What Scott Adams Saw
He predicted Trump. Predicted the backlash. Predicted the cost. And he paid it anyway.
Scott Adams spent his life teaching people that the mind is a moist computer you can reprogram. On January 1st, 2026, knowing the end was near, he programmed his final message. This morning, his ex-wife read it to the world.
I learned to read sprawled out on the floor of my dad’s office in my underwear, working through stacks of Dilbert collections. I was almost six. I didn’t understand half the corporate jokes. But something about that bespectacled engineer and his quiet resistance to pointy-haired authority planted a seed I didn’t know I was carrying.
In 2015, that seed bloomed.
I stumbled onto Scott’s blog and watched him do something no one else in media could do. While every pundit laughed at Donald Trump’s announcement speech, Scott saw the architecture underneath. He identified the techniques. The anchoring. The pacing and leading. The strategic ambiguity that let supporters hear what they needed to hear. He predicted Trump would win the Republican nomination. Then the general. He was nearly alone in this.
He was right.
Scott had an easier path. Stay quiet. Keep the speaking fees. Keep the mainstream access. Die comfortable and forgotten. He opened his mouth instead. Said what he saw. Lost forty percent of his income. Lost the speaking career. California made clear he wasn't welcome among polite company. But Scott had already taught us the principle that would define his legacy: systems beat goals. And his system was saying what he saw, regardless of consequence.
Scott wrote a book called How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big that changed more lives than Dilbert ever did. The core insight fit on an index card. Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous pre-success failure. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems.
Running a marathon in under four hours is a goal. Exercising daily is a system. Making a million dollars is a goal. Building skills that compound is a system.
Goals seduce you with the fantasy of arrival. Systems keep you in the game long enough for luck to find you.
The lesson I carry closest came from a podcast. Scott explained that as a cartoonist, you’ve got 360-plus strips to make every year. You cannot expect every one to land. You think instead about batting average. Can you bat .200? One in five that really connects? And is there enough variety that somewhere in those strips, there’s something for everybody?
I’m not a cartoonist. I don’t draw comic strips. But I do write articles and short books, and I apply that insight every single day. Show up. Do the work. Trust the batting average. Some pieces will sing. Most will serve. A few will miss entirely. The system doesn’t require perfection. It requires presence.
Scott gave us the talent stack. You don’t need to be world-class at any single thing. You need to be good enough at several things that combine in ways no one else has combined them.
He wasn’t the best artist. He said so himself. He wasn’t the best writer. Wasn’t the best businessman. But he was also a trained hypnotist who studied persuasion the way engineers study load-bearing structures. And when he combined mediocre art with decent writing with hypnosis training with business sense, the mixture produced something no one else could replicate. Dilbert emerged from that stack. So did books that taught persuasion to people who’d never heard the word “framing.” So did a daily podcast that built a community of hundreds of thousands who felt less alone because a cartoonist from Pleasanton showed up every morning with coffee and observations.
He also taught writing. His piece “The Day You Became A Better Writer” is circulating again today. Simple rules. Short sentences. Prune the fluff. Your first sentence needs to grab the reader. A good argument in five sentences will sway more people than a brilliant argument in a hundred. He practiced what he preached for thirty-five years.
He believed the mind was re-programmable. He used affirmations before anyone took them seriously. He wrote “I, Scott Adams, will be a famous syndicated cartoonist” fifteen times a day until reality bent toward the declaration. Some called it woo. Scott called it hacking your own operating system. The results spoke for themselves.
In May of last year, Scott announced he had prostate cancer that had spread to his bones. By November, he couldn’t draw anymore. The focal dystonia that had plagued him for decades finally won. He kept writing the strips while someone else illustrated them. He kept showing up on camera every morning with his coffee. The community grew because people recognized something rare. A man facing death who refused to perform grief or milk sympathy. A man applying his systems to mortality itself.
On January 1st, knowing the end was close, Scott composed a message to be read after he was gone.
“If you are reading this, things did not go well for me. I have a few things to say before I go. My body failed before my brain. I am of sound mind as I write this.”
He reflected on his marriages, his evolution from cartoonist to author, the books that worked and the one that didn’t make a dent. He was honest about all of it.
But he opened with the part that will stay with me.
“Many of my Christian friends have asked me to find Jesus before I go. I’m not a believer, but I have to admit, the risk-reward calculation for doing so looks attractive to me. So here I go: I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, and look forward to spending an eternity with him.”
The systems thinker, to the end. Running the numbers even on eternity. And then stepping through the door.
His closing words were pure Scott:
“I had an amazing life. I gave it everything I had. If you got any benefits from my work, I’m asking you to pay it forward as best you can. That’s the legacy I want. Be useful. And please know I loved you all to the end.”
What’s especially hard about Scott’s death is that he knew the whole world was about to change. For the better. For good. And he’s not going to see it.
I never met Scott Adams. Never exchanged a single message with him. But I learned to read on his humor. I learned to see political reality through his breakdowns. I learned to treat my creative output as a batting average rather than a referendum on my worth.
The kid in his underwear on the office floor grew up and started writing books of his own.
Scott taught us that most people sleepwalk through systems they can’t see, controlled by patterns they can’t name. He taught us that the first act of freedom is opening your eyes. The second is refusing to close them again, no matter what it costs.
He saw what was coming in 2015. He saw what it would cost him to say it. He said it anyway.
That’s the real talent stack. Not skills. Courage compounding over time until it becomes something that can’t be bought, can’t be cancelled, and can’t be taken to the grave.
He left it all here. For us.
Now it’s ours to carry.
<3EKO
Thank you for reading.
I love you.
And Scott had the humility and courage to admit that having gotten the Covid shots is what most likely caused his cancer.
It warmed my heart to know that Scott accepted Christ as his personal savior before he took his last breath.
I’d love to see the cartoon Scott would create after seeing the face of Jesus. 🥰
That is a beautiful essay. I didn't have any reality on this man. But I am angry and sad at those who have created and perpetrated the shot and thus caused the untimely deaths of so many wonderful humans. Thank you for the recommendations on Scott Adams' books. I'll be looking into those now. We are fortunate that he left his legacy in print for the rest of us.