Scott Adams
Full Name: Scott Raymond Adams
Birthdate: June 8, 1957
Birthplace: Windham, New York, U.S.A.
Occupation: Cartoonist
Profile: Author and creator of the fictitious comic strip character Dilbert.
Website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams
Number of Quotes: 94
A consultant is a person who takes your money and annoys your employees while tirelessly searching for the best way to extend the consulting contract.
Based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people.
Be careful that what you write does not offend anybody or cause problems within the company. The safest approach is to remove all useful information.
Before Dilbert,
I tried to become a computer programmer. In the early days of computing, I bought this
big, heavy, portable computer for my house. I spent two years nights and weekends trying to write games that I
thought I would sell. Turns out I'm not that good a programmer, so that was two years that didn't work out.
Beware of advice about successful people and their methods. For starters, no two situations are alike. Your dreams of creating a dry-cleaning empire
won't be helped by knowing that Thomas Edison liked to take naps.
By definition, risk-takers often fail. So do morons. In practice it's difficult to sort them out.
Consultants eventually leave, which makes them excellent scapegoats for major management blunders.
Consultants have credibility because they are not dumb enough to work at your company.
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
Dilbert
became popular during the downsizing of the '90s, and job security was a major theme of the strip.
Engineers like to solve problems. If there are no problems handily available, they will create their own problems.
Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success.
Executives can get away with having a clean desk. For the rest of us, it looks like you're not working hard enough.
For most of my career I did one comic a day, every day, including weekends and holidays.
For most people, it's easy to be passionate about things that are working out, and that distorts our impression of the importance of passion. I've
been involved in several dozen business ventures over the course of my life, and each one made me excited at the start. You might even call it passion.
Free will is an illusion. People always choose the perceived path of greatest pleasure.
Good advertising can make people buy your product even if it sucks ... A dollar spent
on brainwashing is more cost-effective than a dollar spent on product improvement.
Happiness is nothing but good health and freedom, and money is the single best way you can buy your freedom.
Home is pretty utopian.
I burned out my drawing hand by using it too much. The common word for it is writer's cramp. The fancy words
for it are focal dystonia. The symptom in my case was a pinky finger that went spastic when I tried to draw.
I don't get embarrassed by the same things that other people do. I would say that probably the biggest thing
that holds people back is,
If I do this, I'm going to look like an idiot if it doesn't work out.
I get mail; therefore I am.
I hated my work. It never seemed to me to be what I should be doing.
I have a perverse attraction to risk. Not physical risk but emotional, financial risk - anything than can't kill you immediately.
I have an endless stream of suggestions coming in from readers who are in cubicles. That keeps me going.
I love magazines. It's such McNugget kind of information.
I respectfully decline the invitation to join your hallucination.
I think Dilbert
will remain popular as long as employees are frustrated and they fear the consequences of complaining too
loudly. Dilbert
is the designated voice of discontent for the workplace. I never planned it that way. It just happened.
I think if you talk to anybody who ever went from not having much to having enough to buy what they
wanted, they're always happier. Now I get that whole $75,000 a year is some kind of magic number,
but my
experience is more is better, up to a point.
Then there's a point where it doesn't make any difference.
I try to avoid giving advice.
I try to manage my day by my circadian rhythms because the creativity is such an
elusive thing, and I could easily just stomp over it doing my administrative stuff.
I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from
Black people. Just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there's no fixing this. This can't be fixed.
I would sometimes sit in a crowded restaurant, and say,
You know, I'm the only person in this restaurant who can't draw.
I'm a poor artist. Through brute force, I brought myself up to mediocre. I've never taken a writing class, but I can write okay.
I'm not happy on vacation. In those rare times when I have three hours with no work I have to do, I'm terribly uncomfortable.
I'm predicting that we'll finally have a computer will search my e-mail automatically and delete every message that begins with
thought you'd be interested,
and then give an electrical shock to the sender to remind him or her to stop send that kind of message.
I'm surrendering myself to the realities of the Internet.
I've always defined myself not as a cartoonist, but as an entrepreneur. That was true before I tried cartooning. I always imagined
cartooning would be how I got my seed capital. I always thought my other businesses would be the less dominant part of my life.
I've been identifying as Black for a while because I like to be on the winning team. And I like to help. I always thought if you
help the Black community, that's sort of the biggest lever, you could find the biggest benefit. But it turns out that nearly half of
that team doesn't think I'm okay to be white. Which is why I identified as Black so I could be on the winning team for a while.
If a job's worth doing, it's too hard.
If nearly half of all Blacks are not okay with white people-according to this poll, not according to me, according to this poll-that's a hate group.
Response to a Rasmussen Report poll: "47 percent of Black respondents were not willing to say it’s OK to be white."
If nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with white people ... that's a hate group. And I don't want anything to do with
them, and based on how things are going, the best advice I could give to white people is to get the hell away from Black
people. Just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. 'Cause there's no fixing this. This can't be fixed.
If you drill down on any success story, you always discover that luck was a huge part of it. You can't control luck, but you can move from a
game with bad odds to one with better odds. You can make it easier for luck to find you. The most useful thing you can do is stay in the game.
If you have a reasonable system for pursuing success, it can survive a lot of face-plants along the way. That knowledge
makes success seem accessible. If you think successful people have some sort of superpower or special connections, why try?
If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show you how it's done.
If you see voters as rational, you'll be a terrible politician. People are not wired to be rational. Our brains
simply evolved to keep us alive. Brains did not evolve to give us truth. Brains merely give us movies in our minds
that keeps us sane and motivated. But none of it is rational or true, except maybe sometimes by coincidence.
If your current get-rich project fails, take what you learned and try something else. Keep repeating until something lucky happens. The universe
has plenty of luck to go around; you just need to keep your hand raised until it's your turn. It helps to see failure as a road and not a wall.
If your goal is to lose 10 pounds, you may wake up each day with failure in mind because the goal is hard to reach, and you
are progressing only by small amounts. It takes up all your willpower. I recommend that instead of a goal, you have a system.
In fact, most people are being squeezed in their little cubicle, and their creativity is forced
out elsewhere, because the company can't use it. The company is organized to get rid of variants.
In less enlightened times, the best way to impress women was to own a hot car. But women wised up and
realized it was better to buy their own hot cars so they wouldn't have to ride around with jerks.
Informed decision-making comes from a long tradition of guessing and then blaming others for inadequate results.
Let's form proactive synergy restructuring teams.
Many, if not most, career opportunities come to you through people you know. So the more people you know, the more opportunities you have.
Improving your social network is a great example of a system for moving from lower odds to better odds without having a specific goal.
Most success springs from an obstacle or failure. I became a cartoonist largely because I failed in my goal of becoming a successful executive.
My failed corporate career became the fodder for the Dilbert
comic. Once it became clear I would
not be climbing any higher on the corporate ladder, it freed me to mock managers without worrying that it
would stall my career. Most failures create some sort of unplanned freedom. I took full advantage of mine.
My investments have been hurt.
My old life - no amount of getting used to it would have made it right.
My reputation for the rest of my life is destroyed. You can't come back from this.
Normal people... believe that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Engineers believe that if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.
Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of
phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion.
Nothing inspires forgiveness quite like revenge.
Obviously there's not much options when you're a cartoonist - you pretty much
either work at home or rent an office I guess, and working at home just seems easier.
One of the reasons why you like to do your own drawings is, your style changes
over time. And there's something about that that keeps it fresh to the viewer.
One strategy for getting ahead is being incredibly good at a particular skill; you need to be world-class to stand
out for that skill. In my case, I layered fairly average skills together until the combination became special.
One way to compensate for a tiny brain is to pretend to be dead.
People vote based on emotion. Period.
Psychology is the only necessary skill for running for president.
Trump knows psychology.
Remember there's no such thing as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple with no logical end.
Remind people that profit is the difference between revenue and expense. This makes you look smart.
Rotten bosses don't get better. Any strategy that assumes they can is doomed.
Scientists will eventually stop flailing around with solar power and focus their efforts on harnessing the only truly unlimited source
of energy on the planet: stupidity. I predict that in the future, scientists will learn how to convert stupidity into clean fuel.
So I don't think it makes any sense as a white citizen of America to try to help Black citizens anymore. It doesn't make sense. There's
no longer a rational impulse. So I'm going to back off on being helpful to Black America because it doesn't seem like it pays off.
Success is entirely accessible, even if you happen to be a huge screw-up 95 percent of the time.
Technology will definitely solve all our problems, but in the process it will create brand new ones.
But that's O.K. because the most you can expect from life is to get to solve better and better problems.
The best things in life are silly.
The biggest change in the workplace of the future will be the widespread realization
that having one idiot boss is a much higher risk than having many idiot clients.
The computer cuts my production time in half. I love it.
The creator of the universe works in mysterious ways. But he uses a base ten counting system and likes round numbers.
The greenest home is the one you don't build. If you really want to save the Earth, move in with another family
and share a house that's already built. Better yet, live in the forest and eat whatever the squirrels don't want.
The most important thing when you study hypnosis is that you learn that humans are irrational. Until you understand that, hypnosis is hard to do... For
me, it was this great awakening to understand that humans are deeply irrational, and it's probably the greatest influence on me in terms of my writing.
The only outcome is I get called a racist. That's the only outcome. It makes no sense to
help Black Americans if you're white. It's over. Don't even think it's worth trying.
The only risk of failure is promotion.
The world is like a reverse casino. In a casino, if you gamble long enough, you're certainly going to lose. But in the real world, where the
only thing you're gambling is, say, your time or your embarrassment, then the more stuff you do, the more you give luck a chance to find you.
There are very few personal problems that cannot be solved through a suitable application of high explosives.
There's kind of a toll you have to pay with a cat; if you don't pet her for 10 minutes she'll bother you for six hours.
There's nothing more dangerous than a resourceful idiot.
We don't always have an accurate view of our own potential. I think most people who are frightened of public speaking and can't imagine they might feel
different as a result of training. Don't assume you know how much potential you have. Sometimes the only way to know what you can do is to test yourself.
We must develop knowledge optimization initiatives to leverage our key learnings.
When times are bad, the gloves come off and employers are less nice. People become disposable.
When you hire that first person, then you're a boss. You've got performance reviews. You've got complaints
about not making enough money. You've got people who are just going to sell your story to the tabloids.
Women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently.
You can never underestimate the stupidity of the general public.
You don't have to be a person of influence
to be influential. In fact, the most
influential people in my life are probably not even aware of the things they've taught me.
You give anybody a billion dollars, and of course they are passionate. Passion is one of those things like
willpower in that there's magical thinking
about it. You've got to be careful about magical thinking.
Last on Earth
