People often ask me if I mind all the personal attacks that people leave in the comment section to my blog. If you’ve been following the blog, you know that I get a healthy dollop of personal abuse.
My incoming e-mail is worse; it’s a virtual festival of Scott-bashing. My friends and acquaintances are only slightly better. If someone eats at one of my restaurants and gets a French fry that doesn’t meet their standard, believe me, I hear about it.
Even the media likes to take their shots. For example, the New York Times once referred to me as “pale and bespectacled.” The San Jose Mercury News said, “He’s not at all like Arnold Schwarzenegger. The bald spot on the back of his head is marching toward the bald spot on the front of his head like Patton toward Montgomery.” Nice.
On a typical day, I receive a load of personal and professional insults that would drive normal people to drink. Many of the criticisms are clearly INTENDED to hurt. And so it’s a natural question as to whether the criticism and insults bother me personally.
Answer: Not much
I’ve discovered that criticism is money in the bank. For example, when Dilbert first appeared in newspapers, it didn’t get much traction. The comic appeared in fewer than 100 papers after running for 3 years. That’s when I started putting my e-mail address in the strip. I wanted to know what the readers were thinking. I soon discovered via e-mail that most readers hated my comic. In the early days, Dilbert wasn’t focused on office life. It was about life in general. The readers weighed in and told me that when Dilbert was at work, they loved it. But since he wasn’t often at work, the comic sucked most of the time. And by the way, it appeared to be drawn by a retarded squirrel on meth.
So I changed the focus of the strip to the office and it took off. Now Dilbert runs in over 2,000 papers in 65 countries. It still appears to be drawn by a retarded squirrel on meth, but people got used to it.
My other superpower is that I don’t mind embarrassing myself in public. If I had to pick one quality that best predicts success (other than wanting to be successful) it would be the willingness to risk embarrassment.
Take this blog, for example. I could afford to pay an editor to correct all of my writing before all of you nitpickers notice that I can’t spell common words. Or I could save that money via a process that I call “not giving a shit.” Ka-ching!
A large part of being a big-time cartoonist involves live interviews on camera, and giving speeches to large crowds. Those activities terrify people that have a normal fear of embarrassment. Not me. If I’m going to embarrass myself, I want witnesses, and lots of them. The entertainment value seems wasted if only one person notices.