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the cycle of permanent presuccess failure.
Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system. That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.
being a serial entrepreneur is a system.
goal is a specific objective that you either achieve or don’t sometime in the future. A system is something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run. If you do something every day, it’s a system. If you’re waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it’s a goal.
Systems have no deadlines, and on any given day you probably can’t tell if they’re moving you in the right direction.
When goal-oriented people succeed in big ways, it makes news, and it makes an interesting story. That gives you a distorted view of how often goal-driven people succeed.
The minimum requirement of a system is that a reasonable person expects it to work more often than not. Buying lottery tickets is not a system no matter how regularly you do it.
I was agnostic about what specific sort of business I would someday run. All I knew for sure is that I needed to be ready when the time was right.
The idea was to create something that had value and—this next part is the key—I wanted the product to be something that was easy to reproduce in unlimited quantities. I didn’t want to sell my time, at least not directly, because that model has an upward limit.
Had I been goal oriented instead of system oriented, I imagine I would have given up after the first several failures.
being systems oriented, I felt myself growing more capable every day, no matter the fate of the project I happened to be working on.
Little did they realize that looking good on paper was my best skill.
the universe makes sure there isn’t much of a link between job performance in the corporate world and outcomes.
If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it. It sounds trivial and obvious, but if you unpack the idea it has extraordinary power.
Few of these wishful people have decided to have any of the things they wish for.
Wishing starts in the mind and generally stays there.
When you decide to be successful in a big way, it means you acknowledge the price and you’re willing to pay it. That price might be sacrificing your personal life to get good grades in school, pursuing a college major that is deadly boring but lucrative, putting off having kids, missing time with your family, or taking business risks that put you in jeopardy for embarrassment, divorce, or bankruptcy. Successful people don’t wish for success; they decide to pursue it. And to pursue it effectively, they need a system. Success always has a pri...
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If you do selfishness right, you automatically become a net benefit to society. Successful people generally don’t burden the world. Corporate raiders, overpaid CEOs, and tyrannical dictators are the exceptions. Most successful people give more than they personally consume, in the form of taxes, charity work, job creation, and so on. My best estimate is that I will personally consume about 10 percent of the total wealth I create over my career.
enlightened selfishness because that sort of pettiness can bite you in the ass later.
The most important form of selfishness involves spending time on your fitness, eating right, pursuing your career, and still spending quality time with your family and friends.
The problem is that our obsession with generosity causes people to think in the short term. We skip exercise to spend an extra hour helping at home. We buy fast food to save time to help a coworker with a problem. At every turn, we cheat our own future to appear generous today.
Being selfish doesn’t mean being a sociopath. It just means you take the long view of things.
In hard times, or even presuccess times, society and at least one cartoonist want you to take care of yourself first.
I make choices that maximize my personal energy because that makes it easier to manage all of the other priorities.
it also means having something in my life that makes me excited to wake up.
You’ve seen for yourself that when a sad person enters a room, the mood in the room drops. And when you talk to a cheerful person who is full of energy, you automatically feel a boost.
I’m suggesting that by becoming a person with good energy, you lift the people around you. That positive change will improve your social life, your love life, your family life, and your career.
To others it will simply appear that you are in a good mood. And you will be.
Cartooning was just one of a dozen entrepreneurial ideas I tried out during my corporate days.
The main reason I blog is because it energizes me. I could rationalize my blogging by telling you it increases traffic on Dilbert.com by 10 percent or that it keeps my mind sharp or that I think the world is a better place when there are more ideas in it. But the main truth is that blogging charges me up. It gets me going. I don’t need another reason.
This book is another example of something that gets my energy up. I like to think that someone might read this collection of ideas and find a few thoughts that help. That possibility is tremendously motivating for me. So while writing takes me away from my friends and family for a bit, it makes me a better person when I’m with them. I’m happier and more satisfied with my life. The energy metric helps make my choices easier.
a person like me should seek to minimize shopping (and I do), while a person who gets a buzz from it should indulge,
The paradox of capitalism is that adding a bunch of bad-sounding ideas together creates something incredible that is far more good than bad.
Capitalism inspires people to work hard, to take reasonable risks, and to create value for customers. On the whole, capitalism channels selfishness in a direction that benefits civilization, not counting a few fat cats who have figured out how to game the system.
If you look at any individual action that boosts your personal energy, it migh...
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I’ll get there soon. And when I do, I’ll feel energized and satisfied and be far more fun to be around.
Like capitalism, some forms of selfishness are enlightened.
The thought of writing a comic is fun, and it’s relatively easy because my brain is in exactly the right mode for that task.
At 6:00 A.M. I’m a creator, and by 2:00 P.M. I’m a copier.
At that time of day I have plenty of energy, and it makes exercise seem like a good idea.
In the late afternoon and early evening my hand is steady. I’m relaxed from exercising and ready to do some simple, mindless, mechanical tasks such as drawing the final art for Dilbert or paying bills online.
I didn’t have one either for the first sixteen years of my corporate life. So I did the next best thing by going to bed early and getting up at 4:00 A.M. to do my creative side projects. One of those projects became the sketches for Dilbert.
If the changes work, our evening will be even better than I imagined, or perhaps more productive. That’s great! But the changes will also introduce new opportunities for things to go wrong. This balance works well for Shelly because she has nerves of steel.
The cost of optimizing is that it’s exhausting and stress inducing, at least for people like me.
If the situation involves communication with others, simplification is almost always the right answer.
Optimizing is often the strategy of people who have specific goals and feel the need to do everything in their power to achieve them. Simplifying is generally the strategy of people who view the world in terms of systems. The best systems are simple, and for good reason. Complicated systems have more opportunities for failure.
Human nature is such that we’re good at following simple systems and not so good at following complicated systems.
Simple systems are probably the best way to achieve success. Once you have success, optimizing begins to have more value. Successful people and successful businesses have the luxury of being able to optimize toward perfection over time. Start-ups often do better by slapping together something that is 80 percent good and seeing how the pub...
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Another big advantage of simplification is that it frees up time, and time is one of your most val...
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When you are trying to decide between optimizing and simplifying, think of your entire day, not the handful of tasks in question. In other words, maximize your personal energy, not the number of tasks.
So not a checklist, but energy zone, where you know your mindset best matches a particular activity
