Scott Adams, Creator of Dilbert
Today, my guest is Scott Adams, the creator of the world famous Dilbert cartoon strip.
After working at Crocker National Bank and Pacific Bell, Adams entertained himself during boring meetings by drawing cartoons of his coworkers and bosses and a bespectacled character named Dilbert emerged from the doodles.
Today, Adams devotes his time to Dilbert, including speaking, writing, doing interviews, designing licensed products and answering hundreds of e-mail messages per day. Dilbert is published in over 2,000 newspapers across 65 countries.
In this candid conversation, Scott shared the real stories behind the accidental creation of his iconic comic strip, his unconventional formula for success, and how he weaponized corporate misery to fuel his art.
1. A Prophetic Name. Scott revealed that Dilbert was born out of his 16 years working in corporate America at Crocker National Bank and Pacific Bell, where he realized bureaucratic nightmares were universal. The comic character originally remained nameless until his boss randomly wrote "Dilbert" on a whiteboard. Even though he later learned the name belonged to an old WWII Navy safety comic, Scott experienced a profound, physical sensation of "seeing the future" in that exact moment, feeling in his entire body that the name would meaningfully define the rest of his life.
2. Solid Gold Frustrations. Initially, Dilbert was designed as a generic comic about a guy and his dog, but Scott shifted the focus entirely to the workplace after early internet users emailed him demanding more office scenes. Because he continued working his corporate day job for the first few years of the strip, he discovered that every horrible, frustrating meeting provided "solid gold" material for his art. This created a perfect dynamic where he literally couldn't have a bad day at the office; if something went terribly wrong at work, it simply became a completed joke for tomorrow's cartoon.
3. The System of Layering Skills. In discussing his massive success, Scott humbly admitted that he isn't a world-class artist or a formally trained comedy writer, having only ever taken a single business writing course that taught him the value of brevity and active sentences. Instead of striving to be the absolute best at one specific thing, he advocates for a "system for success"—a concept from his book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big—where you layer multiple "good enough" skills together to create a highly unique, unbeatable package.
4. The Body Reaction and a Dangerous End. To determine if a workplace idea is actually funny, Scott relies on an involuntary, literal body reaction; if the premise or setup makes him laugh before he even thinks of the punchline, he knows it's a winner. While he keeps Dilbert perpetually frozen around age 30 and continues to actively crowdsource modern office struggles from fans on social media, Scott noted that if he ever decides to retire the comic, he absolutely refuses to go out quietly. Instead, he plans to do something shocking and dangerous, like killing Dilbert off, giving him a sex change operation, or having him spend the rest of his life in prison for working with the hacker group Anonymous.
