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

by Scott Adams

The right approach to sharing a secret is to start small. Make sure the small secrets stay secret before you try anything riskier. One way to judge your risk is to be alert for other people’s secrets that are being relayed to you. Someone who is bad at keeping one kind of secret is probably bad at keeping all secrets. You won’t be exempt.

Decisiveness No one is decisive all the time. The world is a complicated place, and often we’re only guessing which path will be best. Anyone who is confident in the face of great complexity is insane. However, some people act much more decisively than others. And that can be both persuasive and useful. Decisiveness looks like leadership. Keep in mind that most normal people are at least a little bit uncertain when facing unfamiliar and complicated situations. What people crave in that sort of environment is anything that looks like certainty. If you can deliver an image of decisiveness, no matter how disingenuous, others will see it as leadership.

Energy People respond to energy in others. If you show how much you love a particular form of entertainment, it will be easier to persuade others to try it. Energy is contagious. People like how it feels. If you show enthusiasm, others will want to experience the same rush.

Insanity In most groups the craziest person is in control.

When you bring in an emotional dimension, people know they can’t talk you out of it.

It’s important to keep a lot of distance between your fun voice and your persuasive voice. For people who know you, the serious voice will send an unambiguous signal that the topic is important and you might not be open to negotiating.

both men and women with attractive voices find partners more quickly than those with less attractive voices.

For starters, it helps to learn to breathe from the bottom of your lungs, not in the upper chest area. Proper breathing has lots of other benefits, including stress reduction, increased and more efficient metabolism, and better physical stamina, so it’s worth learning.8 If you put your hand on your belly button and breathe correctly, that’s the only part of your torso that should be rising and falling. If your upper chest is expanding when you breathe normally, you’re doing it wrong. When you get your breathing right, your words will come out sounding more confident. Next, you need to pick a tone. Some voice experts will tell you that your best and most natural tone is probably higher than the way you normally speak. Many people have a natural tendency to speak lower to other humans than they might to a pet, for example. On some level, we all understand that lower voices confer some weight to what we say. The downside of a lower voice is that it’s difficult to hear words that match background noise.

Another common speaking trick is to hum the first part of the “Happy Birthday” song and then speak in your normal voice right after. You’ll notice your posthumming voice is strangely smooth and perfect.

Posture is also important for good speech. If you don’t sit up straight or stand straight, your vocal equipment will be pinched, and it will sound that way even if you don’t notice it yourself. When you’re trying to convey a fake sense of confidence—which is often handy—you need to tell yourself you’re acting. Simply speak the way you imagine a confident person would speak and you’ll nail it on the first try. You want to get rid of the hemming and hawing, the “ums” and “uhs,” and anything that disrupts your flow. That takes practice. The quickest fix is simply to substitute silence where you once had “ums” and “uhs.” It will feel uncomfortable at first, but you’ll get used to it. I also like to form full sentences in my head before I start them, at least whenever that’s an option. And when I know a topic is likely to come up in the near future, I practice entire conversations in my head until I can speak my thoughts fluently.

Be proactive. Begin with the end in mind. (Imagine a good outcome.) Put first things first. (Set priorities.) Think win-win. (Don’t be greedy.) Seek first to understand then be understood. Synergize. (Use teamwork.) Sharpen the saw. (Keep learning.)

my own list of the important patterns for success that I’ve noticed over the years. This is purely anecdotal. I exclude the ones that are 100 percent genetic. Lack of fear of embarrassment Education (the right kind) Exercise

Do you know what the unemployment rate is for engineers? It is nearly zero. Do you know how many engineers like their jobs? Most of them do, despite what you read in Dilbert comics. And the ones who are unhappy with work can change jobs fairly easily. Generally speaking, the people who have the right kind of education have almost no risk of unemployment. Education and psychological bravery are somewhat interchangeable. If you don’t have much of one, you can compensate with a lot of the other. When you see a successful person who lacks a college education, you’re usually looking at someone with an unusual lack of fear. The next pattern I’ve noticed is exercise. Good health is a baseline requirement for success. But I’m not talking about the obvious fact that sick people can’t get much done. I’m talking about the extra energy and vitality that good health brings. I might be getting the correlation wrong, and perhaps whatever motivates a person to succeed also motivates that person to maintain an exercise schedule. But I think it works both ways. I believe exercise makes people smarter, psychologically braver, more creative, more energetic, and more influential. In an online article about twenty habits of successful people, the second item on the list is exercise five to seven days a week.2 Other studies back this notion—physical fitness and daily exercise are correlated with success in business and in life.3 There’s one more pattern I see in successful people: They treat suc...

People who enjoy humor are simply more attractive than people who don’t.

Humor makes average-looking people look cute and uninteresting people seem entertaining.

The boost of energy will even make you more willing to exercise, and that will raise your overall energy even more. Humor also transports your mind away from your daily troubles. Humor puts life in perspective and sometimes helps you laugh at even the worst of your problems. Because humor directly influences your energy levels, it touches every part of your life that requires concentration and willpower. And for the most part, humor is free and easily accessible.

When it comes to in-person humor, effort counts a lot. When people see you trying to be funny, it frees them to try it themselves.

If you avoid the traps, you’re golden. Allow me to map the traps for you. I’ll start with a summary then explain. Overcomplaining is never funny. Don’t overdo the self-deprecation. Don’t mock people. Avoid puns and wordplay.

women tend to laugh at stories involving bad things happening to people,

affirmations are useful and I have no idea why.

tried a lot of different ventures, stayed optimistic, put in the energy, prepared myself by learning as much as I could, and stayed in the game long enough for luck to find me.

You become like the people around you.

hanging around with overweight people can cause you to gain weight.

where you live might influence the energy you put into your career. If you live near optimistic winners, those qualities are sure to rub off to some extent.

you’ll find it much easier to exercise in an environment where others are exercising. When you watch others exercise, it activates the exercise subroutine in your own brain. Likewise, it’s often easier to work when others are working in the same room, so long as they don’t bug you too much.

find the people who most represent what you would like to become and spend as much time with them as you can without trespassing, kidnapping, or stalking. Their good habits and good energy will rub off on you.

The only reasonable goal in life is maximizing your total lifetime experience of something called happiness.

The big part—the 80 percent of happiness—is nothing but a chemistry experiment.

A person with a flexible schedule and average resources will be happier than a rich person who has everything except a flexible schedule. Step one in your search for happiness is to continually work toward having control of your schedule.

In your personal life and your career, consider schedule flexibility when making any big decision.

Happiness has more to do with where you’re heading than where you are.

We tend to feel happy when things are moving in the right direction and unhappy when things are trending bad. The directional nature of happiness is one reason it’s a good idea to have a sport or hobby that leaves you plenty of room to improve every year. Tennis and golf are two perfect examples. With either sport, an average player can continue improving well past the age of sixty. Slow and steady improvement at anything makes you feel that you are on the right track. The feeling of progress stimulates your body to create the chemicals that make you feel happy. When you choose a career, consider whether it will lead to a lifetime of ever-improved performance, a plateau, or a steady decline in your skills.

If you are lucky enough to have career options, and only one of them affords a path of continual improvement, choose that one, all else being equal.

The next element of happiness you need to master is imagination.

Pessimism is often a failure of imagination. If you can imagine the future being brighter, it lifts your energy and gooses the chemistry in your body that produces a sensation of happiness. If you can’t even imagine an improved future, you won’t be happy no matter how well your life is going right now. I find it useful to daydream that the future will be better than today, by far. I like to imagine a future that is spectacular and breathtaking. The daydreams need not be accurate in terms of predicting the future. Simply imagining a better future hacks your brain chemistry and provides you with the sensation of happiness today. Being happy raises your energy level and makes it easier to pursue the steps toward real-world happiness. This is another case in which your imagination can influence the real world. Don’t let reality control your imagination. Let your imagination be the user interface to steer your reality.

The next important thing to remember about happiness is that it’s not a mystery of the mind and it’s not magic. Happiness is the natural state for most people whenever they feel healthy, have flexible schedules, and expect the future to be good.

thoroughly

Taking care of my body always influences my happiness more than whatever task I’m involved in. That’s an important point because normally when you feel unhappy, you blame your mood on whatever your environment is serving up to you.

cynicism to any observation and you can manufacture bad news out of thin air.

the primary culprit in your bad moods is a deficit in one of the big five: flexible schedule, imagination, sleep, diet, and exercise.

The exercise itself releases natural pain-relieving substances, endorphins,3 and that gives you a direct feeling of well-being. But exercise is also a mental escape from whatever was stressing you before you laced your athletic shoes.

Exercise also helps you sleep better, so that’s a double benefit.

Of the big five factors in happiness—flexible schedule, imagination, diet, exercise, and sleep—my pick for the most important is exercise.

Unhappiness that is caused by too much success is a high-class problem. That’s the sort of unhappiness people work all of their lives to get.

Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice, tells us that people become unhappy if they have too many options in life. The problem with options is that choosing any path can leave you plagued with self-doubt. You quite rationally think that one of the paths not chosen might have worked out better. That can eat at you. Choosing among attractive alternatives can also be exhausting. You want to feel as if you researched and considered all of your options. That’s why I find great comfort in routine.

Recapping the happiness formula: Eat right. Exercise. Get enough sleep. Imagine an incredible future (even if you don’t believe it). Work toward a flexible schedule. Do things you can steadily improve at. Help others (if you’ve already helped yourself). Reduce daily decisions to routine.

I eat as much as I want, of anything I want, whenever I want.

Let’s start with the part about eating “anything I want.” The trick there is to change what you want.

Once you want to eat the right kinds of food for enjoyment, and you don’t crave the wrong kinds of food, everything else comes somewhat easily.

erased cravings for a wide variety of less-healthy foods. I do them one at a time, and it’s a lot easier than you might think.