Success Quote by Scott Adams

Promotion is supposed to be the gold star; Adams treats it like a trapdoor. "The only risk of failure is promotion" flips corporate mythology on its head with the kind of office-gallows logic that made Dilbert feel less like a comic strip and more like a weekly HR leak.

The intent is compact and sneaky: redefine "failure" not as getting fired, but as being elevated into a role where you can finally be blamed. In many workplaces, staying put is survivable precisely because your job is bounded, your metrics are known, and your mistakes are containable. Promotion often means vaguer expectations, more politics, and fewer tangible outputs - which is to say, more ways to disappoint. The joke lands because it recognizes that hierarchies frequently reward competence by extracting it from the work itself and replacing it with management theater.

The subtext is cynical but familiar: organizations don't always promote to maximize talent; they promote to fill seats, manage appearances, and spread liability upward. If you were good at the actual thing, the system may "reward" you by putting you in charge of people doing the thing, then grading you on morale, budgets, and executive mind-reading. The punchline's bleakness is its precision: you can't fail in a role no one notices; you can fail spectacularly once you're visible.

Context matters too. Adams built a career in the 1990s-2000s era of corporate cubicles, reorgs, and middle-management bloat, when "career growth" often meant more meetings, less agency, and a title that mainly increased your exposure.