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

by Scott Adams

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.

Success caused passion more than passion caused success.

Everything you want out of life is in that huge, bubbling vat of failure.

I’ve long seen failure as a tool, not an outcome.

Failure is a resource that can be managed.

you will spend every moment until you reach the goal—if you reach it at all—feeling as if you were short of your goal. In other words, goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary.

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

In the world of dieting, losing twenty pounds is a goal, but eating right is a system. In the exercise realm, running a marathon in under four hours is a goal, but exercising daily is a system. In business, making a million dollars is a goal, but being a serial entrepreneur is a system.

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.

In the near term it would mean one failure after another. In the long term I was creating a situation that would allow luck to find me.

But being systems oriented, I felt myself growing more capable every day, no matter the fate of the project I happened to be working on. And every day during those years I woke up with the same thought, literally, as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and slapped the alarm clock off. Today’s the day.

This was one of many examples in which the universe makes sure there isn’t much of a link between job performance in the corporate world and outcomes.

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

Few of these wishful people have decided to have any of the things they wish for.

It’s a key difference, for once you decide, you take action.

Successful people don’t wish for success; they decide to pursue it.

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.

it also means having something in my life that makes me excited to wake up.

The main reason I blog is because it energizes me. I could rationalize my blogging by telling you it increases traffic on Dilbert.com by 10 percent or that it keeps my mind sharp or that I think the world is 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.

For our purposes I’ll define your personal energy as anything that gives you a positive lift, either mentally or physically.

The paradox of capitalism is that adding a bunch of bad-sounding ideas together creates something incredible that is far more good than bad.

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.

prefer simplicity whenever I’m choosing a system to use. People can follow simple systems better than complicated ones.

Simplifying is generally the strategy of people who view the world in terms of systems.

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

Today you want to daydream of your idea being a huge success so you can enjoy the feeling. Let your ideas for the future fuel your energy today. No matter what you want to do in life, higher energy will help you get there.

It’s smarter to see your big-idea projects as part of a system to improve your energy, contacts, and skills.

Let’s say you wake up tomorrow full of energy for your exciting new project. Over the course of the day you learn a few things in the process of doing your research, and you meet some new people along the way. If you accomplish that and nothing more, you’re succeeding, no matter what happens with your project.

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.

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

When you can release on your ego long enough to view your perceptions as incomplete or misleading, it gives you the freedom to imagine new and potentially more useful ways of looking at the world.

You too can sometimes get what you want by adopting a practical illusion. Reality is overrated and impossible to understand with any degree of certainty.

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.

long shots

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.

For entrepreneurial ventures it might mean quickly bailing out if things don’t come together quickly.

The pattern I noticed was this: Things that will someday work out well start out well.

Small successes can grow into big ones, but failures rarely grow into successes.

It’s as if a future success left bread crumbs that were visible in the present.

the best predictor is not the average response. 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.

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

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

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

As is often the case, simplicity trumps accuracy.

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.

learning interesting things increases my energy and makes me feel optimistic.

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

Or perhaps I might have thought my losses were lessons from the Creator of the Universe, who realized I needed help maintaining a socially appropriate level of humility. But no, it was just math.

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We had just witnessed an extraordinary act of personal bravery, the likes of which one rarely sees. That was the takeaway. Period.