Your Accomplishments Are Suspiciously Hard to Verify by Scott Adams

Author:Scott Adams
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781449415075
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC

www.andrewsmcmeel.com

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Introduction

Have you noticed that people aren’t good at comparing things? That works to your advantage. It’s easy to mask your incompetence as long as you’re free to pick your own points of reference. For example, if you reduce expenses at your workplace, you can claim success even if any moron easily could have reduced expenses by twice as much. The trick is to compare your results with the hypothetical results of an imaginary person who wasn’t even trying. Keep your boss focused on the important thing—that you reduced expenses, dang it. Case closed. No more questions. Moving on.

Another time-honored approach for making your accomplishments difficult to verify is to work on projects that aren’t expected to bear fruit until some undefined day in the future. In the window of time between initiating your deception and the moment you are unmasked as a fraud, you can be gaining experience, padding your resume, and job-hopping faster than a tiny cowboy in a porcupine rodeo. (I will pause now while you savor that excellent analogy.)

Perceived success is a numbers game. Don’t be afraid to bounce from project to project. If you come in contact with enough random situations, sooner or later, by pure chance, you’ll end up working with someone competent. Then you can call that person your partner and claim coauthorship of every idea that comes out of his or her mouth. Try to use the phrase “I forget which one of us thought of that idea” whenever you get a chance. That way you’re not lying; you’re simply forgetting details that aren’t important. You’re a Big Picture person.

At meetings, when one of your coworkers describes an actual accomplishment, do the slow clap and say, “FINALLY, you listened to my advice.” Then change the subject.

If software is your thing, claim you removed a thousand lines of code and made the system 20 percent faster. Be sure to point out that the improvement is hard to notice because more people are using the system now.

People have bad memories. You can use that to your advantage, too. Speak of your project in glowing, hypothetical terms, under the guise of making some larger point, and hope that repetition makes it stick. For example, you could say, “Suppose my project saves $10 million. That would be twice as good as Carl’s project, right?” If you throw around the $10 million figure often enough people will remember it as a fact.

These are but a few of the many ways you can make your accomplishments difficult to verify. For more, study this book and pay special attention to any strip featuring Wally.

Good luck.

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