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

by Scott Adams

Every time we add new skills and broaden our network of contacts, our market value increases.

I, Scott Adams, will speak perfectly.

I have escaped from my prison cell of silence.

Another possible reason that affirmations appear to work is that optimists tend to notice opportunities that pessimists miss.1

Optimists notice more opportunities, have more energy because of their imagined future successes, and take more risks. Optimists make themselves an easy target for luck to find them.

Under this explanation of the power of affirmations, they act as a sort of message from your subconscious to your rational mind telling you that you have the right stuff, even if your common sense argues otherwise. This would be useful for people who have real talent but don’t believe in it; surely there are a lot of people in that camp.

affirmations might work for perfectly logical reasons our brains aren’t equipped to understand.

But I would argue that doing affirmations is a system that helps you focus, boosts your optimism and energy, and perhaps validates the talent and drive that your subconscious always knew you had.

Humans will always think in terms of goals. Our brains are wired that way. But goals make sense only if you also have a system that moves

you in the right direction.

For example, learning multiple skills makes your odds of success dramatically higher than learning one skill. If you learn to control your ego, you can pick strategies that scare off the people who fear embarrassment, thus allowing you to compete against a smaller field. And if you stay in the game long enough, luck has a better chance of finding you.

And happiness tends to happen naturally whenever you have good health, resources, and a flexible schedule. Get your health right first, acquire resources and new skills through hard work, and look for an opportunity that gives you a flexible schedule someday.

always helps to be thinking in terms of systems and not goals.

failure is your friend. It is the raw material of success. Invite it in. Learn from it.