Adams knew, deep in his bones, that he was cleverer than other people. God always punishes this impulse, especially in nerds. His usual strategy is straightforward enough: let them reach the advanced physics classes, where there will always be someone smarter than them, then beat them on the head with their own intellectual inferiority so many times that they cry uncle and admit they’re nothing special.

For Adams, God took a more creative and – dare I say, crueler – route. He created him only-slightly-above-average at everything except for a world-historical, Mozart-tier, absolutely Leonardo-level skill at making silly comics about hating work.

Scott Adams never forgave this. Too self-aware to deny it, too narcissistic to accept it, he spent his life searching for a loophole. You can read his frustration in his book titles: How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big. Trapped In A Dilbert World. Stick To Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain.

Scott Adams and Elon Musk: Dearly want respect for the thing they have no talent at.

Michael Jordan was the world’s best basketball player, and insisted on testing himself against baseball, where he failed. Herbert Hoover was one of the world’s best businessmen, and insisted on testing himself against politics, where he crashed and burned. We’re all inmates in prisons of different names. Most of us accept it and get on with our lives. Adams couldn’t stop rattling the bars.

It's obvious you won't survive by your wits alone. Why can't someone as smart as Adams figure out persuasion?

Adams became transfixed by the memetic potential of a snappy slogan; the art of hypnotism/persuasion being the only plausible reason that the clever protagonist hadn't already succeeded outside comics

"People don’t respond to logic and evidence, so the world is ruled by people who are good at making catchy slogans. Sufficiently advanced sloganeering is indistinguishable from hypnosis, and so when Adams has some cute turns of phrase in his previous book, he describes it as “[I] used a variety of hypnosis techniques in an attempt to produce a feeling of euphoric enlightenment in the reader”

Every yoga studio and therapist’s office in the Bay Area has a little shed in the back where they keep the skulls of the last ten thousand bright nerds who tried to use intelligence to hack themselves to become hard-working.

I can’t explain why it so invariably goes wrong. The best I can do is tell a story where, when you’re trying to do this, you’re selecting for either techniques that can change you, or techniques that can compellingly make you think you’ve been changed. The latter are much more common than the former.

In theory, becoming a hot charismatic person with great social skills ought to be the same kind of task as everything else, where you practice a little and you’re bad, but then you practice more and you become good. But the uncanny valley is deep and wide, and Scott Adams was too invested in saying “Ha! I just hypnotized you - ha! There, did it again!” for me to trust his mountaineering skills.

A linguistic kill shot: "clown genius"

I have seen public intellectual after public intellectual who I previously respected have their brains turn to puddles of partisan-flavored mush. Jordan Peterson, Ken White, Curtis Yarvin, Paul Krugman, Elon Musk, the Weinsteins, [various people close enough to me that it would be impolite to name them here]. Once, these people were lions of insightful debate. Where now are the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?

Adams was 58 when Trump changed everything. In 2001, age 44, he’d found the failure of his Dilberito funny. But in another interview, at age 50, he suggested that maybe his competitors had formed teams to sneak into supermarkets and hide them in the back of the shelves. Being tragically flawed yet also self-aware enough to laugh about it is a young man’s game.

Everyone has to come back to reality. Especially the clever must painfully adjust their hopes & expectations.

Every nerd who was the smartest kid in their high school goes to an appropriately-ranked college and realizes they’re nothing special. But also, once they go into some specific field they find that intellect, as versatile as it is, can only take them so far. And for someone who was told their whole childhood that they were going to cure cancer (alas, a real quote from my elementary school teacher), it’s a tough pill to swallow.

As compensation, he was gifted with two great defense mechanisms. The first was humor (which Freud grouped among the mature, adaptive defenses), aided by its handmaiden self-awareness.

When he was young, and his mind supple, he was able to balance both these mechanisms (humor/self-aware + arrogance of being on a higher manipulation plane than other nerds); the steam of their dissonance drove the turbine of his art.

As we pass through life, sometimes God shows us dopplegangers, bright or dark mirrors of ourselves, glimpses of how we might turn out if we zig or zag on the path ahead. Some of these people are meant as shining inspirations, others as terrible warnings, but they’re all our teachers.

If you want to see the world more clearly, avoid joining a tribe. But if you are going to war, leave your clear thinking behind and join a tribe

"Silicon Valley, where hustle culture has reached its apogee, has an additional consideration: why don’t you found a startup? If you’re so much smarter than your boss, why not compete against him directly?"

It's a waste of resources that get you behind relative to others not thinking about their cleverness

The only folks who relate such stories to a willing listener are those who are being sought for reward (e.g., candidate employees) or those who you're trading attention time with (friends). In the last two years I've mentally labeled achievement talk as "Ego Emissions." Sadly, I won't be high enough status to find any acolytes for my woulda-been Ego Emissions. Fortunately, the half-life of those w/ credibility who will sit around & listen to your Ego Emissions is short; I ain't losing much.