Successful People Have a Process They Use to Automate Success

Scott Adams is the creator of the Dilbert Cartoon series. Dilbert has made Adams very successful, and very wealthy.

Because success always leaves clues, as part of my Rich Habits research, I have forged the daily habit of reading books written by successful people.

In Scott Adams newest book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life he shares his failures and successes, in a brutally honest fashion.

One of the interesting reveals Adams makes in his book is the fact that he does not pursue goals. Rather, he focuses on the “process” that has made him so successful.

What is that process?

Developing Adequate Complementary Skills

Adams followed his passion for drawing cartoons, even though he confesses he was never very good at drawing.

He is also innately funny. So he embedded his innate sense of humor with his passion for drawing cartoons and Dilbert was born.

Persistence

Adams engaged in his drawing passion every morning before heading off to his full-time corporate job. He would regularly solicit newspaper publications, hoping they would publish his Dilbert cartoons in their newspapers. Eventually, his persistence habit, or persistence process, paid off.

Opportunity Luck

Adams solicited many newspapers to publish Dilbert. All but one rejected his solicitations, all thanks to Opportunity Luck.

Here’s how Opportunity Luck changed Adams life.

Adams had sent a batch of his Dilbert cartoons to a woman who was in charge of selecting cartoons to run in the newspaper she worked for. She and her husband were on a long road trip. During the drive, to kill time, the husband decided to look over the cartoons his wife had brought with her and put in a folder in the backseat of the car.

At some point during the trip, the woman heard her husband laughing over and over again. She asked what he was reading.

He said, “one of your cartoons.”

“Which one?” she asked.

“It’s called Dilbert,” he replied.

The rest is history. Dilbert made it into that newspaper and many others. It became one of the most successful cartoons ever, all thanks to a lucky road trip.

The important point here is that Adams had created the opportunity for good luck to happen by creating Dilbert and by being relentlessly persistent in trying to get it published.

The lesson?

Opportunity Luck visits the persistence.