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by
Scott Adams
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February 4 - February 10, 2020
Affirmations are simply the practice of repeating to yourself what you want to achieve while imagining the outcome you want.
The biggest component of luck is timing.
The success of Dilbert is mostly a story of luck. But I did make it easier for luck to find me, and I was thoroughly prepared when it did. Luck won’t give you a strategy or a system—you have to do that part yourself.
I find it helpful to see the world as a slot machine that doesn’t ask you to put money in. All it asks is your time, focus, and energy to pull the handle over and over.
The pattern I noticed is that the affirmations only worked when I had a 100 percent unambiguous desire for success.
If your gut feeling (intuition) disagrees with the experts, take that seriously. You might be experiencing some pattern recognition that you can’t yet verbalize.
Humans are social animals. There are probably dozens of ways we absorb energy, inspiration, skills, and character traits from those around us. Sometimes we learn by example. Sometimes success appears more approachable and ordinary because we see normal people achieve it, and perhaps that encourages us to pursue schemes with higher payoffs. Sometimes the people around us give us information we need, or encouragement, or contacts, or even useful criticism. We can’t always know the mechanism by which others change our future actions, but it’s pretty clear it happens, and it’s important.
If you live near optimistic winners, those qualities are sure to rub off to some extent.
Given our human impulse to pick up the habits and energy of others, you can use that knowledge to literally program your brain the way you want. Simply find the people who most represent what you would like to become and spend as much time with them as you can without trespassing, kidnapping, or stalking. Their good habits and good energy will rub off on you.
That might sound selfish, but it’s not. Only a sociopath or a hermit can find happiness through extreme selfishness.
My definition of happiness is that it’s a feeling you get when your body chemistry is producing pleasant sensations in your mind.
We’re all born with a limited range of happiness, and the circumstances of life can only jiggle us around within the range.
The big part—the 80 percent of happiness—is nothing but a chemistry experiment.
For starters, the single biggest trick for manipulating your happiness chemistry is being able to do what you want, when you want.
It’s important to look at happiness in terms of timing because timing is easier to control than resources.
Step one in your search for happiness is to continually work toward having control of your schedule.
Happiness has more to do with where you’re heading than where you are.
The directional nature of happiness is one reason it’s a good idea to have a sport or hobby that leaves you plenty of room to improve every year.
Pessimism is often a failure of imagination. If you can imagine the future being brighter, it lifts your energy and gooses the chemistry in your body that produces a sensation of happiness.
Let your imagination be the user interface to steer your reality.
Happiness is the natural state for most people whenever they feel healthy, have flexible schedules, and expect the future to be good.
I’m here to tell you that the primary culprit in your bad moods is a deficit in one of the big five: flexible schedule, imagination, sleep, diet, and exercise.
Of the big five factors in happiness—flexible schedule, imagination, diet, exercise, and sleep—my pick for the most important is exercise.
Recapping the happiness formula: Eat right. Exercise. Get enough sleep. Imagine an incredible future (even if you don’t believe it). Work toward a flexible schedule. Do things you can steadily improve at. Help others (if you’ve already helped yourself). Reduce daily decisions to routine.
I don’t know how many people have died from following the health advice of cartoonists, but the number probably isn’t zero.
The simple diet plan that works for me is this: I eat as much as I want, of anything I want, whenever I want.
The trick there is to change what you want.
My experience, as odd as it sounds, is that I can change my food preferences by thinking of my body as a programmable robot as opposed to a fleshy bag full of magic.
My proposition, which I invite you to be skeptical about, is that one of the primary factors in determining your energy level, and therefore your mood, is what you’ve eaten recently.
food is the fuel that makes exercise possible.
A smarter approach is to use a system to remove willpower from your diet choices—as I’ll explain in a bit—and let your increased energy guide you toward a natural preference for being more active.
The trick to eating right is to keep willpower out of the equation for your diet.
The happier you are in one area of your life, the less effort you’ll put into searching for happiness elsewhere.
If you get your health in order, success will come more easily. And if you get success without good health, you won’t enjoy it.
The only way to succeed in the long run is by using a system that bypasses your need for willpower.
I have condensed the entire field of fitness advice into one sentence: Be Active Every Day
Simplification is often the difference between doing something you know you should do and putting it off.
My challenge in this chapter is to convince you that if you get one simple thing right—being active every day—all of the other elements of fitness will come together naturally without the need to use up your limited supply of willpower.
any form of exercise that requires willpower is unsustainable.
What you need is a natural and easy way to evolve into a fitness routine that works for your specific brain and body. And you want to do it all without drawing on your willpower.
There are three practical ways to schedule exercise in a marriage or marriagelike situation: Join an organized team. Always exercise at the same time every day. Exercise together (if you both really mean it).
After that, the most important rule is that you should never exercise so much in one day that you won’t feel like being active the next day.
If you want to make a habit of something, the worst thing you can do is pick and choose which days of the week you do it and which ones you don’t.
The trick I have found to work best takes advantage of certain cues in your life, or “keys” as hypnotists like to call them.
The trick is manipulating your own cues in a way that programs your mind.
My worldview is that all success is luck if you track it back to its source.
My worldview is that every element of your personality, from your perseverance to your risk tolerance to your ambition to your intelligence, is a product of pure chance.
You don’t need to do anything as a result of reading this book. You’ve already changed. And if I’ve done my job right, you’ve changed in a way that will someday make people say you were lucky.
If you think your odds of solving your problem are bad, don’t rule out the possibility that what is really happening is that you are bad at estimating odds.
When I speak of affirmations these days, I try to say as clearly as possible that they appear to have a beneficial value.
