Your first priority should be you. If you don’t take care of yourself first, you won’t be much use to anyone else. But hurry up—the world has lots of problems and maybe you can help.

  CONTEXT

  Probably the most common way people fall into mental prisons is by not knowing the context of a situation. If you glance at the news headlines on any given day, you’ll be surprised how many so-called news stories are nothing but people misunderstanding what someone said or did because some context was missing.

  Speaking of missing context, this morning I was doing my daily live Periscope when the mood of the audience suddenly turned. My normally friendly viewers started a chorus of Boo! Boo! Boo! I didn’t know what I had done to deserve their disdain. It takes a lot of practice to speak on a live video stream for an hour and also pay attention to live comments coming across the screen. I immediately allocated half of my brain to continuing with my live presentation and the other half to figuring out where I had gone wrong, so I could correct whatever I had said to offend. I soon learned that using half of my brain made me the approximate mental equivalent of an elderly dolphin. I probably could have learned a trick in return for a fish treat, but I wasn’t having much luck talking about a complicated topic in public while simultaneously trying to solve a mystery. Things continued downhill as I floundered. The audience’s bad reaction intensified into a solid wall of Boo! Boo! Boo! And I still couldn’t figure out what I had done wrong.

  Then I noticed that my cat Boo was behind me on the live video. My audience knows Boo, and they were happily calling out her name. They weren’t booing me so much as totally ignoring me in favor of a cat they had never met. Still, that was better than getting booed.

  My point is that context matters. If you don’t know the whole story, you can’t always tell the difference between getting booed off the stage and watching people try to communicate with a cat using the written word. They can look the same.

  Probably the single biggest error that humans make in their decision-making is ignoring relevant context. Sometimes we do it intentionally, as in avoiding news and information sources that would give a competing explanation of reality. That problem can be fixed simply by broadening your information sources. But a bigger problem comes from not knowing what you don’t know.

  Think of all the times you had a firm opinion about some topic in the news, only to later learn you didn’t have the full story. It’s common. I’m not exaggerating when I say it happened to me about five times this week alone. The initial news reports indicated that someone had done something terrible, and within a day or so I learned—after more context had been added to the story—that my first impressions were completely wrong.

  That’s why I like to wait two days before forming a strong opinion on events in the news. The initial reporting is so often wrong or out of context that it’s a waste of energy to immediately get worked up about what you see in the news. Just wait a few days, and there’s a high likelihood you will learn the catastrophe that was reported was no big deal once you hear the context. Or the thing that looked minor is actually a catastrophe. It works both ways.

  In October 2018, the New York Times published a timeline about how the slogan #JobsNotMobs was created by a user on Twitter and caught on so well that it became part of President Trump’s rally speeches and tweets. The Times reported my involvement in that chain of events this way:

  Scott Adams, the creator of the “Dilbert” cartoon strip, quickly endorsed “jobs not mobs” as a potential slogan. Because of the cartoonist’s popularity among the pro-Trump crowd online, this was a key moment.

  It is true that my Twitter account, with more than 324,000 followers at this writing, includes a lot of pro-Trump folks. But an important bit of context is missing to make sense of this story. I’m also famous among people who follow politics for writing about the topic of persuasion, which includes my New York Times bestselling book Win Bigly, my popular blog posts on Dilbert.com, and my daily Periscope livestreams that are monitored by most of the large media sites as well as the White House, or so I have been informed. So when I endorsed the slogan as powerful, people familiar with my persuasion talents correctly believed “jobs not mobs” had a lot of persuasive power, and that was what caused them to put energy behind it. Here’s how I endorsed it in my tweet. I was commenting on Ali Alexander’s tweet discussion of the word mobs.

  @SCOTTADAMSSAYS

  “Mobs” by itself doesn’t work. But “Jobs Not Mobs” is brain glue plus framing and contrast. Science says the brain interprets rhymes as persuasive.

  The New York Times1 story indicated that my contribution was a function of my popularity with the target audience. That account lacks the key context that I’m famous among Twitter users who follow Trump-related politics for my understanding of this specific topic: political persuasion. I’m a trained hypnotist, and I have studied persuasion in all its forms for decades as part of my talent stack for being a writer. The main theme of my persuasion content is that President Trump has weapons-grade persuasion skills, and so, by my view of the world, it is no accident the president and I both saw the persuasive power of #JobsNotMobs. Almost any trained persuader would see it immediately.

  If you follow politics, you know the news media outlets that are the least friendly to President Trump, including the New York Times, don’t often describe him as having useful skills. In this case, they had to leave out the context of my persuasion skills, and the president’s too, in order to tell the story without accidentally complimenting either of us for having a valuable talent. By omitting context, the Times turned a story about persuasion talent into a story about popularity. If you were not aware of the context, you would not know anything was missing.

  People who are often the subject of news and articles, such as me, know that perhaps 60 percent of the time the reporting is either completely wrong or lacks important context that would change your opinion of the situation. If, during the course of this book, you find yourself thinking I am far too distrustful of experts, the media, and people in general, you have to understand my context. If you see a story about a stranger, you usually can’t tell how accurate it is. But when I see a story about me, I know exactly what they get wrong. The same is true for nearly every negative story you hear about me on the Internet. I know the various scandalous stories about me are fake because I know what context they leave out. But you can’t tell. As I said, my best guess is that the news about me is wrong or misleading about 60 percent of the time. And the mistakes are not always harmless. I’ve seen published stories about me that claim I’m part of the Alt-Right, a Holocaust-denier, and the creator of Garfield. None of those things are true, but at least two of them could get me into a bar fight if someone believed them.

  My assumption is that negative stories about other public figures, and other major issues in the news, are similarly wrong or misleading. Here’s a good rule of thumb.

  Reports about famous people and other newsworthy topics are either wrong or misleading about 60 percent of the time, often because they lack context. Wait a few days before forming an opinion on anything new, just in case context is missing. It usually is.

  LISTENING TO THE EXPERTS

  I don’t recommend ignoring experts, no matter the field. But sometimes you will need to violate the advice of experts to accomplish anything meaningful. I’ll give you some examples.

  In 1988, while still working my corporate job at the local phone company, I tried to become a cartoonist in my spare time. I submitted samples of my work to the major syndication companies that sell comics to newspapers all over the world. Four of the companies receiving my samples, staffed by the top experts in the world on the commercial value of comic strips, rejected me. One syndication company said yes. Dilbert went on to become one of the most successful comic properties of all time. Four out of five experts were wrong about my potential.

  I used to be an expert myself. When I worked for my local phone company, my job was to predict the costs and benefits of financial decisions over three to five years. My estimates were approximately as accurate as what one might expect from a squirrel with a spreadsheet. I was an expert, and I was almost always terribly wrong. In my defense, people who do financial predictions on complicated situations are wrong most of the time. And when they are right, it is luck.

  We live in a world in which it is dangerous to ignore the advice of experts, but it is almost as dangerous to follow their advice. The trick is to know when the experts are the solution and when they are the jailers of your mental prison.

  I find it most useful to believe experts when the situation is simple and there is some historical situation much like it. In those cases, experts have a good handle on what works and what doesn’t. But for situations in which there is overwhelming complexity, there is no historical pattern that is predictive, and experts disagree, treat that sort of expert opinion as no more useful than an educated guess.

  FAKE NEWS FILTER

  One of the most useful systems I have developed for understanding the world involves routinely flipping back and forth between CNN and Fox News coverage. When I encounter someone who is stuck in either one of the two silos, left or right, I can quickly recognize the situation because they lack awareness of the argument on the other side. It is one thing to disagree with an opposing viewpoint, but it is a far bigger problem if you have never heard it. And that is a common situation in American politics.

  Recently I asked a prominent Democrat if he was aware that smart people such as Bill Gates believe modern nuclear technology—specifically the Gen IV plants that are safe from meltdowns and eat nuclear waste from other sites as their fuel—are the most promising path for dealing with the risk of climate change. He said he was unaware of it, and he didn’t think others in his political peer group were aware of it either. For many Democrats, the risk of climate change is seen as catastrophic, and yet their news silo prevents too many of them from being aware of the most promising way to address it. Stories without proper context are a dangerous type of fake news, and often the hardest to spot. Here are some tips on identifying potential fake news.

  Four-Point Check: News that is true will generally be reported the same on right-leaning news sites Fox News and Breitbart, as well as on left-leaning CNN and MSNBC. If they all say a hurricane is heading your way, pack your bags. If only the right-leaning news sites or only the left-leaning news outlets report something as fact, it probably isn’t.

  Team Bias: The “side” that is out of power is more likely to generate fake news. When President Obama was in office, Fox News told you he was destroying the country in a thousand ways. CNN was a bit more balanced about President Obama, and more likely to talk of his accomplishments. Under President Trump, CNN pivoted to nonstop negativity about Trump’s performance, and Fox News became more of a cheerleader. The news outlet whose political side is out of power does the most fearmongering because that’s what sells to their viewers. The side that has its preferred president in power has the advantage of being able to point to some accomplishments over time, even if they have to exaggerate to do so.

  Mind Reading: Look for signs that news pundits are reading the minds of politicians to find problems. That usually means things are not as bad as the headlines suggest. The news business needs a full pipeline of news—preferably the bad kind—to feed their business model. If all they can find to complain about is their own opinion about the unspoken thoughts of strangers, the world is in a good place.

  Doom Predictions: Look for signs that the reported bad news is really a prediction of doom from someone who is a political partisan. Predictions of doom from cheerleaders for one team or another are almost always exaggerated.

  Manufactured Outrages: Look for signs that pundits are actively misinterpreting, or taking out of context, someone’s comments that would have been no big scandal without the devious sleight of hand.

  Absurdity: If you see news that is so absurd it is literally unbelievable, that’s usually because it isn’t true. The old saying in the news business is that a dog biting a man is not news, but a man biting a dog is. It would be highly unusual for a man to bite a dog, but one could imagine it happening in our crazy world. So that doesn’t qualify as absurd, just unlikely. The absurd case would be a story about a pet cemetery located near a nuclear waste site that reanimated a dead dog that went on to bite someone.

  Fog of War: For breaking news, don’t believe the first quotes you hear, the body counts, the implications for the future, whose fault it is, or much else about the story until some of the noise settles down. Experience tells us that the initial reports on most things are inaccurate.

  News that is reported the same by news outlets on both the left and the right is probably true. If you only see a story reported by news sites that lean in one direction, it probably isn’t true.

  PERSUASION

  As I have mentioned too often, when I was in my twenties, I took an evening class to learn to be a hypnotist. That launched me on a decades-long quest to better understand how the human mind works, with a special interest in learning how to persuade. The most important thing one learns as a hypnotist is that people are not fundamentally rational when it comes to many of life’s biggest questions. Instead, we are a species that makes one irrational decision after another and then we cover our tracks by concocting “reasons” after the fact. In other words, we are not so much a rational species as a species that experiences the illusion of being rational. If you don’t understand that basic quality of human nature, you will be trapped forever in your mental prison. Your persistent belief in your own rationality is the primary illusion that controls your life. Once you learn to see past that illusion, the walls of your mental prison will start to melt away.

  If people were rational, you would observe that they changed their opinions on topics such as religion and politics when presented with new information that contradicts existing beliefs. But we don’t see anything like that, at least not commonly. Instead, we see people ignoring facts, imagining things that don’t exist, accusing the other team of bad character, believing coincidences mean more than they do, and generally acting irrationally no matter what facts are in evidence.

  We humans can be rational about the little stuff, when we have no emotional investment. But most of what we care about has plenty of emotion, including your romance, family, career, religion, politics, lifestyle, and even hobbies. Irrationality dominates our important decisions, but it is generally wearing a rational disguise that you unwittingly provide.

  If you want to understand the world as it is, instead of the myth of human rationality, any one of these books will set you free. I recommend reading them in this order:

  Influence—by Robert Cialdini

  The Power of Habit—by Charles Duhigg

  Thinking, Fast and Slow—by Daniel Kahneman

  Win Bigly—by Scott Adams

  For more reading on the same topic, do an Internet search on “persuasion reading list” to see my own recommendations, which I sometimes update.

  If you think humans are rational about their biggest priorities, you are poorly equipped to navigate life.

  MANAGING EMBARRASSMENT

  Earlier in this book, I told you it is more effective to think of your ego as a tool than it is to think of it as who you are. But that is easier said than done. Our egos control us through fear, and often that fear is an illusion. Here are the two key exercises you can use over your lifetime to keep your ego from being your jailer.

  Put yourself in potentially embarrassing situations on a regular basis just to maintain practice. If you get embarrassed as planned, watch how one year later you are still alive. Maybe you even have a funny story because of it.

  And . . .

  Note how other people’s embarrassments mean little to you when you are an observer. That’s how much your embarrassments mean to them: nothing.

  Using those two techniques, I have evolved from being embarrassed about just about everything to having almost no sense of shame whatsoever. Like most things in life, practice matters. If you practice controlling your ego, you can learn to do it effectively over time. It doesn’t happen overnight, but if you work at it, you’ll see big gains in a year. And the gains will accumulate.

  CHANGE WHAT YOU DO TO CHANGE HOW YOU THINK

  Your brain makes decisions and causes your body to do whatever it is you decide to do. But it also works the other way, and that is an important tool for escaping your mental prisons. You can change how you think by changing what your body is doing.

  In the simplest example, if you travel and talk to people from different cultures, the relocation of your body helps a great deal to expand your mind.

  You have probably noticed how radically your mood and your thoughts can change after exercise, eating, and even having sex. And if you don’t get enough sleep, you know your thoughts take a different path than if you did. One of the most important conceptual shifts you can make is the realization that you can program your thoughts and your attitudes by taking care of your health and fitness.

  How many times have you considered a challenge and decided it was too overwhelming to take on because you were tired, hungry, or physically weak? And how many times have you noticed that being in good health with lots of energy persuades you to take on bigger challenges and more risks of nonlethal embarrassment? I’m describing most of you. If you want to think more effectively, make sure you manage your body in a way that gets you there. Learn to eat right and exercise right. Treat sleep as a learned skill. Those topics are beyond the scope of this book, but you would do well to read my book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big to learn how to create simple systems to get all of that done.