The cartoonist, social commentator, and all-around good guy Scott Adams passed away yesterday from an aggressive form of prostate cancer. I’m not big into comic strips, but Dilbert was a generation-defining commentary on the absurdity of office politics and spending one’s life in a cubicle in a glass prison. I read and watched many of Adams’ screeds and benefited greatly from them.

Mike Cernovich wrote this on X, and it rang true:

Scott Adams could have kept his mouth shut in 2015, kept those lavish corporate speaking gigs where he'd earn 50-100K per talk, and have died with an extra zero or two in his bank account. Instead, he chose courage and died surrounded by the love of tens-of-millions.

Today, I want to share three pieces of Adams’ advice that were life-changing for me. I also link to his great writing advice, belief in affirmations, and the talent stack. I hope you get as much out of them as I have.

Great Writing Advice

Here I reprint Adams’ seminal blog post “The Day You Became a Better Writer.”

I went from being a bad writer to a good writer after taking a one-day course in “business writing.” I couldn’t believe how simple it was. I’ll tell you the main tricks here so you don’t have to waste a day in class.

Business writing is about clarity and persuasion. The main technique is keeping things simple. Simple writing is persuasive. A good argument in five sentences will sway more people than a brilliant argument in a hundred sentences. Don’t fight it.

Simple means getting rid of extra words. Don’t write, “He was very happy” when you can write “He was happy.” You think the word “very” adds something. It doesn’t. Prune your sentences.

Humor writing is a lot like business writing. It needs to be simple. The main difference is in the choice of words. For humor, don’t say “drink” when you can say “swill.”

Your first sentence needs to grab the reader. Go back and read my first sentence to this post. I rewrote it a dozen times. It makes you curious. That’s the key.

Write short sentences. Avoid putting multiple thoughts in one sentence. Readers aren’t as smart as you’d think.

Learn how brains organize ideas. Readers comprehend “the boy hit the ball” quicker than “the ball was hit by the boy.” Both sentences mean the same, but it’s easier to imagine the object (the boy) before the action (the hitting). All brains work that way. (Notice I didn’t say, “That is the way all brains work”?)

That’s it. You just learned 80% of the rules of good writing. You’re welcome.

That’s excellence in 264 words, folks.

Affirmations

From Tim Ferriss’ podcast (bolds mine):

Alright, so I'm in my 20s. I was taking a course in hypnosis to learn how to become a professional hypnotist and get certified. In my class was a woman who was also interested in a lot of things that I thought were pretty out there; some new-agey stuff. But we became friends. And one day she said, “You’ve got to try this thing called affirmations. I read about it in a book, and I don't remember the name of the book.” So I can’t tell you here, because she didn’t tell me.

And she said: It works like this. All you do is you pick a goal, and you write it down 15 times a day in some specific sentence form, like “I, Scott Adams, will become an astronaut,” for example. And you do that every day. Then it will seem as if the universe just starts spitting up opportunities. And it will look to you like these are coincidences, and whether they are or not is less relevant than the fact that they seem to pop up.

Affirmations work (probably) because they activate your reticular activating system (RAS) toward your goals, helping you see more opportunities. This is why you see more red Ferraris driving around after you talk about red Ferraris.

The Talent Stack

This is perhaps Adams’ most practical advice, from his Keynote Address at Haas Business School:

I layer complementary skills. Now, the complementary skills that I'm putting together are things like public speaking, languages, and psychology. I'm gonna pause here for a moment.

There are about, I don't know, 50 or 100 psychology concepts, principles of persuasion. If you don't know that there are that many, somebody is using that stuff against you, all right? And it would really help if you knew it. So you can layer that on top of whatever else you're good at. And that's gonna be a big add, right? And what's important about layering these relatively easily attainable skills, you know, you can take a class, you can do a little reading, and design is especially one I call out.

Because everything you do is design, right? My slides are design, your pictures are design. They've all got design. You build a website, that's design. You can learn everything, I'd say about 80% of what you need to know in design, you can learn in about 10 minutes. It's the other 20% you have to go to school for to become an expert.

So that's a good hour spent right there. How powerful is this? Well. It's powerful because, if you're not Tiger Woods, you know, you're not born and you're six years old. And you're like, I think I'm gonna be the best in the world at this thing. I'm pretty good right now.

If you didn't have that feeling when you were six, you probably had to layer together some average skills to get where you are.

All right, these are some of the average skills that I've layered together. And the result is that, although I'm a mediocre artist, there's probably, in a room. Like this, I would guess 10 people who are better artists than I am. I'll never win a writing award; in fact, I never took a writing class, but I can write simple sentences and put them together. Again, in this room, 25 people write better than me probably. Better than I? I dunno. You can see what I'm talking about. Case in point! I'm also usually not the funniest person in the room, even in my own house. You know, if I have a party, I'm like the third funniest person. But here's the thing, you put all this stuff together, you add to it. My, you know, the little bit.

I paid attention when I was in the MBA program, and I've got a unique combination. There are very few people who can write a little, they're pretty funny, and they can draw a picture, and they've got enough business experience to put it together and create a business out of it. In the past 25 years, there's been one real breakout comic, and it was Dilbert. And it was primarily because of my Haas experience. That's a longer story. But what I brought to cartooning was a business.

I went from banker to teacher to writer, and the skills I learned in each complement each other.

Wrap Up

Rest in peace, Scott. You were one of the good ones. We’re grateful for all you’ve done.