“Life isn’t fair” is a debate-ending reframe. I used this reframe in my limited step-parenting experiences to good effect. I often added that fairness is not measured in units of one day. One must look at a multi-year period to know if something such as fairness was approached. It’s hard to debate an unknown future from the perspective of right now. That’s why it ends the debate.
I once explained the “life isn’t fair” reframe to my stepson this way: If your first impression is that it means you will get less stuff, you are missing the bigger picture. The existence of so-called unfairness means you can (usually) find situations in which the unfairness is in your favor. Be strategic. Go where you have an “unfair” advantage. And if you can’t find an existing natural advantage, create one by assembling a stack of talents that make you both rare and commercially valuable. Or move to someplace that doesn’t already have enough people who do whatever you do.
Usual Frame: Fairness is a desirable social goal.
Reframe: Fairness is the enemy of success.
The free market rewards people who solve the biggest problems, to paraphrase Elon Musk. If you solve the world’s biggest problem, you won’t want to be paid the same as your neighbor who has a perfectly respectable job in the cubicle economy. That would not seem fair to you, and it would probably prevent you from trying to solve any big problems that require grueling work and great risk. The existence of unfairness is what drives the entire economy. Once you embrace that truth, it will be easier to find your own little island of advantage and exploit it.
Creativity
An odd feature of my career is that people quote me a lot. Do a Google search for “Scott Adams quotes” and a flurry of them pop up. The most viral of my quotes—by far—is this one from my book The Dilbert Principle, published in 1996:
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
That’s a reframe, but it takes a bit of explaining. The first half of the reframe gives you permission to imagine the broadest set of ideas because you are intentionally inviting the ones that have “mistakes” in them. But art is not about the expected. Art lives in the so-called mistakes, the imperfections. For example, my comic character Dilbert has no mouth. That’s a “mistake,” but for some reason, it works. And so it becomes art.
Usual Frame: Avoid mistakes in your art.
Reframe: Invite mistakes into your art and keep the “good ones.”
The way I experience creativity is as a river of ideas flowing through my consciousness. Nearly all of them are bad or incomplete ideas, and my brain flushes them as quickly as they arrive. But every now and then, I get a physical sensation from an idea. It might cause me to laugh, get goosebumps, or get excited about a project. That’s the good one.
To put it another way, I don’t “create” ideas, I simply select the best from the stream as it passes. And I identify the good ones by how they make me feel. I ignore the ideas that have intellectual appeal but don’t register in my body.
Your brain doesn’t have the ability to stop thinking. That means you don’t need to summon ideas; you only need to tell your brain what problem you are trying to solve, then watch the ideas flow past. Pick the best ones based on how they make your body feel.
My creative process depends as much on releasing the bad ideas as it does on identifying the good ones. Releasing bad ideas is harder than it sounds. We tend to fall in love with our ideas, and they become sticky. The best way to delete a sticky-but-bad idea is reminding yourself that the active part of the creation process is releasing the bad ideas. And if you don’t “feel” the idea—literally feel in some part of your body—it’s not worth saving. This reframe helps you do that.
Usual Frame: I need to come up with a good idea.
Reframe: I need to release all my bad ideas as quickly as possible.
I won’t pretend creativity is something anyone can do if they use the right technique. Creativity, like most human skills, is a genetic gift. Most humans have some degree of it. What these two reframes do is give you an active way to brainstorm. Instead of trying to summon ideas, you scan a huge number of bad ones—focusing on speed more than analysis—until one of the ideas moves you physically.
Impostor Syndrome
Starting a new job can be tough on your ego. You won’t understand the company-specific jargon for weeks. You won’t know who to ask for help. And you won’t want to continuously ask questions of the one person who might have all the answers. In that situation, it’s normal to feel as if you are the only incompetent person in the company. And that feeling can last.
The way to upgrade that experience is to change your frame of comparison. Don’t compare yourself to seasoned employees with years of experience. Compare yourself to where you were yesterday or to when you started. Focus on what you have learned already and how quickly you learned it. As you watch the imaginary pile of “what you learned” grow in your mind, your confidence will come back online.
Usual Frame: You feel like a fraud. Everyone else is competent.
Reframe: You are learning fast. Look at all you learned!
To be fair, I can’t rule out the possibility that you feel like an impostor because you are bad at your job and always will be. But if you have read this far, I suspect you have some skills or will soon.
I would also like to offer you a helpful observation from my decades of experience in the business and entertainment worlds: Everyone is faking it (at least some of the time). Thanks to my odd career, I’ve spent a lot of time with experts of all kinds: scientists, CEOs, entrepreneurs, billionaires, doctors, lawyers, you name it. And they all have human biases and knowledge gaps. If you don’t believe me, go to any expert with a problem that isn’t like the normal ones. You’ll lose all faith in humanity, but at least you won’t feel you are the only “impostor” in the game. Everyone in a new job is an impostor, and every experienced person encountering a novel situation is an impostor, too. You are in good company.
If you can’t shake the sensation that you are an impostor at work, it might make you feel better to know how successful you can be with that mindset. I felt like an impostor at every job I’ve ever had, and I wasn’t wrong. Behold the following experiences:
In my banking career, I was offered a job as a computer programmer and accepted. I did not know how to program anything. I signed up for classes at night and figured it out.
In my phone company career, I was promoted to the job of engineer despite having a degree in economics. I muddled through with the help of coworkers who were capable.
I was offered a contract to be a syndicated cartoonist before I had ever created a commercial-grade comic. With the help of the syndication company, I figured it out.
I was offered a book contract despite having zero professional writing experience outside of comic strips. That book, The Dilbert Principle, became the #1 bestselling nonfiction book in the country.
I was offered professional speaking opportunities despite having only some corporate presentation experience. My first outing was a disaster. I improved steadily and became one of the highest-paid speakers in the country.
If you saw the beginning of my livestreaming career that started on a buggy app called Periscope and branched out to YouTube and the Locals platform, you know how low-quality it was. I experimented for years to get the show, Coffee with Scott Adams, to the level it is today. (Still low production quality, but much better than where it started.)