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

by Scott Adams

Few things are as destructive and limiting as a worldview that assumes people are mostly rational.

If you want people to see you as smart, persuasive, and funny, consider taking a two-day class in business writing. There aren’t many skills you can learn in two days that will serve you this well.

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.

Try to keep your setup to one sentence, two at most.

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.

Decisiveness looks like leadership.

If you can deliver an image of decisiveness, no matter how disingenuous, others will see it as leadership.

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

Cults are a good example of insanity being viewed as leadership.

In any kind of negotiation, the worst thing you can do is act reasonable. Reasonable people generally cave in to irrational people because it seems like the path of least resistance.

Emotions don’t bend to reason. So wrap your arguments in whatever emotional blankets you can think of to influence others. A little bit of irrationality is a powerful

(Imagine a good outcome.)

Seek first to understand then be understood.

Lack of fear of embarrassment Education (the right kind) Exercise

you can’t handle the risk of embarrassment, rejection, and failure, you need to learn how, and studies suggest that is indeed a learnable skill.1

improve your psychological bravery but say no to anything that has a strong chance of killing you.

Education and psychological bravery are somewhat interchangeable. If you don’t have much of one, you can compensate with a lot of the other. When you see a successful person who lacks a college education, you’re usually looking at someone with an unusual lack of fear.

In an online article about twenty habits of successful people, the second item on the list is exercise five to seven days a week.2 Other studies back this notion—physical fitness and daily exercise are correlated with success in business and in life.3

success as a learnable skill. That means they figure out what they need and they go and get it. If you’ve read this far, you’re one of those people. You’re

humor raises your energy, and that can reverberate into everything you do

Humor also makes you more creative, at least in the short run.3 I think it has something to do with the fact that humor is a violation of straight-line thinking. Humor temporarily shuts down the commonsense program in your moist robot brain and boots the random idea generator. At least it feels that way to me, figuratively speaking. Perhaps all that is happening is that humor makes one feel energized and relaxed at the same time and that is bound to help creativity.

you don’t need to know why something works to take advantage of it.

Incurable health problems often attract quack cures.

have a vivid memory of sitting in the doctor’s waiting room with the other patients who were there for the same reason: maybe cancer.

If your gut feeling (intuition) disagrees with the experts, take that seriously. You might be experiencing some pattern recognition that you can’t yet verbalize.

life had patterns and this was one of them: You become like the people around you.

Humans are social animals. There are probably dozens of ways we absorb energy, inspiration, skills, and character traits from those around us.

Simply find the people who most represent what you would like to become and spend as much time with them as you can without trespassing, kidnapping, or stalking. Their good habits and good energy will rub off on you.

Happiness, like gardening, only seems simple.

Step one in your search for happiness is to continually work toward having control of your schedule.

kids remove almost all of the flexibility in your schedule, especially if you’re the stay-at-home parent.

I’ve transformed work into pleasure simply by having control over when I do it.

find a boss who values your productivity over your attendance.

it’s a good idea to have a sport or hobby that leaves you plenty of room to improve every year.

If you are lucky enough to have career options, and only one of them affords a path of continual improvement, choose that one, all else being equal.

Simply imagining a better future hacks your brain chemistry and provides you with the sensation of happiness today.

Don’t let reality control your imagination. Let your imagination be the user interface to steer your reality.

Happiness is the natural state for most people whenever they feel healthy, have flexible schedules, and expect the future to be good.

I’m here to tell you that the primary culprit in your bad moods is a deficit in one of the big five: flexible schedule, imagination, sleep, diet, and exercise.

if you believe alcohol is the devil’s urine, it might eliminate your risk of drinking and driving. You can

often get good results from inaccurate worldviews.

for both diet and exercise is that you want to reduce the amount of willpower required. Any other approach is unsustainable.

Remember, goals are a trap. You want systems, not goals.

what’s easiest even if we know it shortens our lives. What you want is for healthy food to be more convenient than unhealthy food.

The only way to succeed in the long run is by using a system that bypasses your need for willpower.

In the long run, any system that depends on your willpower will fail. Or worse, some other part of your life will suffer as you focus your limited stockpile of willpower on fitness.

the right amount of exercise today is whatever amount makes me look forward to being active tomorrow.

Having great hair is a short-term goal. Fitness is a system. Systems are for winners.

you can’t help but be changed by a book, if only a trivial amount.

Are you looking for ways to turn your failures into something good?