Chapter 26  A Few Times Affirmations Worked

A few years into my cartooning career, The Wall Street Journal asked me to write a guest editorial about the workplace. That article was titled "The Dilbert Principle," and it got a great response from readers. An editor for Harper Business contacted me and asked if I would be willing to write a book around the same topic. I agreed and started writing. During that time, and usually while running on the treadmill at the gym, I repeated my new affirmation in my head: "I, Scott Adams, will be a number-one bestselling author."

The Dilbert Principle started strong and within a few weeks hit number one on The New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. In a matter of months, my follow-up book, Dogbert's Big Book of Business, joined it in the number two slot. The success of the two books brought me a lot of attention and put a turbo boost on sales of Dilbert to newspapers. The Dilbert website was getting huge traffic by the standards of the day, and I had a booming speaking career on the side. The licensing business for Dilbert took off, too. Suddenly, it seemed as if everything I touched was working.

With so many good things happening, I convinced myself that I could do just about anything that I set my mind to. I discounted the affirmations as being nothing more than a way to focus, and I figured I no longer needed that crutch.

So I didn't use affirmations when I worked as co-executive producer of the animated Dilbert TV show that ran for two half-seasons on the now-defunct UPN network. The first half-season did well, but we lost our time slot the following season because of a simple communication problem that resulted in the show getting moved to a new time slot. Viewers had trouble finding the show, and the ratings tanked. At the same time, the network decided to remake itself as a channel focusing on African-American viewers. Dilbert was cancelled after the second half-season. I had mixed feelings about the show's premature death because it was a lot of work, and not the fun kind.

I also didn't use affirmations when I invested in my first or second restaurant, and in the long run, neither of those worked out.

I didn't use affirmations when I started my vegetarian burrito company, which never took off.

I can't tell you I believe affirmations caused my few successes or that not using affirmations doomed other projects to failure. I can only tell you what I did and when. As I've explained, there are several perfectly reasonable explanations for the pattern. The one that stands out in my mind is that I really had no love for the work involved in the TV show, the Dilberito, or the restaurants. And I felt relief when each ended. The pattern I noticed is that the affirmations only worked when I had a 100 percent unambiguous desire for success. If I could have snapped my fingers and made the TV show, the Dilberito, and the restaurants successful, I would have done it. But I knew I wouldn't have enjoyed ongoing management of any one of them. Did my mixed feelings matter? I'll never know.

I only used affirmations one more time. And in that case, I had no mixed feelings. I wanted something as much as a person can want.

"I, Scott, will speak perfectly."

Chapter 27 Voice Update I

Months had passed since my last Botox shot to my vocal cords. My voice was so weak and unpredictable that it was a struggle to accomplish the simplest human interactions. I'm a natural optimist, but the reality was that spasmodic dysphonia had no cure, and I was likely to spend the rest of my life without ever again experiencing a conversation.

I couldn't speak on the phone except to people who knew my situation and were willing to keep conversations to short yes or no answers. I couldn't order my own food at restaurants, couldn't talk to people at social gatherings, couldn't continue my speaking tour, and generally couldn't enjoy life. I was often depressed, which I understand happens to most people with this condition. The loneliness was debilitating.

Blogging kept me alive. When I wrote a blog post, I was communicating. People understood me, mostly, and left fascinating comments and responses. Blogging made me feel less lonely. It kept me sane but only barely.

I wasn't looking forward to the next several decades of life as a non-talker. It felt like my personal hell. But I hadn't given up. I didn't know how to give up.

Incurable health problems often attract quack cures. I tried most of the ones that weren't dangerous. Drinking a certain brand of cough syrup didn't work. Acupuncture didn't work. Mineral supplements didn't work. Stutter cures didn't work. Three different approaches to voice therapy didn't work. The Alexander Technique§§ didn't work. Iron supplements didn't work. Changing my diet didn't work.

I hadn't spoken normally for over a year. It was slowly killing me.

But what I did have was a two-part system. To identify the pattern that caused my voice to be its worst, I created a spreadsheet and recorded every factor I guessed might be at work, including diet, hours of sleep, exercise, practice talking, and even the number of Diet Cokes consumed. If I could find the pattern behind my worst voice days, I would know what I needed to change. But no pattern emerged.

The second part of my system involved scouring the planet for any mention of the words "spasmodic dysphonia" in a medical context. Luckily, I was born in the right era, so the scouring was done by Google using their Google Alerts function. I just plugged in the keywords. Any mention of my condition anywhere on the Internet generated an email message that went to my phone that lives in my left-front pants pocket. I got several alerts per week, but none looked promising. Usually, the articles on the Internet discussed the incurability of the condition—no surprise given that the medical consensus was that my condition was caused by a brain abnormality. Those are hard to fix.

No one wants to feel lonely and depressed. But on the plus side, misery alters your appetite for risk. If someone had suggested a plan for fixing my voice that had a 50 percent chance of killing me, I would have taken it in a heartbeat.

I checked my phone often to see if any Google alert emails had come in. And I waited. Homo sapiens have been around for 150,000 years. My best hope was that one of us, somewhere on Earth, would figure out a cure for this problem within my lifetime, before the condition devoured what was left of my optimism. My odds were not good. But I was far from giving up. In fact, I was mad as hell, and for me, anger is sometimes enough. My attitude was always the same: Escape from my cell, free the other inmates, shoot the warden, and burn down the prison.

In my car, every day, I repeated over and over, "I, Scott Adams, will speak perfectly." I believed it would happen because I needed to believe it.

§§The Alexander Technique is a method for moving in a conscious way with the goal of removing tension from your body.