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

by Scott Adams

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.

If you can’t tell whether a simple plan or a complicated one will be the best, choose the simple one.

If the cost of failure is high, simple tasks are the best because they are easier to manage and control.

maximize your personal energy, not the number of tasks.

Your brain takes some of its cues from what your body is doing.

Consistency might be more important than the specific position you choose.

Sleep experts will tell you that the worst place to watch television is in bed.

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

One trick I’ve learned is that I automatically generate enthusiasm about tidying up if I know someone is stopping by.

One of the biggest obstacles to success—and a real energy killer—is the fear that you don’t know how to do the stuff that your ideal career plans would require.

When you start asking questions, you often discover that there’s a simple solution,

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

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.

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.

Priorities are the things you need to get right so the things you love can thrive.

Your attitude affects everything you do in your quest for success and happiness. A positive attitude is an important tool. It’s important to get it right. The best way to manage your attitude is by understanding your basic nature as a moist robot that can be programmed for happiness if you understand the user interface.

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

A simple trick you might try involves increasing your ratio of happy thoughts to disturbing thoughts. If your life doesn’t provide you with plenty of happy thoughts to draw upon, try daydreaming of wonderful things in your future. Don’t worry that your daydreams are unlikely to come true. The power of daydreaming is similar to the power of well-made movies that can make you cry or make you laugh.

avoid exposure to too much news of the depressing type and why it’s a good idea to avoid music, books, and movies that are downers.

For the truly bad moods, exercise, nutrition, sleep, and time are the smart buttons to push.

A powerful variation on the daydreaming method involves working on projects that have a real chance of changing the world, helping humanity, and/or making a billion dollars.

Ideas change the world routinely, and most of those ideas originate from ordinary people.

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

putting on exercise clothes will make you feel like working out.

acting confident makes you feel more confident. Feeling energetic makes you want to play a sport, but playing a sport will also make you feel energetic. Loving someone makes you want to have sex, but having sex also releases the bonding chemicals that make you feel love. High testosterone can help you win a competition, but winning a competition can also sometimes raise your testosterone.2 Being tired makes you want to lie down, but lying down when you are rested can put you in the mood for a nap. Feeling hungry can make you want to eat simple carbs, but eating simple carbs can make you feel hungry. Understanding this two-way causation is highly useful for boosting your personal energy. To take advantage of it, I find it useful to imagine my mind as a conversation between two individuals. It feels that way because I think in sentences, as if talking to another entity that is also me. One of me tends to be rational and reasonable, while the other me is a bit more emotional and instinctual. When the rational me wants to perk up the emotional me—the part of me that controls my energy—the rational me has to act as a programmer and push the right buttons.

smiling makes you more attractive to others.3 When you’re more attractive, people respond to you with more respect and consideration, more smiles, and sometimes even lust.

avoid friends who are full-time downers.

success at anything has a spillover effect on other things. You can take advantage of that effect by becoming good at things that require nothing but practice. Once you become good at a few unimportant things, such as hobbies or sports, the habit of success stays with you on more important quests. When you’ve tasted success, you want more. And the wanting gives you the sort of energy that is critical to success.

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.

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.

Pick the way that works, even if you don’t know why.

No matter what reality delivers in the future, my imagined version of the future has great usefulness today. 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.

what were my odds of being the first person on earth to beat a focal dystonia? One in a million? One in ten million? I didn’t care. That one person was going to be me.

Have this attitude.

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.

Author Malcolm Gladwell wrote about it in his book Outliers. Few people will put in that kind of practice to one skill. But early obsessions can predict which skills a kid might someday be good at. Another clue to talent involves tolerance for risk.

Childhood obsessions and tolerance for risk are only rough guides to talent at best.

Things that will someday work out well start out well. Things that will never work start out bad and stay that way.

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

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 more honest.

if no one is excited about your art/product/idea in the beginning, they never will be. If the first commercial version of your work excites no one to action, it’s time to move on to something different.

If your work inspires some excitement and some action from customers, get ready to chew through some walls. You might have something worth fighting for.

There’s no denying the importance of practice. The hard part is figuring out what to practice.

The first filter in deciding where to spend your time is an honest assessment of your ability to practice. If you’re not a natural “practicer,” don’t waste time pursuing a strategy that requires it.

Your skills will increase with experience, which is the more fun cousin of practice. Practice involves putting your consciousness in suspended animation. Practicing is not living.

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

The children of successful people probably learn by observation and parental coaching.

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

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