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by
Scott Adams
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February 4 - February 10, 2020
Did my strategy make a difference, or is luck just luck, and everything else is just rationalization? Honestly, I don’t know. That’s why I suggest you compare my story with the stories of other people who found success and see if you notice any patterns.
Book Tease Goals are for losers. Your mind isn’t magic. It’s a moist computer you can program. The most important metric to track is your personal energy. Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success. Happiness is health plus freedom. Luck can be managed, sort of. Conquer shyness by being a huge phony (in a good way). Fitness is the lever that moves the world. Simplicity transforms ordinary into amazing.
Realistically, most people have poor filters for sorting truth from fiction, and there’s no objective way to know if you’re particularly good at it or not.
The Six Filters for Truth Personal experience (Human perceptions are iffy.) Experience of people you know (Even more unreliable.) Experts (They work for money, not truth.) Scientific studies (Correlation is not causation.) Common sense (A good way to be mistaken with complete confidence.) Pattern recognition (Patterns, coincidence, and personal bias look alike.)
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In our messy, flawed lives, the nearest we can get to truth is consistency.
When seeking truth, your best bet is to look for confirmation on at least two of the dimensions I listed.
over the years I have cultivated a unique relationship with failure. I invite it. I survive it. I appreciate it. And then I mug the shit out of it.
My hypothesis is that passionate people are more likely to take big risks in the pursuit of unlikely goals, and so you would expect to see more failures and more huge successes among the passionate.
Success caused passion more than passion caused success.
You already know that when your energy is right you perform better at everything you do, including school, work, sports, and even your personal life. Energy is good. Passion is bullshit.
A system is something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run.
My proposition is that if you study people who succeed, you will see that most of them follow systems, not goals.
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.
If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it.
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.
For starters, when it comes to the topic of generosity, there are three kinds of people in the world: Selfish Stupid Burden on others
If you do selfishness right, you automatically become a net benefit to society.
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.
I’m giving you permission to take care of yourself first, so you can do a better job of being generous in the long run.
Influence works best when the person being influenced has no objection to the suggested change.
The way I approach the problem of multiple priorities is by focusing on just one main metric: my energy. I make choices that maximize my personal energy because that makes it easier to manage all of the other priorities.
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.
My proposition is that organizing your life to optimize your personal energy will add up to something incredible that is more good than bad.
A simplifier will prefer the easy way to accomplish a task, while knowing that some amount of extra effort might have produced a better outcome. An optimizer looks for the very best solution even if the extra complexity increases the odds of unexpected problems. Allow me to compare and contrast the two approaches.
If the situation involves communication with others, simplification is almost always the right answer. If the task is something you can do all by yourself, or with a partner who is on your wavelength, optimizing might be a better path if you can control most variables in the situation.
If the cost of failure is high, simple tasks are the best because they are easier to manage and control.
maximize your personal energy, not the number of tasks.
it’s a good idea to dedicate certain sitting positions and certain work spaces to work and other spaces to relaxation or play.
Priorities are the things you need to get right so the things you love can thrive.
A powerful variation on the daydreaming method involves working on projects that have a real chance of changing the world, helping humanity, and/or making a billion dollars.
The smiling-makes-you-happy phenomenon is part of the larger and highly useful phenomenon of faking it until you make it.
I’ve come to believe that success at anything has a spillover effect on other things.
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.
In many cases, it’s your point of view that influences your behavior, not the universe. And you can control your point of view even when you can’t change the underlying reality.
we are designed to become in reality however we act.
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 friend who knows different things than you do. And you can always find one of those.
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.
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,
Small successes can grow into big ones, but failures rarely grow into successes.
In each of these examples, 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.
It’s generally true that if no one is excited about your art/product/idea in the beginning, they never will be.
There’s no denying the importance of practice. The hard part is figuring out what to practice.
The first filter in deciding where to spend your time is an honest assessment of your ability to practice.
The primary purpose of schools is to prepare kids for success in adulthood. That’s why it seems odd to me that schools don’t have required courses on the systems and practices of successful people. Success isn’t magic; it’s generally the product of picking a good system and following it until luck finds you. Unfortunately, schools barely have the resources to teach basic course work. Students are on their own to figure out the best systems for success.
The formula, roughly speaking, is that 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.
To put the success formula into its simplest form: Good + Good > Excellent
what I have that most artists and cartoonists do not have is years of corporate business experience plus an MBA from Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.
I knew about the Internet before most people had even heard of it.
