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

by Scott Adams

When it comes to any big or complicated question, humility is the only sensible point of view.

In our messy, flawed lives, the nearest we can get to truth is consistency. Consistency is the bedrock of the scientific method. Scientists creep up on the truth by performing controlled experiments and attempting to observe consistent results.

Think Again

I waited for the applause to stop. And when it did, I waited a little longer, as I had learned. When you stand in front of an audience, your sensation of time is distorted. That’s why inexperienced presenters speak too rapidly. I mentally adjusted my internal clock to match the audience’s sense of timing. I also wanted them to wait in silence for a beat or two, to engage their curiosity. I knew from experience that audience members often wonder what the creator of Dilbert will sound like. That day, I wondered the same thing.

Failure always brings something valuable with it. I don’t let it leave until I extract that value.

Good ideas have no value because the world already has too many of them. The market rewards execution, not ideas.

This was my first exposure to the idea that one should have a system instead of a goal. The system was to continually look for better options.

as far as I can tell, the people who use systems do better. The systems-driven people have found a way to look at the familiar in new and more useful ways.

Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The

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.

Successful people don’t wish for success; they decide to pursue it. And to pursue it effectively, they need a system.

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. If you neglect your health or your career, you slip into the second category—stupid—which is a short slide to becoming a burden on society.

If you pursue your selfish objectives, and you do it well, someday your focus will turn outward. It’s an extraordinary feeling.

When I talk about increasing your personal energy, I don’t mean the frenetic, caffeine-fueled, bounce-off-the-walls type of energy. I’m talking about a calm, focused energy. To others it will simply appear that you are in a good mood. And you will be.

My proposition is that organizing your life to optimize your personal energy will add up to something incredible that is more good than bad.

I prefer simplicity whenever I’m choosing a system to use.

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.

Your brain takes some of its cues from what your body is doing.

Priorities are the things you need to get right so the things you love can thrive.

Your attitude affects everything you do in your quest for success and happiness.

But remember, goals are for losers anyway. It’s smarter to see your big-idea projects as part of a system to improve your energy, contacts, and skills. From that viewpoint, if you have a big, interesting project in the works, you’re a winner every time you wake up.

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.

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

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.

The Success Formula: Every Skill You Acquire Doubles Your Odds of Success

None of my skills are world-class, but when my mediocre skills are combined, they become a powerful market force.

Another huge advantage of learning as much as you can in different fields is that the more concepts you understand, the easier it is to learn new ones.

Everything you learn becomes a shortcut for understanding something else.

Framework thinking

The Knowledge Formula: The More You Know, the More You Can Know

A smarter approach is to think of learning as a system in which you continually expose yourself to new topics, primarily the ones you find interesting.

The point is that while we all think we know the odds in life, there’s a good chance you have some blind spots. Finding those blind spots is a big deal.

Adults are starved for a kind word. When you understand the power of honest praise (as opposed to bullshitting, flattery, and sucking up), you realize that withholding it borders on immoral.

Clean writing makes a writer seem smarter and it makes the writer’s arguments more persuasive.

When you ask a stranger a personal question, you make that person happy. Your question relieves the stress of awkward silence and gets the conversation moving. Best of all, it signals that you have interest in the stranger, which most people interpret as friendliness and social confidence, even if you’re faking it. And faking social confidence leads to the real thing over time.

In my entire life I have never met a stranger who didn’t have some fascinating life experiences that spilled out if I asked the right questions. Everyone is interesting if you make the situation feel safe.

The point of conversation is to make the other person feel good. If you do that one simple thing correctly, the other benefits come along with the deal.

The single best tip for avoiding shyness involves harnessing the power of acting interested in other people. You don’t want to cross into nosiness, but everyone appreciates it when you show interest.

I also recommend exercising your ego the way you’d exercise any other muscle. Try putting yourself in situations that will surely embarrass you if things go wrong, or maybe even if they don’t. Like any other skill, suppressing shyness takes practice. The more you put yourself in potentially embarrassing situations, the easier they all become.

Anyone who is confident in the face of great complexity is insane. However, some people act much more decisively than others. And that can be both persuasive and useful. Decisiveness looks like leadership.

Energy is contagious. People like how it feels. If you show enthusiasm, others will want to experience the same rush.

Crazy + confident probably kills more people than any other combination of personality traits, but when it works just right, it’s a recipe for extraordinary persuasion.

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.

Another possible reason that affirmations appear to work is that optimists tend to notice opportunities that pessimists miss.

Whether you are a born optimist or you become one through affirmations, prayer, or positive thinking, you end up with several advantages that make it easier for luck to find you. 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.

Affirmations look a lot like focusing on goals. But I would argue that doing affirmations is a system that helps you focus, boosts your optimism and energy, and perhaps validates the talent and drive that your subconscious always knew you had. If you plan to try affirmations, I recommend keeping your objectives broad enough to allow some luck. It’s probably better to affirm future wealth than to try to win a specific lottery.