Dilbert 2.0: The Boom Years
Introduction
The Boom Years: 1994-1997
Introduction
by Scott Adams
Dilbert appears in 2,000 newspapers and is translated into 23 languages in 70 countries. There are over 20 million Dilbert books and calendars in print.
When I sat down to organize this twentieth-anniversary book, I wondered how best to tell the tale. I knew I could do it in a variety of ways. But I thought the most interesting way would be to explain the unlikely combination of events that put me, and then Dilbert, in the right places at the right times. Let’s start at the beginning.
1957—Born
You can never be sure how much of what you become is due to nature versus nurture. My mother was a successful landscape artist in her spare time, so I probably inherited some of her artistic DNA, evidently mutated. I also have my dad’s sense of humor and his economical way with words. The building blocks for Dilbert were in place early.
I probably got my stubbornness from both sides of the family, which I prefer to call persistence. My parents’ work ethic was also baked into me at a young age. I come from a long line of hard workers who believe that having only one full-time job per day is the same as slacking.
1963—Peanuts Books
My uncle owned a farm just up the road. When we visited, I would head straight for his collection of Peanuts paperback books. I became obsessed with them, even before I could read or under-stand them. They had the x-factor. There was just something about them that was special and amazing. I was hooked for life.
My parents always told me I could grow up to be anything I wanted to be. I decided to grow up to be Charles Schulz. Surely the world had room for two of him. And after all, how hard could it be? You draw pictures, you write some words—it seemed like easy work to me. And from what I heard, the pay was good. I decided to start right in on my new profession.
Between the ages of six and nine, I drew a comic featuring creatures I named Little Grabbers, which was the phrase my dad often used to describe children. I imagined my characters as the tiny gremlins who were responsible for all the things that went wrong in the house and had no other explanation. My mother saved my early drawings from that period.
Here we see the Little Grabbers leaving the phone off the hook, spilling ink, and causing trouble. In the masterpiece here, the Little Grabbers are accelerating the decomposition of a flower arrangement. Luckily they have their own helicopter for this sort of work.
By about the age of eleven, I was influenced primarily by MAD magazine, and by the single-panel comics in other magazines. Drawing single-panel comics didn’t look that hard, so I tried making some of my own. In the hilarious work here, a hunting dog fails to notice a rabbit.
In this knee-slapper, a prisoner tries to tunnel to freedom with a spoon, and hits oil. It’s sort of a good news-bad news situation. I was not yet a master of perspective.
Around this time I acquired a book on cartooning. I spent countless hours with it, often practicing the drawing of human hands, which are especially hard to get right. That’s part of the reason Dilbert characters have five digits on each hand while most comics characters have only four. Once I learned how to draw hands, I didn’t want to squander that ability on four-digit mutants.
I can trace Dogbert’s origin back to my own family dog, Lucy, who was mostly beagle. Lucy never once came when called. And she was indifferent to everyone in the family except my mom, who fed her. In the drawing on the left, they are enjoying some quality time. It is no coincidence that later I developed a dog character with floppy ears that disdains humans.
1967—Cereal Box Contest Winner
One day I noticed a contest on the back of a cereal box: draw a picture of the geyser Old Faithful, and you could win a TV. There were also a number of runners-up prizes, including some cool-looking cameras. I entered the contest, confident I would win some sort of prize. My mother noticed my misplaced optimism and cautioned against getting my hopes up, explaining that thousands of kids would enter the contest, and only a few would win prizes. I remained confident despite the warnings, in a way that only people with no life experience can be.
I won a camera. The camera was made entirely of plastic, but it worked. I was thrilled. I started to suspect that beating long odds wasn’t as hard as it seemed. This became a pattern that repeated itself throughout my life.
1968—The Golden Egg
Our small town held an annual Easter egg contest. Eggs labeled with various monetary amounts were hidden in a large field. The grand prize was the Golden Egg, worth ten dollars, which was big money for an eleven-year-old in those days. I boldly predicted that I would be first among the hordes to find that Golden Egg.
By pure luck, I found myself in the right place at the right time. I walked to a particular spot in the field, on a hunch, looked down, and there it was: the Golden Egg. The local newspaper published a picture of me posing with the Golden Egg. I tasted fame for the first time, and liked it. Again, beating long odds seemed easier than everyone kept saying. It was time to raise my sights, to try something bigger.
1968—Famous Artists Course for Talented Young People
I applied for the Famous Artists Course for Talented Young People. It was a correspondence course for wannabe artists. My mother saved my application in the attic all these years. Here it is, so you can judge how much talent I had (or didn’t have) at a young age.
I got an okay grade on the application, but I was rejected by the school because I was too young. Above is the rejection letter that broke the news to me. It was the day I learned you can’t always find the Golden Egg just because you want to.
I soon abandoned my dreams of becoming a famous cartoonist. And I started to learn that unlikely things are indeed unlikely. I adjusted my goals to something that seemed more attainable. I looked around my town and learned that exactly two people had high incomes. One was the only doctor in town, and the other was the only lawyer. I didn’t like touching other people’s guts and tendons and whatnot, so I set my sights on a career in law.
1975—Graduated High School
There were only about forty people in my graduating class, and I had known most of them since kindergarten. My world was small, so it wasn’t hard to be in the top ten at any particular activity. The guy who jumped center on our basketball team my senior year was 5’6’’. The small-town experience made success seem attainable. If you wanted to be the best in town at one thing or another, your chances were excellent because it was unlikely anyone else was even trying hard.
I was one of the top students in my tiny class, but opted to not take chemistry or physics in high school for reasons that make a fascinating story, but don’t fit with this one. Skipping upper-level science classes was an unwise move for someone planning to go to college. But in a strange twist of fate, it turned out to be the luckiest unwise move of my life.
The only other course offered during the period when chemistry was taught was typing. At the time, typing was thought to be a skill reserved for future secretaries. The typing class was a lot easier than chemistry, and I got an A. The people who took chemistry didn’t do so well. No one got an A in that class. That tiny difference allowed me to graduate as class valedictorian. I won a few scholarships and applied for colleges that weren’t too far from home.
I don’t recommend that anyone follow my example. But it needs to be said that as an adult, I rarely use chemistry. However, I have authored several books, while simultaneously writing and typing at about ninety words per minute. Sometimes doing the wrong thing works out.
1975—Hartwick College, Oneonta, New York
In college, I majored in economics, partly because someone told me it was good prepara
tion for law school, and partly because I wanted to understand how money worked. It seemed as though it would come in handy no matter what I did. And it did.
I took one art class in college, primarily because I thought it would be easy. It wasn’t. I got the lowest grade in the class, and deserved it. The other students were talented artists who could draw a bunch of fruit on a table so well it made you hungry. My drawings looked like something you see on prison walls.
In my senior year of college, I went to a job interview in Syracuse for an internship at an accounting firm. The interviewer dismissed me without talking to me because I wasn’t wearing a suit. I was so naïve that I thought my casual clothes were just fine for an interview at an accounting firm.
On my way home, as I was driving along a new highway with virtually no other traffic, the engine on my beat-up Datsun 510 quit. It was February, at night, and snowing, and I hadn’t brought a coat because I figured I would be sprinting from car to building and back. I managed to pack a whole lot of stupid into that one day.
There was no civilization in sight, no streetlights, and no traffic. I knew I couldn’t go back the way I came, because I would freeze to death, literally, before reaching civilization. I hoped there were homes along
the road ahead of me, near enough for me to reach on foot. It was my best shot, so I decided to run in that direction.
As I ran, my extremities started freezing. My feet felt like blocks of ice pounding the frozen road. I thought I had a good chance of dying that night. I ran as far as I could, then stopped, froze some more, and ran again. As I approached exhaustion, I promised myself that if I lived, I would sell my car for a one-way ticket to California and never see another (expletive deleted) snowflake as long as I lived.
After an hour of running and freezing, headlights appeared over the horizon. I flagged down a station wagon. A shoe salesman saved me and gave me a ride back to campus. Upon graduation, a few months later, I traded my car to my sister for a one-way ticket to California. I haven’t been in snow since.
1979—My First Job
In California, I stayed with my brother and looked for a job where my degree in economics had some value. Crocker National Bank, in San Francisco, hired me as a teller. I was robbed twice at gunpoint in a four-month period, and realized that management was a safer place to be.
I got into a management training program after I sent some suggestions for improving profits to the senior vice president. The suggestions were naïve and impractical, as he informed me with a grin, but he liked the way I made my case. I had included some wry humor in the write-up, and my sense of humor reminded him of someone he loved: himself. He took a chance and put me in the management training program.
Over the course of the next six years, I was a management trainee, computer programmer, budget analyst, commercial lender, product manager, and finally a supervisor of a small group of analysts who negotiated contracts, wrote business cases, and tracked budgets. I can say with all appropriate modesty that I was incompetent at all of those jobs, primarily because I never stayed in one position long enough to develop any skill. At least that’s my excuse.
Several of my jobs at the bank involved making presentations to upper management. I seasoned my presentations with comics to keep the audience awake, and to have a business reason for sitting around drawing comics at work. My comics weren’t funny in the ha-ha sense, but they reminded people of their jobs, and that seemed to be enough. I believe my first published comic was the mole I drew for the cover of the company newsletter.
At about this time, I started drawing two characters more than others. One was a guy with glasses who would later become Dilbert. The other was a dog that was loosely based on my old family dog, Lucy.
In my early drawings, the character who would become Dilbert had no necktie. But other characters did. I came across the old drawing below from pre-Dilbert days showing perhaps the first upturned necktie I ever drew. I have no memory of why or when I first drew Dilbert with the upturned tie, but the next comic foreshadowed it.
1983—MBA
I had ambitions to reach upper management at the bank, but to do that I needed an MBA from a good school. I set my sights on the University of California at Berkeley, which had an evening program the bank was willing to pay for. As it turns out, “free” was the exact price I could afford, so that plan suited me.
The only problem was that a few years earlier I had taken the required aptitude test for a master’s degree in business (called the GMAT), and only scored in the top seventy-seventh percentile. That was nowhere near the level I needed to get into Berkeley. I needed to be somewhere above the ninetieth percentile, I figured.
At about this time I was experimenting with something called affirmations. The idea (admittedly whacko sounding) is that you can manifest your destiny by writing down your specific goals fifteen times a day. I had tried it a few times that year, on some personal goals, and was shocked at the coincidences that seemed to pile together to make the goal happen.
I should digress at this point to note that I am among the most skeptical people you could ever meet. I don’t believe in ghosts, magic, ESP, Santa Claus, UFOs, horoscopes, or religion. My best guess as to why affirmations appear to work is that they help you focus, and perhaps that makes you think sharper, or try harder, or notice opportunities more easily than you would have otherwise.
Or perhaps selective memory is at work, and I somehow forgot the times that affirmations didn’t work. I was alert to the illusion of selective memory while trying affirmations, but I still can’t rule it out. I want to be perfectly clear that I am not claiming affirmations have magic powers, or even that they work. I’m simply describing my story. And part of that story involves experimenting with writing my goals every day.
I ended up making a foolish bet with a co-worker who was taking a class to prepare for the GMAT in a few months. She had scored somewhere in the upper eightieth percentile the first time she tried and hoped to improve on that. I made a bet with her that I could beat her next (presumably improved) score by doing nothing but study the practice books and take the test again. This was an unwise bet, because the experts agreed that practice wasn’t likely to improve my score as much as I needed mine to improve.
So I picked a specific goal that seemed high enough—the ninety-fourth percentile—and I did my affirmations daily: “I ‘Scott’ Adams will score in the ninety-fourth percentile on my GMATs.” I visualized seeing the 94 on the test results. I also studied the practice tests, and consistently scored about the same as on my original test. Things weren’t looking good. But I took the GMAT again and hoped for the best.
Some weeks later, I received a letter containing my test results. I opened it, and looked for the box I had visualized with a 94. And there it was. Exactly 94.
I reiterate that I don’t think magic was involved. I’m simply describing the events as they happened. It is relevant in the story of Dilbert’s origins because it changed forever my view of what was likely and what was not.
I applied to the University of California at Berkeley’s evening MBA program and was accepted. For the next three years, I worked days, took classes at night, and did homework during all the cracks in my schedule. It was the hardest three years of my life, but also, as you will see, a key to Dilbert’s success.
As I neared the completion of my MBA program, I expected greater opportunities for promotion. This time I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The media had recently discovered that my employer had virtually no diversity in management. When an assistant vice president position opened up, and I was an obvious candidate for the spot, my boss called me into her office. I was the most qualified candidate for the position, she explained, but because of pressure to be more diverse, there was no hope for another generic white male to get promoted any time soon.
I updated my resume, hoping to find a company that would value me for my abilities. The only offer I got was from the local phone company, Pacific Bel
l. The money they offered was good, the commute was reasonable, and I took the job. Within a few months, every person in my old group at the bank had been downsized.
1986—Career Turning Point
At Pacific Bell, I completed my MBA and did my best to act and talk like an up-and-coming senior manager. Apparently my act was convincing, and I was soon added to what they called “the binder” of people who were ready for promotion. One day my boss called me into his office and informed me that while I was indeed management material, the company had been getting a lot of bad press lately about their lack of diversity in management. He noted that promoting me would only make things worse.
You might think this was a bad day for me. But you would be wrong. Because the day you realize that your efforts and your rewards are not related, it really frees up your calendar. Suddenly I didn’t see the need to come to work so early, or to stay late, or to work hard. I had time for hobbies. I worked on my tennis game, and I started drawing comics for my own amusement. The doodle on the left came from that era.
One day I decided to see if I could get my comics published. I didn’t care what publication printed them. I just wanted to get paid for cartooning, and to feel as if I was doing something that had upside potential, unlike my job. But how do you become a cartoonist? I had no idea. So I started my affirmations again, this time focusing on becoming a cartoonist.