《呆伯特》作者误打误撞的成功路

    “我不是任何方面的专家，包括我自己的本职工作，”斯科特•亚当斯在《我的人生：样样稀松照样赢》（How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life）的引言中说。“我画画时就像一只喝醉酒的吼猴，我的写作风格介于莫名其妙和一知半解之间。我为什么还能够不断得到报酬，这对我来说一直是个未解之谜。”他还提前指出：“这不是一本建议指南，如果你听遵循一位漫画家的建议，很有可能没什么好下场。”

    随后亚当斯谈笑风生地忽略掉了自己的免责声明，在这本书的后面提供了229页的反向职业建议，他的根据是自己工作和生活上好坏参半的经历。虽然亚当斯早在8岁的时候就告诉妈妈，他想成为下一个查尔斯•舒尔茨（美国史努比系列漫画作者——译注），但当他在1979年开始自己的职业生涯时，他却进了旧金山一家银行担任出纳员。在那里，“我获得的经济学学位让我多少有些大材小用，不过我还是成功把工作做的很糟糕。”总的算来，亚当斯在美国公司工作了16年时间，大多数是太平洋贝尔公司（Pacific Bell）财务管理的中低端职位，他还从加州大学伯克利分校（Berkeley）的哈斯商学院（the Haas School）获得了MBA学位。

    这些经历听起来很老套，但亚当斯是一个贪婪的自学者。“我是一个学习机器，”他写道。“如果我觉得某件东西将来可能有用，我就试着掌握至少是最基础的知识。”亚当斯书中的很多观察成果来自于他对很多看似随意的学科组合的钻研，其中包括冥想、催眠、心理学、计算机编程以及电子游戏设计开发。

    亚当斯白天工作，夜里创作《呆伯特》（Dilbert）系列连环画。除此之外，他获得了一项让旧式手机发短信更容易的技术专利（智能手机的出现淘汰了这项技术）；推出了被称为Dilberitos的蔬菜卷饼，成功在数家全国性连锁店内销售，一直到被竞争对手打败；发明了一些命运多舛的电脑游戏；还上线了几家不了了之的网站。

    亚当斯在书中名为“我的滑铁卢精选总结报表”的章节中对这一切连同一些重大的糟糕投资进行了描写，后者包括一家在YouTube之前的视频网站，它失败的原因在于那时的网速还没有快到能够支持在线视频分享。“我就是在这时候开始明白，时机往往是成功最重要的组成部分，”他写道。“而且，由于时机很难准确把握——除非你能通灵——这样尝试不同的事物，直到靠运气获得合适的时机就顺理成章了。”

    亚当斯尝试了很多不同的事物，同时不放弃自己的日常工作，这使他得出了一则公式：你获得的每一种技能可以让你成功的机会增加一倍。他写道，大多数人“最好还是擅长两种互补的技能、而不是专精一种……当我将自己贫乏的业务技能和糟糕的艺术技巧以及相当普通的写作才能结合在一起时，最终的效果相当强大。”

    《样样稀松照样赢》是一本不落俗套的名流富豪自传，它讽刺了关于成功要素的陈词滥调。仅举一例，想一想激情。亚当斯表示，成功者经常把激情说成自己成功的一个原因，因为“所有人都可以对一些东西或其他东西有激情……激情让人感觉相当大众化，这是人的天性，人人皆可拥有。同时那大多都是胡说八道。”

    在他看来，激情是成功的副产品，而不是它的先决条件。回顾自己创办的数十家公司或者试图创办的公司，亚当斯写道他对每一个都充满激情，直至它以失败告终。“那些没有成功的努力——失败案例占到大多数——慢慢榨干了我的激情，因为它们失败了。”他这样写道。绘制连环画“起初只是我愿意尝试的很多致富计划之一，但是当它开始看起来有戏的时候，我对画画的激情增加了。”——这对《呆伯特》的粉丝来说真是一件幸事。（财富中文网）

    译者：王灿均  

    "I'm not an expert at anything, including my own job," Scott Adams writes in the introduction to How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life. "I draw like an inebriated howler monkey and my writing style falls somewhere between baffling and sophomoric. It's an ongoing mystery to me why I keep getting paid." He also notes upfront that "this is not an advice book. If you've ever taken advice from a cartoonist, chances are it didn't end well."

    Breezily ignoring his own disclaimer, Adams goes on to pack the next 229 pages with contrarian career advice, based on the author's mixed bag of experience in work and life. Although he told his mother when he was eight years old that he wanted to be the next Charles Schulz, Adams started his career in 1979 as a teller at a bank in San Francisco, where "my degree in economics made me somewhat overqualified for the job, and yet I still managed to be dreadful at it." Altogether, he spent 16 years in corporate America, many of them in the middle rungs of financial management at Pacific Bell, and got an MBA from the Haas School at Berkeley.

    Sounds pretty conventional, but Adams was a voracious autodidact. "I was a learning machine," he writes. "If I thought something might someday be useful, I tried to grasp at least the basics." Many of the observations in his book come from his delving deep into a seemingly random collection of subjects, from meditation and hypnosis to psychology, computer programming, and electronic game design.

    Without letting go of his day job, and while drawing Dilbert strips at night, Adams patented an invention to make texting easier on old-style cell phones (smartphones made it obsolete), launched a line of veggie burritos called Dilberitos that sold in a few national chains before being crushed by the competition, invented some ill-fated computer games, and built several websites that went nowhere.

    All of this is described in a chapter called "Some of My Many Failures in Summary Form" along with a few big, bad investments -- including one in a predecessor to YouTube that flopped because Internet speeds were not yet fast enough for online video sharing to catch on. "This was about the time I started to understand that timing is often the biggest component of success," he writes. "And since timing is hard to get right unless you are psychic, it makes sense to try different things until you get the timing right by luck."

    Trying lots of different things, while holding on to his day job, led him to come up with a formula: Every skill you acquire doubles your chances of success. Most people, he writes, are "better off being good at two complementary skills than being excellent at one ... When I combined my meager business skills with my bad art skills and my fairly ordinary writing talent, the mixture was powerful."

    Refreshingly for an autobiography by a rich and famous person, How to Fail at Almost Everything skewers the usual clichés about what leads to success. To take just one example, consider passion. Adams says successful people often cite passion as a reason for their rise because "everyone can be passionate about something or other ... Passion feels very democratic. It's the people's talent, available to all. It's also mostly bullshit."

    In his view, passion is a byproduct of succeeding at something, not a prerequisite to it. Looking back over the dozens of business ventures he started, or tried to start, he writes that he was passionate about each one until it fizzled. "The ones that didn't work out -- and that would be most of them -- slowly drained my passion as they failed," he writes. Drawing a comic strip "started out as just one of many get-rich schemes I was willing to try. When it started to look as if it might be a success, my passion for cartooning increased" -- a lucky break for Dilbert fans.