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

by Scott Adams

There’s no denying the importance of practice. The hard part is figuring out what to practice.

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

The Success Formula: 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.

Good + Good > Excellent

When writing a résumé, a handy trick you’ll learn from experts is to ask yourself if there are any words in your first draft that you would be willing to remove for one hundred dollars each.

When you accept without necessarily believing that each new skill doubles your odds of success, you effectively hack (trick) your brain to be more proactive in your pursuit of success.

When it comes to skills, quantity often beats quality.

If I thought something might someday be useful, I tried to grasp at least the basics.

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.

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

while we all think we know the odds in life, there’s a good chance you have some blind spots.

it helps to see the world as math and not magic.

The best way to increase your odds of success—in a way that might look like luck to others—is to systematically become good, but not amazing, at the types of skills that work well together and are highly useful for just about any job.

the transformative power of praise versus the corrosive impact of criticism.

Positivity is far more than a mental preference. It changes your brain, literally, and it changes the people around you. It’s the nearest thing we have to magic.

Don’t assume you know how much potential you have. Sometimes the only way to know what you can do is to test yourself.

Quality is not an independent force in the universe; it depends on what you choose as your frame of reference.

Success in anything usually means doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t,

It’s a good idea to make psychology your lifelong study.

You’ve heard the old saying that knowledge is power. But knowledge of psychology is the purest form of that power.

It is tremendously useful to know when people are using reason and when they are rationalizing the irrational. You’re wasting your time if you try to make someone see reason when reason is not influencing the decision.

business writing is all about getting to the point and leaving out all of the noise.

It’s a tiny difference, but over the course of an entire document, passive writing adds up and causes reader fatigue.

You can pay others to do your accounting and cash-flow projections, but that only works if you can check their work in a meaningful way. The smarter play is to learn enough about accounting and spreadsheets that you understand the basics.

The most common is the L-shaped layout. You imagine a giant letter L on the page and fill in the dense stuff along its shape, leaving less clutter in one of the four open quadrants. Artists call the uncluttered part negative space.

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

So how do you get a stranger to like you? It’s simple, actually. It starts by smiling and keeping your body language open. After that, just ask questions and listen as if you cared, all the while looking for common interests. Everyone likes to talk about his or her own life, and everyone appreciates a sympathetic listener. Eventually, if you discover some common interests, you’ll feel a connection without any effort.

Try to get in the habit of asking yourself how you can turn your interesting experiences into story form.

The most important key to good storytelling is preparation. You don’t want to figure out your story as you tell it. If something story-worthy happens to you, spend some time developing the story structure in your head—a structure I will explain in a minute—and practice telling the story in your head until you have it down.

Smile, ask questions, avoid complaining and sad topics, and have some entertaining stories ready to go. It’s all you need to be in the top 10 percent of all conversationalists.

You should also try to figure out which people are thing people and which ones are people people.

I also find it helpful to remind myself that every human is a mess on the inside. It’s easy to assume the good-looking and well-spoken person in front of you has it all together and is therefore your superior. The reality is that everyone is a basket case on the inside. Some people just hide it better.

The more you put yourself in potentially embarrassing situations, the easier they all become.

Success builds confidence and confidence suppresses shyness. If you can’t control your shyness directly through the tricks I outlined, wait until you’re rich and famous; the shyness might leave on its own.

The simple rule for “I” versus “me” is that the sentence has to make sense if you remove the other person mentioned in the sentence.

Repeat your claim of disinterest as often as it takes to end the conversation.

A more effective way to approach a dangerous social or business situation is sideways, by asking a question that starts with “I just wanted to clarify . . .”

Helping nice people always feels good. All you need to do is be polite and ask a direct question: “Is there anything you can do for me?”

No matter how you deliver a thank-you, make sure it includes a little detail

Life is messy and you’re going to be right only sometimes. You’ll do everyone in your life a favor by acting decisively, though, even if you have doubts on the inside.

In some cases you have a moral obligation to be manipulative if you know it will create a good result for all involved. For example, manipulating coworkers to do better work is usually good for everyone.

Throughout my corporate years I used a serious-sounding tone of voice whenever I was in “professional” mode. I was literally acting, but it didn’t feel disingenuous because the business world is a lot like theater.

think my fake professional voice and body language were at least half of the reason I was seen as having management potential.

Simply speak the way you imagine a confident person would speak and you’ll nail it on the first try.

A lack of fear of embarrassment is what allows one to be proactive. It’s what makes a person take on challenges that others write off as too risky.

Generally speaking, the people who have the right kind of education have almost no risk of unemployment.

There’s one more pattern I see in successful people: They treat success as a learnable skill.

When people see you trying to be funny, it frees them to try it themselves.

It’s better to adapt to what others want to hear, assuming your goal is to be liked.