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

by Scott Adams

This is a good time to skip ahead and give you a preview of the failing-toward-success topics that will follow. I do this because I anticipate your curiosity. You won’t learn much from my abbreviated list, but if it gooses your interest it might give you a reason to finish the book. Book Tease Goals are for losers. Your mind isn’t magic. It’s a moist computer you can program. The most important metric to track is your personal energy. Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success. Happiness is health plus freedom. Luck can be managed, sort of. Conquer shyness by being a huge phony (in a good way). Fitness is the lever that moves the world. Simplicity transforms ordinary into amazing.

Most people think they have perfectly good bullshit detectors. But if that were the case, trial juries would always be unanimous, and we’d all have the same religious beliefs. Realistically, most people have poor filters for sorting truth from fiction, and there’s no objective way to know if you’re particularly good at it or not. 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. When it comes to any big or complicated question, humility is the only sensible point of view.

The system recognizes that there are at least six common ways to sort truth from fiction, and interestingly, each one is a complete train wreck. The Six Filters for Truth Personal experience (Human perceptions are iffy.) Experience of people you know (Even more unreliable.) Experts (They work for money, not truth.) Scientific studies (Correlation is not causation.) Common sense (A good way to be mistaken with complete confidence.) Pattern recognition (Patterns, coincidence, and personal bias look alike.)

You already know that when your energy is right you perform better at everything you do, including school, work, sports, and even your personal life. Energy is good. Passion is bullshit.

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.

My failure taught me to seek opportunities in which I had an advantage.

I knew one thing about success: It wouldn’t be easy to find in Windham, New York, population two thousand.

The systems-driven people have found a way to look at the familiar in new and more useful ways. To put it bluntly, goals are for losers.

Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous presuccess failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system. That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.

My proposition is that if you study people who succeed, you will see that most of them follow systems, not goals.

I learned by observation that people who pursued extraordinarily unlikely goals were overly optimistic at best, delusional at worst, and just plain stupid most of the time. The smart people in my little Republican-dominated town made practical plans and stuck to them.

I had ignored my father’s advice to work for the Postal Service. That turned out to be a good idea. I got into college without much help from my guidance counselor, and I stayed in school against my doctor’s advice. This was about the time that my opinion of experts, and authority figures in general, began a steady descent that continues to this day.

The idea was to create something that had value and—this next part is the key—I wanted the product to be something that was easy to reproduce in unlimited quantities. I didn’t want to sell my time, at least not directly, because that model has an upward limit. And I didn’t want to build my own automobile factory, for example, because cars are not easy to reproduce. I didn’t want to do any sort of custom work, such as building homes, because each one requires the same amount of work. I wanted to create, invent, write, or otherwise concoct something widely desired that would be easy to reproduce.

It helps a great deal to have at least a general strategy and some degree of focus. The world offers so many alternatives that you need a quick filter to eliminate some options and pay attention to others. Whatever your plan, focus is always important.

I’m not good at any sort of task that has to be done right the first time. I’m more of a do-it-wrong-then-fix-it personality.

I looked great on paper. Little did they realize that looking good on paper was my best skill.

the universe makes sure there isn’t much of a link between job performance in the corporate world and outcomes.

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.

Success always has a price, but the reality is that the price is negotiable. If you pick the right system, the price will be a lot nearer what you’re willing to pay.

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.

I’m giving you permission to take care of yourself first, so you can do a better job of being generous in the long run.

The way I approach the problem of multiple priorities is by focusing on just one main metric: my energy. I make choices that maximize my personal energy because that makes it easier to manage all of the other priorities. Maximizing my personal energy means eating right, exercising, avoiding unnecessary stress, getting enough sleep, and all of the obvious steps. But it also means having something in my life that makes me excited to wake up. When I get my personal energy right, the quality of my work is better, and I can complete it faster. That keeps my career on track. And when all of that is working, and I feel relaxed and energetic, my personal life is better too.

Most people aren’t lucky enough to have a flexible schedule. I didn’t have one either for the first sixteen years of my corporate life. So I did the next best thing by going to bed early and getting up at 4:00 A.M. to do my creative side projects. One of those projects became the sketches for Dilbert. You might not think you’re an early-morning person. I didn’t think I was either. But once you get used to it, you might never want to go back. You can accomplish more by the time other people wake up than most people accomplish all day.

Some people are what I call simplifiers and some are optimizers. A simplifier will prefer the easy way to accomplish a task, while knowing that some amount of extra effort might have produced a better outcome. An optimizer looks for the very best solution even if the extra complexity increases the odds of unexpected problems.

I have a bias for simplification, but surely there are situations in which optimizing is the better play. So how do you know which approach works best in a given situation? If the situation involves communication with others, simplification is almost always the right answer. If the task is something you can do all by yourself, or with a partner who is on your wavelength, optimizing might be a better path if you can control most variables in the situation. And realistically, sometimes you simply have to get three hours of tasks completed in two hours, so we don’t always have the luxury of being able to choose simple paths. I prefer simplicity whenever I’m choosing a system to use. People can follow simple systems better than complicated ones.

If you can’t tell whether a simple plan or a complicated one will be the best, choose the simple one. If it’s a coin toss, you might as well do whatever is easiest. If the cost of failure is high, simple tasks are the best because they are easier to manage and control.

Optimizing is often the strategy of people who have specific goals and feel the need to do everything in their power to achieve them. Simplifying is generally the strategy of people who view the world in terms of systems. The best systems are simple, and for good reason. Complicated systems have more opportunities for failure. Human nature is such that we’re good at following simple systems and not so good at following complicated systems. Simple systems are probably the best way to achieve success. Once you have success, optimizing begins to have more value.

When you are trying to decide between optimizing and simplifying, think of your entire day, not the handful of tasks in question. In other words, maximize your personal energy, not the number of tasks.

Every second you look at a messy room and think about fixing it is a distraction from your more important thoughts.

Keep in mind that every time you wonder how to do something, a few hundred million people have probably wondered the same thing. And that usually means the information has already been packaged and simplified, and in some cases sold. But it’s usually free for the asking.

I’ve noticed that an alarming number of people have adopted the asshole lifestyle and decided it works well enough to stay on that path. While the word “asshole” usually makes you think of males, in this context I mean it to be gender inclusive. There’s no single, agreed definition of what it means to be an asshole. It might include selfishness, arrogance, mean-spiritedness, or any number of other character flaws. You know asshole behavior when you see it. And if you’re normal, you’ve probably been one for at least a few minutes of your life. I would define an asshole as anyone who chooses to make the lives of others less pleasant for reasons that don’t appear productive or necessary. Asshole behaviors: Changing the subject to him/herself Dominating conversation Bragging Cheating, lying Disagreeing with any suggestion, no matter how trivial Using honesty as a justification for cruelty Withholding simple favors out of some warped sense of social justice Abandoning the rules of civil behavior, such as saying hello or making eye contact I assume asshole behavior exists because it feels good when you do it. In that sense it’s like an addiction. The long-term effect of being an asshole can’t be good for the person immersed in the lifestyle, but it must feel good in the short term. That’s a bad trade-off. Your self-interest is best served by being a reasonable person whenever you can muster it.

It’s useful to think of your priorities in terms of concentric circles, like an archery target. In the center is your highest priority: you. If you ruin yourself, you won’t be able to work on any other priorities. So taking care of your own health is job one. The next ring—and your second-biggest priority—is economics. That includes your job, your investments, and even your house. You might wince at the fact that I put economics ahead of your family, your friends, and the rest of the world, but there’s a reason. If you don’t get your personal financial engine working right, you place a burden on everyone from your family to the country. Once you are both healthy and financially sound, it’s time for the third ring: family, friends, and lovers. Good health and sufficient money are necessary for a base level of happiness, but you need to be right with your family, friends, and romantic partners to truly enjoy life. The next rings are your local community, your country, and the world, in that order. Don’t bother trying to fix the world until you get the inner circles of your priorities under control.

One simple way to keep your priorities straight is by judging how each of your options will influence your personal energy. 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. Right choices can be challenging, but they usually charge you up. When you’re on the right path, it feels right, literally.

When I speak of priorities I don’t mean that in terms of what you love the most. You can love your family more than you love your job and still spend all day working so your family has food and opportunities. Priorities are the things you need to get right so the things you love can thrive.

Your brain is wired to continuously analyze your environment, your thoughts, and your health and to use that information to generate a sensation you call your attitude. You know from experience that you do better work, and you more enjoy life, when your attitude is good. If you could control your attitude directly, as opposed to letting the environment dictate how you feel on any given day, it would be like a minor superpower. It turns out you have that superpower. You can control your attitude by manipulating your thoughts, your body, and your environment.

Exercise, food, and sleep should be your first buttons to push if you’re trying to elevate your attitude and raise your energy.

The power of daydreaming is similar to the power of well-made movies that can make you cry or make you laugh. Your body and your mind will respond automatically to whatever images you spend the most time pondering.

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

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 The smiling-makes-you-happy phenomenon is part of the larger and highly useful phenomenon of faking it until you make it.

A 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.

Reality is overrated and impossible to understand with any degree of certainty. What you do know for sure is that some ways of looking at the world work better than others. Pick the way that works, even if you don’t know why.

The overuse took its toll, and my pinkie finger started to spasm whenever I touched pen to paper, making it nearly impossible to draw. I went to see my doctor in the Kaiser health-care system, and he said he might know another doctor in the system who was an expert in this very problem. By wonderful coincidence, one of the world’s most knowledgeable doctors in this specific condition worked for Kaiser, and his office was just down the road from my home. Pause for a moment to reflect on that. There were over six billion people in the world, and one of the most published experts in the field worked within walking distance of my home. Never assume you understand the odds of things.

My optimism is like an old cat that likes to disappear for days, but I always expect it to return. And frankly, cumulatively the events in my life up to that point gave me a sensation of being exempt from the normal laws of chance, and that is probably the source of my optimism.

It’s a cliché that who you know is helpful for success. What is less obvious is that you don’t need to know CEOs and billionaires. Sometimes you just need a friend who knows different things than you do. And you can always find one of those.

Within ten seconds of my opening my mouth in her office, the doctor confirmed the diagnosis. I had a classic case. “What’s the cure?” I whispered. “There is none,” she replied. But that isn’t what I heard. The optimist in me translated the gloomy news as “Scott, you will be the first person in the world to be cured of spasmodic dysphonia.” And I decided that after I cured myself, somehow, some way, I would spread the word to others. I wouldn’t be satisfied simply escaping from my prison of silence; I was planning to escape, free the other inmates, shoot the warden, and burn down the prison. Sometimes I get that way. It’s a surprisingly useful frame of mind.

One helpful rule of thumb for knowing where you might have a little extra talent is to consider what you were obsessively doing before you were ten years old. There’s a strong connection between what interests you and what you’re good at. People are naturally drawn to the things they feel comfortable doing, and comfort is a marker for talent.

Another clue to talent involves tolerance for risk.

The smartest system for discerning your best path to success involves trying lots of different things—sampling, if you will. For entrepreneurial ventures it might mean quickly bailing out if things don’t come together quickly. That approach might conflict with the advice you’ve heard all your life—that sticking with something, no matter the obstacles, is important to success. Indeed, most successful people had to chew through a wall at some point. Overcoming obstacles is normally an unavoidable part of the process. But you also need to know when to quit. Persistence is useful, but there’s no point in being an idiot about it.

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.