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

by Scott Adams

‘I wish I could give you a surefire formula for success, but life doesn’t work that way. What I can do is describe a model that you can compare with your current way of doing things.

One size doesn’t fit all.

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.

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 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.)

In our messy, flawed lives, the nearest we can get to truth is consistency.

Consistency is the best marker of truth that we have, imperfect though it may be. When seeking truth, your best bet is to look for confirmation on at least two of the dimensions I listed.

one step you will always do first if it’s available to you: You’ll ask a smart friend how he or she tackled the same problem. A smart friend can save you loads of time and effort. Many of you have a smart friend or two already, and you are lucky to have them. But my observation is that a startling percentage of the adult population literally has no smart friends to help them in their quest for success and happiness.

Research shows that loneliness damages the body in much the same way as aging.

You can cure your loneliness only by doing the talking yourself and—most important—being heard.

Experts say public speaking is one of the most terrifying things a person can do.

put my hands in front of me, fingertips together, as speakers do, while I absorbed the applause and converted it to positive energy.

I waited for the applause to stop. And when it did, I waited a little longer, as I had learned. When you stand in front of an audience, your sensation of time is distorted.

Failure always brings something valuable with it. I don’t let it leave until I extract that value.

When I was a commercial loan officer for a large bank in San Francisco, my boss taught us that you should never make a loan to someone who is following his passion. For example, you don’t want to give money to a sports enthusiast who is starting a sports store to pursue his passion for all things sporty. That guy is a bad bet, passion and all. He’s in business for the wrong reason. My boss, who had been a commercial lender for over thirty years, said the best loan customer is one who has no passion whatsoever, just a desire to work hard at something that looks good on a spreadsheet.

You want the grinder, not the guy who loves his job.

passionate people are more likely to take big risks in the pursuit of unlikely goals, and so you would expect to see more failures and more huge successes among the passionate.

The ones that didn’t work out—and that would be most of them—slowly drained my passion as they failed. The few that worked became more exciting as they succeeded.

Success caused passion more than passion caused success.

Passion can also be a simple marker for talent. We humans tend to enjoy doing things we are good at, while not enjoying things we suck at. We’re also fairly good at predicting what we might be good at before we try.

success was a combination of desire, luck, hard work, determination, brains, and appetite for risk.

seen failure as a tool, not an outcome.

Nietzsche famously said, “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.”

Good ideas have no value because the world already has too many of them. The market rewards execution, not ideas.

look for opportunities in which I had some natural advantage.

timing is often the biggest component of success. And since timing is often hard to get right unless you are psychic, it makes sense to try different things until you get the timing right by luck.

Most failures involve bad luck, ignorance, and sometimes ordinary stupidity.

Your best bet, he explained, was to always be looking for the better deal.

my first exposure to the idea that one should have a system instead of a goal. The system was to continually look for better options.

Did the businessman owe his current employer loyalty? Not in his view. The businessman didn’t invent capitalism, and he didn’t create its rules. He simply played within the rules. His employers wouldn’t have hesitated to fire him at the drop of a hat for any reason that fit their business needs. He simply followed their example. The second thing I learned on that flight—or confirmed, really—is that appearance matters.

the people who use systems do better. The systems-driven people have found a way to look at the familiar in new and more useful ways.

If you achieve your goal, you celebrate and feel terrific, but only until you realize you just lost the thing that gave you purpose and direction. Your options are to feel empty and useless, perhaps enjoying the spoils of your success until they bore you, or set new goals and reenter the cycle of permanent presuccess failure.

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.

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.

system is something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run. If you do something every day, it’s a system. If you’re waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it’s a goal.

people who succeed, you will see that most of them follow systems, not goals.

This was one of those times when the difference between wishing and deciding mattered. I didn’t wish to stay in school; I decided.

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.

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

Successful people don’t wish for success; they decide to pursue it. And to pursue it effectively, they need a system. 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 topic of generosity, there are three kinds of people in the world: Selfish Stupid Burden on others

Society hopes you will handle your selfishness with some grace and compassion. If you do selfishness right, you automatically become a net benefit to society.

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.

The healthiest way to look at selfishness is that it’s a necessary strategy when you’re struggling.

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.

No one will think worse of me in the long run for being thirty minutes behind for a full day of fun that they have already started. But everyone will appreciate that I’m in a better mood when I show up.

most writers work either early in the morning or past midnight.

going to bed early and getting up at 4:00 A.M. to do my creative side projects.

Optimizing works often enough to reinforce the habit. The cost of optimizing is that it’s exhausting and stress inducing,