"The best advice I got was before I was a syndicated cartoonist," Adams tells Business Insider. "I asked advice of a professional cartoonist, Jack Cassady, who had a TV show called 'Funny Business' years ago on PBS. I wrote to him, and he gave me this advice: 'It’s a competitive business, but don’t give up.'"

"That sounds very non-profound, but let me fast forward the story," Adams continues. "I put some comics together and sent them to magazines 14 The New Yorker, Playboy 14 but they rejected them. So I said, 'Oh well, I tried.' A year later, I get a second letter from Cassady. He’d been cleaning his office and came across my original samples. He said he was just writing to me to make sure that I hadn’t given up. And I had. So I took out my art supplies, and I decided to raise my sights."

"I had to do one more thing for luck to find me," he says. "As it turns out, one of the perhaps six people on planet Earth who could have looked at my cartoon and said 'yes' was a woman married to a guy who was the spitting image of, and had the same job as, Dilbert. It required that one extra attempt, and that wouldn’t have happened without the best advice anybody ever gave me, which is don’t give up."