Flip the Board (A Tribute to Scott Adams)

If the game is rigged, if the frame is hostile, if the rules are designed to drain you—don’t “try harder.” Flip the board. Turn the table. Change the game.

Scott Adams—the creator of Dilbert—died on January 13, 2026, at 68, after a battle with metastatic prostate cancer. I’m not writing this to litigate his life. I’m writing this because one of his ideas is clean, durable, and useful—especially now.

Because most people lose for a simple reason:

They accept the board.

Most conflicts aren’t about facts. They’re about who gets to define what’s happening.

If I can force you to argue inside my assumptions, I can beat you even when I’m wrong—because you’re spending your energy inside a maze I designed.

Scott’s work (especially later) orbited this: persuasion, framing, reframing—how human beings get “locked” into mental models and then can’t see exits. He talked explicitly about reframing as a practical tool for changing outcomes in real life.

So “flip the board” isn’t a tantrum move. It’s a competence move.

It means:

• stop debating inside a trap

• stop optimizing within someone else’s scoreboard

• stop begging for “fairness” in a game that never offered it

• replace the frame entirely

But one of the most valuable things he pushed—over and over—was the power of reframing: the idea that the world changes when you change the lens.

And near the end, he left a simple request: be useful, pay it forward—make what you learned matter for someone else.

So that’s what I’m doing here.

If you’ve been stuck, stop pushing harder on a door that opens the other way.

Flip the board.