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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Scott Adams
Read between
June 6 - June 12, 2021
All I know for sure is that I pursued a conscious strategy of managing my opportunities in a way that would make it easier for luck to find me. Did my strategy make a difference, or is luck just luck, and everything else is just rationalization? Honestly, I don’t know.
When it comes to any big or complicated question, humility is the only sensible point of view. Still, we mortals need to navigate our world as if we understood it.
Success caused passion more than passion caused success.
Energy is good. Passion is bullshit.
Your best bet, he explained, was to always be looking for the better deal. The better deal has its own schedule. I believe the way he explained it is that your job is not your job; your job is to find a better job.
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.
a goal is a specific objective that you either achieve or don’t sometime in the future. A system is something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run.
Simple systems are probably the best way to achieve success. Once you have success, optimizing begins to have more value. Successful people and successful businesses have the luxury of being able to optimize toward perfection
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.
If you manage your illusions wisely, you might get what you want, but you won’t necessarily understand why it worked.
The focal dystonia was a case of extraordinary bad luck for a cartoonist. But when I got done beating the dystonia problem to death and rifling through its pockets, I came out the other end a far more efficient cartoonist.
People generally accept outsized risk only when they expect big payoffs.
Where there is a tolerance for risk, there is often talent.
Overcoming obstacles is normally an unavoidable part of the process. But you also need to know when to quit. Persistence is useful, but there’s no point in being an idiot about it.
Things that will never work start out bad and stay that way. What you rarely see is a stillborn failure that transmogrifies into a stellar success.
It’s naive to expect the average person to embrace endless practice in pursuit of long-term success. It makes more sense to craft a life plan for yourself that embraces your natural inclinations, assuming you’re not a cannibal.
My combined mediocre skills are worth far more than the sum of the parts. If you think extraordinary talent and a maniacal pursuit of excellence are necessary for success, I say that’s just one approach, and probably the hardest.
Don’t think of the news as information. Think of it as a source of energy.
If your view of the world is that people use reason for their important decisions, you are setting yourself up for a life of frustration and confusion. You’ll find yourself continually debating people and never winning except in your own mind. Few things are as destructive and limiting as a worldview that assumes people are mostly rational.
In some cases you have a moral obligation to be manipulative if you know it will create a good result for all involved.
A caveman could successfully use a phone, assuming someone taught him how, while continuing to believe its inner workings were based on magic. His faulty perceptions would have no impact on the usefulness of the phone, at least until it broke and he started praying to it.
I 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. I hoped a buck would eventually walk by, and with Dilbert it did.
A normal slot machine that requires money will bankrupt any player in the long run. But the machine that has rare yet certain payoffs, and asks for no money up front, is a guaranteed winner if you have what it takes to keep yanking until you get lucky. In that environment, you can fail 99 percent of the time, while knowing success is guaranteed. All you need to do is stay in the game long enough.
My attitude was always the same: Escape from my cell, free the other inmates, shoot the warden, and burn down the prison.
And I advise you to consider this fact a primary tool for programming your moist-robot self. The programming interface is your location. To change yourself, part of the solution might involve spending more time with the people who represent the change you seek.
Happiness has more to do with where you’re heading than where you are. A person who is worth two billion dollars will feel sad if he suddenly loses one billion because he’s moving in the wrong direction,
Don’t let reality control your imagination. Let your imagination be the user interface to steer your reality.
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. If you find yourself there, and I hope you do, you’ll find your attention naturally turning outward. You’ll seek happiness through service to others. I promise it will feel wonderful.
My proposition, which I invite you to be skeptical about, is that one of the primary factors in determining your energy level, and therefore your mood, is what you’ve eaten recently.
But if success is your dream and operating at peak mental performance is something you want, coffee is a good bet. I highly recommend it. In fact, I recommend it so strongly that I literally feel sorry for anyone who hasn’t developed the habit.
No matter how well the business actually does, I will come out of it with a detailed understanding of the start-up process, a new network of highly capable contacts, a wealth of new knowledge in half a dozen areas, and about seventy-five new jokes for Dilbert. No one can predict how a start-up will go after launch. The only thing I know for sure is that my partners and I plan to come out ahead. Every time we add new skills and broaden our network of contacts, our market value increases.
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.
To put it in simpler terms, affirmations might work for perfectly logical reasons our brains aren’t equipped to understand.
