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

by Scott Adams

I’m going to focus on ordinary talents and combinations of ordinary talents that add up to something extraordinary.

I drew in the snow. For me, drawing was more of a compulsion than a choice. Childhood compulsions aren’t a guarantee of future talent. But my unscientific observation is that people are born wired for certain preferences. Those preferences drive behavior, and that’s what can make a person willing to practice a skill.

Where there is a tolerance for risk, there is often talent.

Again, the quality didn’t predict success. The better predictor is that The Simpsons was an immediate hit despite its surface quality. It had the x factor. In time it grew to be one of the most important, most creative, and best shows of all time.

Quality is one of the luxuries you can afford when the marketplace is spraying money in your direction and you have time to tinker.

One of the best ways to detect the x factor is to watch what customers do about your idea or product, not what they say.

People tend to say what they think you want to hear or what they think will cause the least pain.

What people do is far mo...

If the first commercial version of your work excites no one to action, it’s time to move on to something different.

The hard part is figuring out what to practice.

My observation is that some people are born with a natural impulse to practice things and some people find mindless repetition without immediate reward to be a form of torture.

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 primary purpose of schools is to prepare kids for success in adulthood.

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

Students are on their own to figure out the best systems for success.

If we can’t count on schools to teach kids the systems of success, how will people lea...

The children of successful people probably learn by observation a...

The average kid spends almost no time around highly successful people, and certainly not during the workday, when those successfu...

You can manipulate your odds of success by how you choose to fill out the variables in the formula.

The idea is that you can raise your market value by being merely good—not extraordinary—at more than one skill.

Successwise, you’re better off being good at two complementary skills than being excellent at one.

What matters is that the formula steers your behavior in the right direction.

Likewise, I think it’s important to think of each new skill you acquire as a doubling of your odds of success.

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.

I’m a perfect example of the power of leveraging multiple mediocre skills.

My combined mediocre skills are worth far more than the sum of the parts.

When it comes to skills, quantity often beats quality.

In the days when more exposure was a good thing, the piracy helped far more than it hurt.

But my business training told me I needed to open a direct channel to my customers and modify my product based on their feedback. That’s exactly what I did,* making it a workplace-focused strip, as readers requested, and from there it took off.

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.

I was a learning machine. 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 great thing about reading diverse news from the fields of business, health, science, technology, politics, and more is that you automatically see patterns in the world and develop mental hooks upon which you can hang future knowledge.

your happy experience reading the news will make you want to enjoy it longer.

I read

the news to broaden my exposure to new topics and patterns that make my brain more efficient in general and to enjoy myself, because learning interesting things increases my energy and makes me feel optimistic.

The idea I’m promoting here is that it helps to see the world as math and not magic.

The future is thoroughly unpredictable when it comes to your profession and your personal life ten years out.

I made a list of the skills in which I think every adult should gain a working knowledge. I wouldn’t expect you to become a master of any, but mastery isn’t necessary. Luck has a good chance of finding you if you become merely good in most of these areas. I’ll make a case for each one, but here’s the preview list. Public speaking Psychology Business writing Accounting

Design (the basics) Conversation

Overcoming shyness Second language Golf Proper grammar Persuasion Technology (hobby lev...

I’ll defend the economic value of each of these skills in the remai...

“Instead of describing the Dale Carnegie course myself, I’ve asked two of your fellow employees who took the course to tell you what they think.” He introduced the first guy and walked off. Tony Snow was done selling.

She had been alone in her misery, fighting a losing fight. But somehow the instructor understood what was happening inside her and he respected it.

The most important is the transformative power of praise versus the corrosive impact of criticism.

Adults are starved for a kind word.

When you understand the power

of honest praise (as opposed to bullshitting, flattery, and sucking up), you realize that withholding it borders on immoral. If you see something that impresses you, a decent re...

Positivity is far more than a mental preference.