mindless repetition without immediate reward to be a form of torture. Whichever camp you're in, it probably won't change. It's naïve to expect the average person to embrace endless practice in pursuit of long-term success. It makes more sense to craft a life plan for yourself that embraces your natural inclinations, assuming you're not a cannibal. Most natural inclinations have some sort of economic value if you channel them right.

A good start for deciding where to spend your time is an honest assessment of your ability to practice. If you're not a natural "practicer," don't waste time pursuing a strategy that requires it. You know you won't be a concert pianist or a point guard in the NBA. That's not necessarily a bad thing. You're not doomed to mediocrity. You simply need to pick a life strategy that rewards novelty-seeking more than mindless repetition. For example, you might want to be an architect, designer, home builder, computer programmer, entrepreneur, website designer, or even doctor.

Those professions all require disciplined study, but every class will be different. And later in your career, all your projects are likely to be unique. Your skills will increase with experience, which is the more fun cousin of practice. Practice involves putting your consciousness in suspended animation. Practicing is not living. But when you build your skills through an ever-changing sequence of experiences, you're alive.

¶Yes, I do realize that mentioning the tennis court at my house makes me sound like a gigantic douchebag, but I couldn't figure out how to tell the story in a less douchey way.

Chapter 20 Managing Your Odds for Success

The primary purpose of schools is to prepare kids for success in adulthood. That's why it seems odd to me that schools don't have required courses on the systems and practices of successful people. Success isn't magic; it's generally the product of picking a good system and following it until luck finds you. Unfortunately, schools barely have the resources to teach basic coursework. Students are on their own to figure out the best systems for success.

If we can't count on schools to teach kids the systems of success, how else will people learn those important skills? The children of successful people probably learn by observation and parental coaching. But most people are not born to highly successful parents. The average kid spends almost no time around highly successful people, and certainly not during the workday when those successful people are applying their methods. The young are intentionally insulated from the adult world of work. At best, kids see the television and movie versions of how to succeed, and that isn't much help.

Books about success can be somewhat useful. But for marketing reasons, a typical book is focused on a single topic to make it easier to sell—and packed with filler to get the page count up. No one has time to sort through that much filler.

When I speak to young people on the topic of success, as I often do, I tell them there's a formula for it. You can manipulate your odds of success by how you choose to fill out the variables in the formula. The formula, roughly speaking, is that every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success.

The Success Formula: Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success.

Notice I didn't say anything about the level of proficiency you need to achieve for each skill. I didn't mention anything about excellence or being world-class. The idea is that you can raise your market value by being merely good—not extraordinary—at more than one skill.

In California, for example, having one common occupational skill plus fluency in Spanish puts you at the head of the line for many types of jobs. If you're also a skilled public speaker (good but not great) and you know your way around a PowerPoint presentation, you have a good chance of running your organization. To put the Success Formula into its simplest form:

Good + Good > Excellent

Success-wise, you're better off being good at two complementary skills than to be excellent at one. I'm ignoring the outlier possibility that you might be one of the best performers in the world at some skill or another. That can obviously be valuable, too. But realistically, you wouldn't be reading this book if you could throw a baseball a hundred miles per hour or compose hit songs in your head.

When I say each skill you acquire will double your odds of success, that's a useful simplification. Obviously, some skills are more valuable than others, and the twelfth skill you acquire might have less value than each of the first eleven. But if you think of each skill in terms of doubling your chances of success, it will steer your actions more effectively than if you assume the benefit of learning a new skill will get lost in the rounding. Logically, you might think it would make more sense to either have an accurate formula for success or none at all. But that's not how our brains are wired. Sometimes, an entirely inaccurate formula is a handy way to move you in the right direction—if it offers the benefit of simplicity. I realize that's not an obvious point, so allow me to give you an example.

A handy trick you'll learn from résumé writing experts is to ask yourself if there are any words in your first draft that you would be willing to remove for $100 each. Here's the simple formula:

Deleting Each Unnecessary Word = $100

When you apply the formula to your résumé, you surprise yourself by how well the formula helps you prune your writing to its most essential form. It doesn't matter that the $100 figure is arbitrary and that some words you remove are more valuable than others. What matters is that the formula steers your behavior in the right direction. As is often the case, simplicity trumps accuracy. The $100 in this case is not only inaccurate, it's entirely imaginary. And it still works.

Likewise, I think it's important to think of each new skill you acquire as doubling your odds of success. In a literal sense, it's no more accurate than the imaginary $100 per deleted word on your résumé, but it still helps guide your behavior in a productive direction. If I told you that taking a class in website design during your evenings might double your odds of career success, the thought would increase the odds that you will act. If instead I only offer you a vague opinion that acquiring new skills is beneficial, you won't feel particularly motivated. When you accept without necessarily believing that each new skill doubles your odds of success, you effectively hack (trick) your brain to be more proactive in your pursuit of success. Looking at the familiar in new ways can change your behavior even when the new point of view focuses on the imaginary.

I'm a perfect example of the power of leveraging multiple mediocre skills. I'm a rich and famous cartoonist who doesn't draw well. At social gatherings, I'm usually not the funniest person in the room. My writing skills are good, not great. But what I have that most artists and cartoonists do not have is years of corporate business experience plus an MBA from Berkeley's Haas School of Business. In the early years of Dilbert, my business experience served as immediate fodder for the comic. Eventually I discovered that my business skills were essential in navigating Dilbert from a cult hit to a household name. My combined mediocre skills are worth far more than the sum of the parts. If you think extraordinary talent and a maniacal pursuit of excellence are necessary for success, I say that's just one approach and probably the hardest. When it comes to skills, quantity often beats quality.

This would be a good time to tell you what kind of student I was in Berkeley's MBA program. In my first semester, I often had the lowest grades in the class. I worked hard and rose to scholastic mediocrity through brute force. In the end, all that mattered is that I learned skills that complemented my other meager talents.

When I combined my meager business skills with my bad art skills and my fairly ordinary writing talent, the mixture was powerful. With each new skill, my odds of success increased substantially. But there was still one more skill I acquired in my day job at Pacific Bell that ended up mattering a lot: I knew how to use the Internet before most people had even heard of it.

My day job at Pacific Bell involved demonstrating a new thing called the World Wide Web, later known as the Internet, to potential customers. I saw the possibilities early, and when Dilbert stalled in newspaper sales, I suggested moving it to the Internet to generate more exposure, as sort of a back-door marketing plan. I wanted people to read Dilbert online, then request it in their local newspapers. And that's what happened. Dilbert was the first syndicated comic to run for free on the Internet, although in the beginning it ran a week behind newspapers. Today it's hard to imagine that it ever seemed a huge risk to put Dilbert on the Internet for free. There were concerns that piracy would go through the roof (it did) and that newspapers would see the Internet as competition and cancel (none did). In the days when more exposure was a good thing, the piracy helped far more than it hurt.

My early comfort with technology helped me in another big way, too. I was the first syndicated cartoonist to include my email address in every strip. Email was still a geeky novelty in the early nineties, and some of my business associates worried that client newspapers would consider my email address a form of advertisement. But my business training told me I needed to open a direct channel to my customers and modify my product based on their feedback. That's exactly what I did,** making it a workplace-focused strip as readers requested. From there, Dilbert took off.

Recapping my skill set: I have poor art skills, mediocre business skills, good but not great writing talent, and an early knowledge of the Internet. And I have a good but not great sense of humor. I'm like one big mediocre soup. None of my skills are world-class, but when my mediocre skills are combined, they become a powerful market force.

My sixteen years in corporate America added half-a-dozen other useful skills to the mix as well. I managed people, did contract negotiations, made commercial loans, wrote business plans, designed software, managed projects, developed systems to track performance, contributed to technology strategies, and more. I took company-paid classes in public speaking, time management, managing difficult people, listening, business writing, and lots of other useful topics. During my corporate career, I finished my MBA classes in the evening while working full time. I was a learning machine. If I thought something might someday be useful, I tried to grasp at least the basics. In my cartooning career, I've used almost every skill I learned in the business world.

Another huge advantage of learning as much as you can in different fields is that the more concepts you understand, the easier it is to learn new ones. Imagine explaining to an extraterrestrial visitor the concept of a horse. It would take some time. If the next thing you tried to explain was the concept of a zebra, the conversation would be shorter. You would simply point out that a zebra is a lot like a horse but with black and white stripes. Everything you learn becomes a shortcut for understanding something else.

One of my lifelong practices involves reading about world events every day, sometimes several times a day. Years ago, that meant reading a newspaper before work. Now it usually involves checking X whenever I have a minute or two of downtime. The great thing about reading diverse perspectives from the fields of business, health, science, technology, politics, and more is that you automatically see patterns in the world and develop mental hooks upon which you can hang future knowledge. The formula for knowledge looks something like this:

The Knowledge Formula: The More You Know, the More You Can Know.

If your experience of reading the news is that it's always boring, you're doing it wrong. The simple entry point for developing a news-reading habit is that you only read the topics that interest you, no matter how trivial they might be. That effectively trains you to enjoy the time you spend reading the news—even if the only thing you look at involves celebrity scandals and sports. In time, your happy experience reading the news will make you want to enjoy it longer. You'll start sampling topics that wouldn't have interested you before. At first, perhaps you'll do little more than skim the headlines. But in time, you'll find yourself drawn in. It will feel easy and natural—the sign of a good system. If I had suggested starting every morning by reading the hard news in The Wall Street Journal, it would feel daunting for many people, and it's unlikely you would follow through. A smarter approach is to think of learning as a system in which you continuously expose yourself to new topics, primarily the ones you find interesting.

My one caution about reading the news every day is that it can be a huge downer if you pick the wrong topics. Personally, I try to avoid stories involving tragic events and concentrate on the more hopeful topics in science, technology, and business. I don't ignore bad news, but I don't dwell on it. The more time you spend exposing yourself to bad news, the more it will weigh on you and sap your energy. I prefer stories about breakthroughs in green technology, even knowing that 99 percent of those stories are pure bullshit. I don't read the news to find truth, as that would be a foolish waste of time. I read the news to broaden my exposure to new topics and patterns that make my brain more efficient in general and to enjoy myself because learning interesting things increases my energy and makes me feel optimistic. Don't think of the news as information. Think of it as a source of energy.

**Changing art to satisfy customers probably makes real artists ill just thinking about it. I considered myself an entrepreneur, not an artist, so I had no trouble being flexible with my so-called art.