“Life is a closet filled with pool toys.”
—AMY POEHLER, ACTRESS AND COMEDIAN
If you’ve read E-Squared, you might remember that I used affirmations to launch my freelance writing career. I even sent myself postcards with reminders that, “I, Pam Grout, am a great writer.” “I, Pam Grout, have what it takes to sell to New York editors.”
So I was thrilled to discover there’s another writer out there who also used affirmations to kick off his career.
Scott Adams, the creator of the comic strip Dilbert, credits writing 15 affirmations a day (“I, Scott Adams, will be a famous cartoonist”) for his meteoric rise.
Doing affirmations started as a lark. At the time, he was taking a hypnosis class. One of his classmates mentioned that by affirming what you want, you draw that very thing into your life. He didn’t buy it at first, but figured, “What can it hurt? It’s worth an experiment.”
He started by getting a date with a girl who was clearly (at least in his mind) out of his league.
“At the time, I was a six, maybe a six-point-five. But she was a nine. The odds of her going out with me were long indeed,” he said.
But after several weeks of affirming just that, they ended up dating.
Still not convinced, he decided to ask for investment tips. He wanted to play the stock market.
Of course, it would have helped if he actually knew how to buy stocks. But nevertheless, he began writing affirmations about his stock-buying prowess. He woke up one night and, with startling clarity, heard Buy Chrysler. He was a wet-behind-the-ears kid at the time and had no idea how to actually make the purchase.
But as he followed Chrysler (this was during the Lee Iacocca days), the stock shot straight up, filling its investors’ pockets.
Next (and this time he was ready) he got a hint to invest in something called ASK computers. Sure enough, it quickly increased by 10, then 20 percent. Smugly, he sold it, happily pocketing the proceeds only to hear that it soon doubled and then tripled in value.
Next, he put his 15 affirmations a day to work on the GMAT test. He got a score of 77 the first time, which wasn’t high enough to get into UC Berkeley, his graduate school of choice.
He decided he needed a 94 if he had any hope of securing admission to his dream school.
“I knew I wasn’t really smart enough to get a 94, but I kept affirming and visualizing that number. I kept seeing a 94 peeking through that little window on the envelope,” he says.
He retook the test, even though he knew 77 was probably his limit.
Several weeks passed before the envelope arrived in his mail slot. He turned it over, looked in that little window, and, you guessed it, his score was 94.
So by the time he began affirming that “I, Scott Adams, am a famous cartoonist,” he was an old pro at affirmations. The universe had little choice but to reward him with the popular cartoon strip that, at last count, was syndicated in 2,000 newspapers around the world.
