Monday, November 03, 2014

The wisdom of Scott Adams


http://search.dilbert.com/search?w=the+natural

"P.S. Yes, I am in a bad mood this week. Why do you ask?" snaps the famous cartoonist.

Sometimes it takes losing your rag to get at a simple statement of the truth:

"The loser worldview is that whoever is causing the problem needs to fix it for you.

"The problem with the loser worldview is that in many cases the only person who CAN fix the problem is you, even if you had nothing to do with causing it. A winner in that situation fixes his own problem. A loser sits indefinitely waiting for others to solve it for him, even knowing that won't happen. [...]


"If others are at fault, and they have the ability and motivation to fix the problem for you, by all means take a run at it. But if the only person who can fix your problem is you, and you choose not to do it because the fault is with others, you have taken the loser path. You literally chose the path you know will fail because of some misguided sense of rightness."

- Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert)

And one way to assess solutions, he says in "The Joy Of Work", is to formulate them as newspaper headlines. For example, if you think what you need to do in your job is use your time more efficiently, the story would be "Cubicle Worker Becomes Billionaire Thanks To Careful Scheduling".

Brilliant.


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1 comment:

A K Haart said...

I enjoy reading Scott Adams, but one has to tread carefully.

"A winner in that situation fixes his own problem."

Indeed, but winners are often a key part of the problem. The situation is not linear.