Chapter 4 Some of My Many Failures in Summary Form
I'm delighted to admit that I've failed at more challenges than anyone I know. There's a non-zero chance that reading this book will set you on the path of your own magnificent screw-ups and cavernous disappointments. You're welcome! And if I forgot to mention it earlier, that's exactly where you want to be—steeped to your eyebrows in failure. It's a good place to be because failure is where success likes to hide in plain sight. Everything you want out of life is in that huge, bubbling vat of failure. The trick is to get the good stuff out.
If success were easy, everyone would have it. It takes effort. That fact works to your advantage because it keeps lazy people out of the game. And don't worry if you're lazy, too. Much of this book involves tricks for ramping up your energy without much effort. In fact, the process of simply reading this book might give you a little boost of optimism. I designed it to do just that. So you're already moving in the right direction.
I'm an optimist by nature or perhaps by upbringing—it's hard to know where one leaves off and the other begins—but whatever the cause, I've long seen failure as a tool, not an outcome. I believe that viewing the world in that way can be useful for you, too.
Nietzsche famously said, "What doesn't kill us makes us stronger." It sounds clever, but it's a loser philosophy. I don't want my failures to simply make me stronger,* which I interpret as making me better able to survive future challenges. Becoming stronger is obviously a good thing, but it's only barely optimistic. I do want my failures to make me stronger, of course, but I also want to become smarter, more talented, better networked, healthier, and more energized. If I find a cow turd on my front steps, I'm not satisfied knowing that I'll be mentally prepared to find some future cow turd. I want to shovel that turd onto my garden and hope the cow returns every week so I never have to buy fertilizer again†. Failure is a resource that can be managed.
Prior to launching the Dilbert comic and after, I failed at a long series of day jobs and entrepreneurial adventures. Here's a quick listing of the worst ones. I'm probably forgetting a dozen or so. I include this section because successful people generally gloss over their most aromatic failures, which leaves the impression they have some magic you don't. When you're done reading this list, you won't have that delusion about me, and that's the point. Success is entirely accessible even if you happen to be a huge screw-up 95 percent of the time.
My Favorite Failures:
Velcro™ Rosin Bag Invention: In the seventies, tennis players sometimes used rosin bags to keep their racket hands less sweaty. In college I built a prototype of a rosin bag that attached to a Velcro strip on tennis shorts so it would always be available when needed. My lawyer told me it wasn't patent-worthy because it was simply a combination of two existing products. I approached some sporting goods companies and got nothing but form letter rejections. I dropped the idea. But in the process, I learned a valuable lesson: Good ideas have no value because the world already has too many of them. The market rewards execution, not ideas. From that point on, I concentrated on ideas I could execute. I was already failing toward success, but I didn't yet know it.
My First Job Interview: It was my senior year at Hartwick College, and I started interviewing for real-world jobs. One day, Hartwick hosted a career day on campus. The only company that interested me was Xerox. They were looking for two field salespeople. At the time, Xerox seemed like a good company for the long run. I just needed to get my foot in the door with an entry-level sales job and work my way up. Several of my classmates were interviewing for the same two openings. I was familiar with their academic standings, and I knew I had the best grades of the bunch. I figured my academic excellence would be the advantage I needed for a sales position. That is how ignorant I was.
As far as I knew at the time, my interview with the recruiter went well. I explained that I had no sales experience, but I loved to argue. And what is selling, I asked rhetorically, if not a form of arguing with customers until you win? Yes, I really took that approach.
That failure taught me to look for opportunities in which I had some natural advantage. When I later decided to try cartooning, it was because I knew there weren't many people in the world who could draw funny pictures and also write in a witty fashion. My failure taught me to seek opportunities in which I had an advantage.
Meditation Guide: Soon after college, a friend and I wrote a beginner's guide to meditation. I had meditated for years and found a lot of benefits in it. We advertised our meditation guide in minor publications and sold about three copies. I learned a good deal about local advertising, marketing, and product development. All of that came in handy later.