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

by Scott Adams

It seemed as if other people were benefiting greatly from the wisdom of their friends and families. That’s exactly the sort of inequality that pisses me off and motivates me at the same time.

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.

If success were easy, everyone would do it. It takes effort. That fact works to your advantage because it keeps lazy people out of the game.

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

From that point on, I concentrated on ideas I could execute.

That failure taught me to look for opportunities in which I had some natural advantage.

This makes perfect sense if you do the math. Chances are the best job for you won’t become available at precisely the time you declare yourself ready. Your best bet, he explained, was to always be looking for the better deal. The better deal has its own schedule.

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.

Throughout my career I’ve had my antennae up, looking for examples of people who use systems as opposed to goals. In most cases, as far as I can tell, the people who use systems do better.

To put it bluntly, goals are for losers. That’s literally true most of the time. For example, if your goal is to lose ten pounds, you will spend every moment until you reach the goal—if you reach it at all—feeling as if you were short of your goal. In other words, goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary. That feeling wears on you. In time, it becomes heavy and uncomfortable. It might even drive you out of the game.

If you achieve your goal, you celebrate and feel terrific, but only until you realize you just lost the thing that gave you purpose and direction. Your options are to feel empty and useless, perhaps enjoying the spoils of your success until they bore you, or set new goals and reenter the cycle of permanent presuccess failure.

The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system.

In the world of dieting, losing twenty pounds is a goal, but eating right is a system.

In the exercise realm, running a marathon in under four hours is a goal, but exercising daily is a system.

For our purposes, let’s say a 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. If you do something every day, it’s a system. If you’re waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it’s a goal.

The minimum requirement of a system is that a reasonable person expects it to work more often than not. Buying lottery tickets is not a system no matter how regularly you do it.

My only chance of getting into that school was if some sort of fast-moving plague killed all of the people who knew there was a deadline for applying.

This was about the time that my opinion of experts, and authority figures in general, began a steady descent that continues to this day.

I wanted the product to be something that was easy to reproduce in unlimited quantities.

Most of my budget spreadsheets had formula errors, but that didn’t matter because all of the inputs from the various departments were complete lies and bullshit.

I tried asking her not to smoke, but all that did was turn her into an unfriendly smoker, and that wasn’t an upgrade.

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard goes something like this: 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.

It’s a key difference, for once you decide, you take action. Wishing starts in the mind and generally stays there.

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

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 as if a future success left bread crumbs that were visible in the present.

The executive explained that for television shows, the best predictor is not the average response. Averages don’t mean much for entertainment products. What you’re looking for is an unusually strong reaction from a subset of the public, even if the majority hates it.

For the excited few, the normal notions of what constitutes quality don’t apply.

I don’t read the news to find truth, as that would be a foolish waste of time.

You can’t directly control luck, but you can move from a game with low odds of success to a game with better odds.

Salespeople know they can manipulate buyers by controlling what they compare.

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

I decided against it because I didn’t want to be in the business of selling my time.

I no longer see reason as the driver of behavior. I see simple cause and effect, similar to the way machines operate. If you believe people use reason for the important decisions in life, you will go through life feeling confused and frustrated that others seem to have bad reasoning skills. The reality is that reason is just one of the drivers of our decisions, and often the smallest one.

This car was so obviously going to belong to us that seeing it was like peering into the future.

The amateur hypnotist in me knows that our visceral reaction to the car was the beginning and end of the “thinking” that went into the purchase.

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.

When politicians tell lies, they know the press will call them out. They also know it doesn’t matter.

A lie that makes a voter feel good is more effective than a hundred rational arguments.

Apple owes much of its success to Steve Jobs’s understanding that the way a product makes users feel trumps most other considerations, including price.

It’s a good idea to always have a backlog of stories you can pull out at a moment’s notice. And you’ll want to continually update your internal story database with new material.

If you don’t have a twist, it’s not a story. It’s just a regurgitation of your day.

Sometimes you hear statements that are so mind-numbingly stupid, evil, or mean that you know a direct frontal assault would only start a fight. People tend to double down when challenged, no matter how wrong they are.

When I took a class on how to train our dog, one of the first things we learned is that the quality of the dog treats made a big difference in how cooperative the dog would be. The trainer had the good stuff, and I believe she could make those dogs play the piano if she wanted. Our medium-quality treats were just barely good enough to keep the dogs from turning on us. The trainer admitted that the key to her superior results with dogs was partly snack quality.

Do you know what the unemployment rate is for engineers? It is nearly zero. Do you know how many engineers like their jobs? Most of them do, despite what you read in Dilbert comics. And the ones who are unhappy with work can change jobs fairly easily.

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

I was like a hunter who picks his forest location intelligently and waits in his blind for a buck to stroll by. The hunter still has to be lucky, but he manages his situation to increase his odds.

Then the universe got involved: The salesman had a heart attack and died in a hotel room on the road.

In that environment, you can fail 99 percent of the time, while knowing success is guaranteed. All you need to do is stay in the game long enough.

The pattern I noticed is that the affirmations only worked when I had a 100 percent unambiguous desire for success.