You can see from the examples that being relatively incompetent—certainly at first—had surprisingly little impact on where things ended up. What mattered more were the skills I was amassing while struggling on each of those new adventures. If you feel you are taking on a bit more than you can handle, that’s probably the perfect place to be. You can generally do more than you believe you can, so staying in the “impostor zone” while you build your skills is necessary for success.
If you discover a reframe that makes you feel less of an impostor—in this book or anywhere else—go ahead and use it. If that doesn’t work, try the other side of the sandwich and reframe everyone else as impostors. You won’t care so much about being an impostor when you realize you’re surrounded by them.
Usual Frame: I feel like an impostor at my job.
Reframe: Everyone is an impostor.
I use this reframe a lot. I think it’s easier to embrace the idea that everyone is an impostor as you get older, after you have watched countless experts and leaders unwittingly reveal their impostor sides.
Dopamine Faucet
You probably know dopamine is a chemical in your body associated with making you feel good. But you might not know it’s essential to making you physically move. If you wanted to move but had low dopamine, you would just sit there wanting to get up but not moving. I’m oversimplifying, but that’s the basic idea.
Another way to look at dopamine is that it is the “currency” your body uses to transact business. You want your body to go do some work? You’d better have enough dopamine to pay for it.
The dopamine frame is more than just interesting. It is also a prescription for what to do if you find yourself low on motivation, energy, or enjoyment of life: Go get yourself some dopamine.
As luck would have it, you are alive in an age in which we know how humans create dopamine. Apparently, we evolved to reward ourselves with a hit of dopamine when we complete meaningful tasks. And those tasks could be anything from cleaning the house to taking a class to improving your career options. When you recognize your own small successes, your brain releases dopamine to reward you. That dopamine can propel you to greater success by keeping you interested and energetic toward your long-term desires.
You’ve probably heard it said that success leads to success. That’s true for a variety of reasons, one of which is dopamine production.
When I first entered the cartooning business, I kept my corporate day job for years. That meant waking at 4:00 AM seven days per week to do the comic, working all day during the workweek, and working again at night when I got home. As hard as all that sounds—and it was plenty hard—it was easier than you might think because of the dopamine feedback loop. Every day without exception, I produced a comic that would run in newspapers around the country. It was a task with a start and a finish, per comic, and the satisfaction each day was wonderful. By the time I arrived at my day job, I was high on dopamine. Compare that to corporate projects that have no end, drag on forever, and get canceled in the next reorganization. The corporate world doesn’t offer much in the way of completed tasks that boost dopamine.
According to Dr. Andrew Huberman, you can hack your dopamine reward system by reframing your work today as essential to the kind of future you want. That gives you a reason to be happy every day. I call it preferring systems over goals. If you are following a good system, the reward is that you followed the system.
My best example of systems over goals is my gym-going habit. About five times a year, the following scenario plays out: I put on my workout clothes, drive across town to my gym, realize I don’t have it in me that day, then head home without exercising. But I declare success because I focused on the system, and that gives me a dopamine hit for successfully maintaining a useful habit.
Usual Frame: Your mood is determined by your internal thoughts.
Reframe: You can improve your mood by completing meaningful tasks.
Managing Versus Reacting
By managing, I mean managing any part of your life, from fitness to income to employees if you have them. It can be an illusion that you are managing things when you are making decisions (even smart ones!) in any situation in which you have no way to measure what is working and what is not. That isn’t managing. That’s guessing plus wishful thinking.
Usual Frame: Whatever managers do is managing.
Reframe: If you are not measuring, you are not managing.
In the workplace, you might be measuring profits or expenses to see how they change based on your decisions. Businesses measure everything they can measure because that gives them the most leverage over their situations. You should do the same in your personal life.
Are you trying to maintain or lose weight? Weigh yourself every day at the same time. (Ignore the “experts” who tell you otherwise. If you aren’t measuring, you are not managing anything.)
Are you trying to get more fit? Count the number of times you make it to the gym each week.
Are you trying to meet more people? How many times did you “put yourself out there” this week?
If you can measure it, you have a chance of managing it. To be fair, you also must make lots of decisions without the benefit of measurement. That’s okay so long as you are measuring the big stuff.
Art
One of the gripes I most often hear from my critics is that the Dilbert comic is “not funny.” I don’t know how they explain the tens of millions of loyal readers who have purchased my books and calendars and laughed out loud when they read them. My explanation is that art is subjective. The only objective measure of art is commercial appeal. If people want to pay for it, that’s good art. Everything else is just opinion.
I’m not a fan of opera, but I observe that people buy tickets to experience it, so obviously the opera-makers are doing something right. I don’t judge opera beyond observing that some people like it. And that’s what I recommend for you. Stop judging art as good or bad. Simply observe whether people like it and let that be your guide to its quality.
Usual Frame: Some art is good, and some is bad.
Reframe: If there is a market for the art, it is good art.
How to Spot a Winner
If you create a new product or perhaps some type of art, you might want to ask others for their opinion to see how much potential it has. If the people you ask have glowing praise for your creation, that might make you feel good. But in my experience, friends and family are liars—they care more about supporting you than making accurate predictions.
The most reliable way to spot a future winner is when people volunteer to extend or modify your product on their own. For example, if you wrote a clever blog post for your industry but someone in another industry copied and modified it for their own use, you probably have commercial-grade writing skills. That’s how I learned I could be a writer and cartoonist for a living. Long before I monetized those skills, my coworkers were taking my corporate slide decks with my earliest comics and faxing them around the company. (Yes, it was pre-email.) And when Dilbert came out as a comic strip, people were cutting them out of newspapers and organizing them by topic into their own binder-books. That’s how I knew Dilbert would be big, long before it was: People proved it by their actions, not their words. Something about that little comic made people move. Here’s the reframe.
Usual Frame: Praise for your creation predicts you have a hit.
Reframe: Only action predicts a hit, not words. Watch for people to extend or modify your creation.
The Bad Version
Another strong indicator of future success is a product that is terrible yet popular as soon as it is released. Mobile phones, the Internet, and fax machines all followed that path. Each one was a user nightmare in its early form, yet people craved those experiences so much that the early versions’ low quality did not predict where they would end up.