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

by Scott Adams

saw one of my coworkers transform from a hesitant and unimpressive personality to confidence and power within two months of his promotion.

we are designed to become in reality h...

wake at 4:00 A.M. to draw before my commute, then work all day in my cubicle prison and come home to draw all night.

Never assume you understand the odds of things.

I’m wired to think things will work out well for me no matter how unlikely it might seem.

hypnosis training*

Try it?

my drawing improved dramatically on the Wacom because it’s so easy to make small adjustments.

As time went by and Dilbert became more well known, more speaking requests flowed in, often several per day. I raised my price to $10,000, and the requests kept coming. I tried $15,000, and the requests accelerated. By the time I got to $25,000, the speakers’ bureaus had started to see me as a source of bigger commissions and advised me to raise my price to $35,000, then $45,000. The largest offer I ever turned down, because of a scheduling conflict, was $100,000 to speak for an hour on any topic I wanted.

All I needed to do was overprice myself and see what happened.

Wow

As simple as that sounds in retrospect, I doubt I would have taken that path on my own.

It’s a cliché that who you know is helpful for success. What is less obvious is that you don’t need to know CEOs and billionaires. Sometimes you just need a fr...

My searches were too broad.

It’s a phenomenon that people in creative jobs experience often, but it might be unfamiliar to the rest of you. Suddenly, out of nowhere, two totally unrelated thoughts—separated by topic, time, and distance—came together in my head. For

Connecting the dots! How could *blank* apply to *blank*?

My secret assassin had a name, and now I knew it. It felt like a turning point.

Name your imaginary friends and enemies

wouldn’t be satisfied simply escaping from my prison of silence; I was planning to escape, free the other inmates, shoot the warden, and burn down the prison.

The bigger issue for me was that the Botox masked the impact of any other type of treatment I might want to experiment with.

going to focus on ordinary talents and combinations of ordinary talents that add up to something extraordinary.

One helpful rule of thumb for knowing where you might have a little extra talent is to consider what you were obsessively doing before you were ten years old.

Yep

There’s a strong connection between what interests you and what you’re good at. People are naturally drawn to the things they feel comfortable doing, and comfort is a marker for talent.

But my unscientific observation is that people are born wired for certain preferences.

Those preferences drive behavior, and that’s what can make a person willing to practice a skill.

Another clue to talent involves tolerance for risk.

was willing to take a significant personal risk for my so-called art, and this was in sharp contrast to my otherwise risk-averse lifestyle. People generally accept outsized risk only when they expect big payoffs.

I eagerly accepted the risk of expulsion and great bodily harm that comes with insulting larger kids. My risk profile predicted my future.

Counts for taking risk in love as well

Where there is a tolerance for risk, there is often talent.

The smartest system for discerning your best path to success involves trying lots of different things—sampling, if you will.

For entrepreneurial ventures it might mean quickly bailing out if things don’t come together quickly.

There have been times I stuck with bad ideas for far too long out of a misguided sense that persistence is a virtue.

Things that will someday work out well start out well.

Things that will never work start out bad and...

Small successes can grow into big ones, but failures rarely g...

the quality of the early products was a poor predictor of success. The predictor is that customers were clamoring for the bad versions of the product before the good versions were even invented.

They all preferred the comics in which Dilbert was in the office.

So I changed the focus of the strip to the workplace, and that turned out to be the spark in the gasoline.

the thing that predicted Dilbert’s success in year one is that it quickly gained a small ...

What you’re looking for is an unusually strong reaction from a subset of the public, even if the majority hates it.

the enthusiasm model, if I may call it that, is a bit like the x factor.

time, the products that inspire excitement typically evolve to have quality too.

One of the best ways to detect the x factor is to watch what customers do about your idea or product, not what they say. People tend to say what they think you want to hear or what they think will cause the least pain. What people do is far more honest.

It’s generally true that if no one is excited about your art/product/idea

idea in the beginning, they never will be.

If the first commercial version of your work excites no one to action, it’s time to move on to something different. Don’t be fooled by the opinions ...

He tried it, and with some coaching he duplicated my swing, more or less. He was fully coachable at the age of three.

Some adults—maybe most—never have that capability.

It makes more sense to craft a life plan for yourself that embraces your natural inclinations, assuming you’re not a cannibal.

You’re not doomed to mediocrity. You simply need to pick a life strategy that rewards novelty seeking more than mindless repetition. For example, you might want to be an architect, designer, home builder, computer programmer, entrepreneur, Web site designer, or even doctor. All of those professions require disciplined study, but every class will be different, and later on all of your projects will be different. Your skills will increase with experience, which is the more fun cousin of practice. Practice involves putting your consciousness in suspended animation. Practicing is not living. But when you build your skills through an ever-changing sequence of experiences, you’re alive.

Success isn’t magic; it’s generally the product of picking a good system and following it until luck finds you.

for marketing reasons, a typical book is focused on a single topic to make it easier to sell and packed with filler to get the page count up. No one has time to sort through that much filler.

every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success.

The idea is that you can raise your market value by being merely good—not extraordinary—at more than one skill.