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

by Scott Adams

If you think your odds of solving your problem are bad, don’t rule out the possibility that what is really happening is that you are bad at estimating odds.

obvious explanation for the apparent power of affirmations is selective memory.

explanation of the apparent power of affirmations is that people who report success with it are liars, with no more credibility than the people who report being abducted by aliens.

False memory is another possible explanation for why affirmations appear to work. Perhaps we remember victories that weren’t so amazing in reality, or we remember normal events as being huge coincidences.

optimists tend to notice opportunities that pessimists miss.

You can train yourself to act like an optimist—and writing affirmations is probably good training—so that you get the same benefits as natural optimists when it comes to noticing opportunities. Whether you are a born optimist or you become one through affirmations, prayer, or positive thinking, you end up with several advantages that make it easier for luck to find you. Optimists notice more opportunities, have more energy because of their imagined future successes, and take more risks. Optimists make themselves an easy target for luck to find them.

only the people who know, deep down, that they have the right stuff to succeed will even bother doing affirmations.

keeping your objectives broad enough to allow some luck. It’s probably better to affirm future wealth than to try to win a specific lottery.

The model for success I described here looks roughly like this: Focus on your diet first and get that right so you have enough energy to want to exercise. Exercise will further improve your energy, and that in turn will make you more productive, more creative, more positive, more socially desirable, and more able to handle life’s little bumps. Once you optimize your personal energy, all you need for success is luck. You can’t directly control luck, but you can move from strategies with bad odds to strategies with good odds. For example, learning multiple skills makes your odds of success dramatically higher than learning one skill. If you learn to control your ego, you can pick strategies that scare off the people who fear embarrassment, thus allowing you to compete against a smaller field. And if you stay in the game long enough, luck has a better chance of finding you. Avoid career traps such as pursuing jobs that require you to sell your limited supply of time while preparing you for nothing better.

Happiness is the only useful goal in life.

Get your health right first, acquire resources and new skills through hard work, and look for an opportunity that gives you a flexible schedule someday.

key skills as possible, including public speaking, business writing, a working understanding of the psychology of persuasion, an understanding of basic technology concepts, social skills, proper voice technique, good grammar, and basic accounting. Develop a habit of simplifying.

If you control the inputs, you can determine the outcomes, give or take some luck.

Eat right, exercise, think positively, learn as much as possible, and stay out of jail, and good things can happen.

Look for patterns in every part of life, from diet to exercise to any...

goals are for losers and systems are for winners. People who seem to have good luck are often the people who have a system that allows luck to find them.

failure is your friend. It is the raw material of success. Invite it in. Learn from it. And don’t let it leave until you pick its pocket. That’s a system.