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

by Scott Adams

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. Consider the people who routinely disagree with you. See how confident they look while being dead wrong? That’s exactly how you look to them.

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.)

Consistency is the best marker of truth that we have, imperfect though it may be.

Once you have your bullshit filter working, think about how you begin the process of tackling any new and complicated problem. There’s one step you will always do first if it’s available to you: You’ll ask a smart friend how he or she tackled the same problem. A smart friend can save you loads of time and effort.

Sometimes the only real difference between crazy people and artists is that artists write down what they imagine seeing.

My boss, who had been a commercial lender for over thirty years, said the best loan customer is one who has no passion whatsoever, just a desire to work hard at something that looks good on a spreadsheet.

Success caused passion more than passion caused success.

If you ask a billionaire the secret of his success, he might say it is passion, because that sounds like a sexy answer that is suitably humble. But after a few drinks I think he’d say his success was a combination of desire, luck, hard work, determination, brains, and appetite for risk.

failure is where success likes to hide in plain sight.

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

look for opportunities in which I had some natural advantage.

timing is often the biggest component of success.

As I struggled to stay upright and keep moving, I made myself a promise: If I lived, I would trade my piece-of-shit car for a one-way plane ticket to California and never see another f@$#!#& snowflake for the rest of my life.

He said that every time he got a new job, he immediately started looking for a better one. For him, job seeking was not something one did when necessary. It was an ongoing process.

I believe the way he explained it is that your job is not your job; your job is to find a better job.

Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous presuccess failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do.

Warren Buffett’s system for investing involves buying undervalued companies and holding them forever, or at least until something major changes.

I learned by observation that people who pursued extraordinarily unlikely goals were overly optimistic at best, delusional at worst, and just plain stupid most of the time.

This was one of those times when the difference between wishing and deciding mattered. I didn’t wish to stay in school; I decided.

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. And I didn’t want to build my own automobile factory, for example, because cars are not easy to reproduce. I didn’t want to do any sort of custom work, such as building homes, because each one requires the same amount of work. I wanted to create, invent, write, or otherwise concoct something widely desired that would be easy to reproduce.

My system of creating something the public wants and reproducing it in large quantities nearly guaranteed a string of failures.

Little did they realize that looking good on paper was my best skill.

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.

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 price, but the reality is that the price is negotiable. If you pick the right system, the price will be a lot nearer what you’re willing to pay.

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.

generous people take care of their own needs first. In fact, doing so is a moral necessity. The world needs you at your best.

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.

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.

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

One of the most important tricks for maximizing your productivity involves matching your mental state to the task.

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. And realistically, sometimes you simply have to get three hours of tasks completed in two hours, so we don’t always have the luxury of being able to choose simple paths.

When you start asking questions, you often discover that there’s a simple solution, a Web site that handles it, or a professional who takes care of it for a reasonable fee.

If you don’t get your personal financial engine working right, you place a burden on everyone from your family to the country.

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

The best way to manage your attitude is by understanding your basic nature as a moist robot that can be programmed for happiness if you understand the user interface.

Exercise, food, and sleep should be your first buttons to push if you’re trying to elevate your attitude and raise your energy.

You can literally imagine yourself to higher levels of energy.

Show me someone who you think is always in a good mood and I’ll show you a person who (probably) avoids overexposure to sad forms of entertainment.

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. I try to have one or more change-the-world projects going at all times.

Let your ideas for the future fuel your energy today. No matter what you want to do in life, higher energy will help you get there.

Smiling makes you feel better even if your smile is fake.

The next time you’re in a gloomy mood, try smiling at a stranger you pass on the street. You’ll be surprised how many people reflexively return the smile, and if you smile often enough, eventually that cue will boot up the happiness subroutine in your brain and release the feel-good chemicals you desire.

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.

If you manage your illusions wisely, you might get what you want, but you won’t necessarily understand why it worked.

When you define yourself as a member of any group, you start to automatically identify with the other members and take on some of the characteristics of the group.

We fake it until it becomes real.

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. 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.

Things that will someday work out well start out well. Things that will never work start out bad and stay that way. What you rarely see is a stillborn failure that transmogrifies into a stellar success. Small successes can grow into big ones, but failures rarely grow into successes.

If your work inspires some excitement and some action from customers, get ready to chew through some walls.