If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Rolling Stone may receive an affiliate commission.
The death of Dilbert creator, Scott Adams, has propelled a number of his books back onto the bestsellers charts, including the author’s popular advice books, which sought to push everything from shifting personal perspectives to rallying independent thought.
While he initially made his name as an illustrator and comic strip creator, Adams eventually began writing self-help books as a way to reach more people with his work. His 2014 book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, became the first of three bestselling releases that have come to be known as the “Scott Adams Success Series.“
Reframe Your Brain: The User Interface for Happiness and Success
One of those books, Reframe Your Brain: The User Interface for Happiness and Success, has returned to number one on Amazon’s self-help chart and is in the top five of Amazon’s overall bestsellers chart.
In the book, Adams offers tips for how to shift your perspectives and retrain your brain to see situations and challenges from a more positive point of view. Among the lessons he discusses: focusing on managing your energy and figuring out what to expend it on, rather than being obsessed with managing your time.
He also encourages readers to network and meet new people each week, positing that success doesn’t depend on who you know, but rather on how many people you know. And, as Adams writes in the introduction, even days where you may have “nothing” to do can be reframed as opportunities to practice good posture and breathing, or to set your intentions and goals for the following day.
Most importantly, Adams says to learn to tackle challenges one step at a time, rather than trying to get from 0 to 100 in one move. The “usual frame,” per Adams, is that, “the effort is so big and daunting I can’t even start.” How you should reframe it: “What’s the smallest thing I can do that moves me in the right direction?”
As the publisher notes state, “These instant perspective-shifters will help you feel better on demand and succeed at any endeavor,” whether you’re looking for “personal fulfillment, business and career success, mental health, social activities, and physical well-being. If only 10 percent of the reframes work for you, your life will never be the same.”
How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life
Two other Adams books have returned to the bestsellers charts following his passing, including this book, which is a guide to finding success in career ambitions, health and fitness goals and personal fulfilment.
Originally released in 2013, Amazon has the second edition of How to Fail available, which features updated content and anecdotes. As the publisher notes, state, this book is a “contrarian guide that embraces failure as a path to success, offering counterintuitive advice on productivity, career growth, and entrepreneurship.”
Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America
The third book in the “Scott Adams Success Series” is also back on the charts, though Amazon has it categorized under its “propaganda and political psychology” section.
The controversial 2019 release posits that Americans are trapped in an opinion bubble, with Adams writing that, “Even the smartest people can slip into loserthink’s seductive grasp.” His argument: that too many people accept what they’re told and are “underinformed,” without thinking outside the box — or thinking for themselves.
Amazon has the second edition of the book available for purchase online; Adams writes in the intro that his original version was pulled from shelves in 2023 due to the “cancellation hysteria of the time.”
In fact, much of this was due to Adams’ contentious political beliefs, which often involved race. In 2022, more than 75 newspapers dropped the daily Dilbert cartoon strip after Adams introduced a Black character, which he used to mock “wokeness” (the character in the comic strip identified as white and LGBTQ+ for work purposes). Adams also called Black Americans a “hate group” that white Americans should “get the hell away from,” though he writes in Loserthink that he was simply encouraging white Americans to “stay away from any group that is trained… to believe that they’re part of the enemy class.”
Of course, the controversy only fueled Adams’ efforts to promote Loserthink, with the author writing that “the world needs this book more than ever.”
Adams died on Jan. 13 after a battle with cancer. He was 68.
