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

by Scott Adams

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.

over the years I have cultivated a unique relationship with failure. I invite it. I survive it. I appreciate it. And then I mug

Failure always brings something valuable with it. I don’t let it leave until I extract that value. I have a long history of profiting from failure. My cartooning career, for example, is a direct result of failing to succeed in the corporate environment.

Success caused passion more than passion caused success.

that’s exactly where you want to be: steeped to your eyebrows in failure. It’s a good place to be because failure is where success likes to hide in plain sight.

Everything you want out of life is in that huge, bubbling vat of failure. The trick is to get the good stuff out.

failure as a tool, not an outcome.

Failure is a resource that can be managed.

Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous presuccess failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out.

If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it.

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

I blame society for the sad state of adult fitness in the Western world. We’re raised to believe that giving of ourselves is noble and good. If you’re religious, you might have twice as much pressure to be unselfish. All our lives we are told it’s better to give than to receive. We’re programmed for unselfish behavior by society, our parents, and even our genes to some extent. The problem is that our obsession with generosity causes people to think in the short term. We skip exercise to spend an extra hour helping at home. We buy fast food to save time to help a coworker with a problem. At every turn, we cheat our own future to appear generous today.

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

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.

So while writing takes me away from my friends and family for a bit, it makes me a better person when I’m with them. I’m happier and more satisfied with my life. The energy metric helps make my choices easier. “Energy” is a simple word that captures

Ideally, you want to manage your personal energy for the long term and the big picture. Having

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

Simplicity is a worthy long-term goal. That’s how you will free your personal energy so you can concentrate it where you need it.

It’s not a foolproof gauge, but if you know a particular path will make you feel more stressed, unhealthy, and drained, it’s probably the wrong choice.

Imagination is the interface to your attitude. You can literally imagine yourself to higher levels of energy.

The easiest way to manage your attitude is to consume as much feel-good entertainment as you can.

Will it succeed? Probably not. But the idea of it excites me and raises my energy today. That’s my system.

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. This is the clearest example of how your brain has a user interface. When you’re in a bad mood, the physical act of forcing a smile may trigger the feel-good chemistry in your brain that is associated with happiness.1

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.

it’s your point of view that influences your behavior, not the universe.

shouldn’t hesitate to modify your perceptions to whatever makes you happy, because you’re probably wrong about the underlying nature of reality anyway.

some ways of looking at the world work better than others. Pick the way that works, even if you don’t know why.

Free yourself from the shackles of an oppressive reality. What’s real to you is what you imagine and what you feel. If you manage your illusions wisely, you might get what you want, but you won’t necessarily understand why it worked.

hope has a lot of practical utility.

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

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.

Again, the quality didn’t predict success. The better predictor is that The Simpsons was an immediate hit despite its surface quality. It

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.

If the first commercial version of your work excites no one to action, it’s time to move on to something different. Don’t be fooled by the opinions of friends and family. They’re all liars.

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

Practice involves putting your consciousness in suspended animation. Practicing is not living. But when you build your skills through an ever-changing sequence of experiences, you’re alive.

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

When it comes to skills, quantity often beats quality.

I worked hard and rose to scholastic mediocrity through brute force.

I’m like one big mediocre soup. None of my skills are world-class, but when my mediocre skills are combined, they become a powerful market force.

Imagine explaining to an extraterrestrial visitor the concept of a horse. It would take some time. If the next thing you tried to explain were the concept of a zebra, the conversation would be shorter. You would simply point out that a zebra is a lot like a horse but with black and white strips. Everything you learn becomes a shortcut for understanding something else.

The More You Know, the More You Can Know

Don’t think of the news as information. Think of it as a source of energy.

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

This is another example in which viewing the world as math (adding skills together) and not magic allows you to move from a strategy with low odds of success to something better.

If you see something that impresses you, a decent respect to humanity insists you voice your praise.

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

We’re all in the business of selling some version of ourselves.

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