How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

by Scott Adams

money distorts truth like a hippo in a thong.

Failure always brings something valuable with it.

If success were easy, everyone would do it. It takes effort. That fact works to your advantage because it keeps lazy people out of the game.

timing is often the biggest component of success.

Walk away from the soul suckers. You have a right to pursue happiness and an equal right to run as fast as you can from the people who would deny it.

A great strategy for success in life is to become good at something, anything, and let that feeling propel you to new and better victories. Success can be habit-forming.

Overcoming obstacles is normally an unavoidable part of the process. But you also need to know when to quit. Persistence is useful, but there’s no point in being an idiot about it.

Everything you learn becomes a shortcut for understanding something else.

Sometimes the only way to know what you can do is to test yourself.

When I took a class on how to train our dog, one of the first things we learned is that the quality of the dog treats made a big difference in how cooperative the dog would be. The trainer had the good stuff, and I believe she could make those dogs play the piano if she wanted.

People respond to energy in others.

Step one in your search for happiness is to continually work toward having control of your schedule.

Optimists notice more opportunities, have more energy because of their imagined future successes, and take more risks. Optimists make themselves an easy target for luck to find them.

Happiness is the only useful goal in life.