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

by Scott Adams

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. Maybe the loan customer wants to start a dry-cleaning store or invest in a fast-food franchise—boring stuff. That’s the person you bet on. You want the grinder, not the guy who loves his job. So who’s right? Is passion a useful tool for success, or is it just something that makes you irrational? My hypothesis is that 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. Passionate people who fail don’t get a chance to offer their advice to the rest of us. But successful passionate people are writing books and answering interview questions about their secrets for success every day. Naturally those successful people want you to believe that success is a product of their awesomeness, but they also want to retain some humility. You can’t be humble and say, “I succeeded because I am far smarter than the average person.” But you can say your passion was a key to your success, because everyone can be passionate about something or other. Passion sounds more accessible. If you’re dumb, there’s not much you can do about it, but passion is something we think anyone can generate in the right circumstances. Passion feels very democratic. It is the people’s talent,...

Throughout my career I’ve had my antennae up, looking for examples of people who use systems as opposed to goals. In most cases, as far as I can tell, 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. To put it bluntly, goals are for losers. That’s literally true most of the time. For example, if your goal is to lose ten pounds, you will spend every moment until you reach the goal—if you reach it at all—feeling as if you were short of your goal. In other words, goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary. That feeling wears on you. In time, it becomes heavy and uncomfortable. It might even drive you out of the game. 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. The systems-versus-goals point of view is burdened by semantics, of course. You might say every system has a goal, however vague. And that would be true to some extent. And you could say that everyone who pursues a goal has some sort of system to get there, whether it is expressed or not. You could word-glue goals and systems together if you chose. All I’m suggesting is that thinking of goals and syste...

This was one of those times when the difference between wishing and deciding mattered. I didn’t wish to stay in school; I decided. For the next two weeks I stayed in a bed in the college infirmary, struggling to stay awake long enough to read my textbooks and keep up to where I assumed the class would be. Upon release, I discovered I was actually a month ahead in some of my classes. My grades climbed back where they needed to be and I marched on. I had ignored my father’s advice to work for the Postal Service. That turned out to be a good idea. I got into college without much help from my guidance counselor, and I stayed in school against my doctor’s advice. This was about the time that my opinion of experts, and authority figures in general, began a steady descent that continues to this day.

This brings me to my system. I still have the diary I wrote when I graduated from Hartwick, in which I outlined my entrepreneurial plan. The idea was to create something that had value and—this next part is the key—I wanted the product to be something that was easy to reproduce in unlimited quantities. I didn’t want to sell my time, at least not directly, because that model has an upward limit. And I didn’t want to build my own automobile factory, for example, because cars are not easy to reproduce. I didn’t want to do any sort of custom work, such as building homes, because each one requires the same amount of work. I wanted to create, invent, write, or otherwise concoct something widely desired that would be easy to reproduce.

I decided to revive a long-lost interest and try my hand at cartooning. But it was an unlikely dream, given my complete lack of artistic talent and the rarity of success stories in that business. So I decided to try something called affirmations, which I will describe in more detail later in the book. I bought some art supplies, practiced drawing every morning before work, and wrote my affirmation fifteen times a day: “I, Scott Adams, will be a famous cartoonist.”

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. When I get my personal energy right, the quality of my work is better, and I can complete it faster. That keeps my career on track. And when all of that is working, and I feel relaxed and energetic, my personal life is better too. You might be familiar with a television show that was called The Dog Whisperer. On the show, Cesar Millan, a dog-training expert, helped people get their seemingly insane dogs under control. Cesar’s main trick involved training the humans to control their own emotional states, because dogs can pick up crazy vibes from their owners. When the owners learned to control themselves, the dogs calmed down too. I think this same method applies to humans interacting with other humans. You’ve seen for yourself that when a sad person enters a room, the mood in the room drops. And when you talk to a cheerful person who is full of energy, you automatically feel a boost. I’m suggesting that by becoming a person with good energy, you lift the people around you. That positive change will improve your social life, your love lif...

Without the exercise I wouldn’t have the attention span to handle boring tasks. I would be bouncing around from one thing to another and accomplishing nothing.

One of the best ways to pollute the energy in a group situation is by being a total asshole. You might succeed in getting people fully energized, but it won’t be in a productive way. If you think of your bad behavior as a lifestyle choice, as in “being yourself” or “just being honest,” you might be ignoring the cost to your personal energy. When you piss off the people around you, there is bound to be some blowback and wasted effort cleaning up the mess you made. It can all be quite distracting and draining.

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. For starters, pay attention to the attitudes of people who have recently exercised. You’ll discover they are almost always happy and upbeat. Now also look at the attitudes of people who have recently eaten versus the people who are hungry. You’ll see a big difference. Tired people are grumpy, rested people are less so. Exercise, food, and sleep should be your first buttons to push if you’re trying to elevate your attitude and raise your energy. But what if you’re doing everything right on the physical-health front and you’re still not enjoying life as much as you think you should?

You should also try to figure out which people are thing people and which ones are people people. Thing people enjoy hearing about new technology and other clever tools and possessions. They also enjoy discussions of processes and systems, including politics. People people enjoy only conversations that involve humans doing interesting things. They get bored in a second when the conversation turns to things. Once you know whether you are dealing with a thing person or a people person, you can craft your conversation to his or her sweet spot. It makes a big difference in how people react to you, and that in turn will make you more confident and less shy.

I’ve since learned to penetrate background noise by using a higher-pitched voice. It’s great for communicating, but I don’t expect to get any CEO offers. It’s a real trade-off.

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.)

The good news is that anyone who has experienced happiness probably has the capacity to spend more time at the top of his or her personal range and less time near the bottom. In my case, my baseline is on the fence between happy and unhappy, so staying near the top of my narrow range makes all the difference. To do that I treat myself like the moist robot I am and manipulate my body chemistry as needed. I also try to improve my situation and circumstances wherever I can, but I see that as 20 percent of the solution. The big part—the 80 percent of happiness—is nothing but a chemistry experiment. And it’s hugely helpful to think of it that way. You can’t always quickly fix whatever is wrong in your environment, and you can’t prevent negative thoughts from drifting into your head. But you can easily control your body chemistry through lifestyle, and that in turn will cause your thoughts to turn positive, while making the bumps in your path feel less important. Let’s get to the mechanics of manipulating your body chemistry. Obviously your doctor can give you a pill to change your mood. Antidepressants are big business. And you can change your chemistry by drinking alcohol or doing recreational drugs. The problem with each of those methods is that it comes with risks and side effects you’d rather avoid. I advocate a more natural approach. For starters, the single biggest trick for manipulating your happiness chemistry is being able to do what you want, when you want. I’m contra...

I’ve explained to a number of people my observations about how exercise, diet, and sleep influence mood. The usual reaction is a blank expression followed by a change of topic. No one wants to believe that the formula for happiness is as simple as daydreaming, controlling your schedule, napping, eating right, and being active every day. You’d feel like an idiot for suffering so many unhappy days while not knowing the cure was so accessible. I know from experience that you might accept the idea that daily lifestyle choices are perhaps a small part of what causes your bad moods. But you probably think the majority of your crabbiness is caused by the idiots and sociopaths in your life plus your inexplicable bad luck on any given day. Based on a lifetime of observation, my best estimate is that 80 percent of your mood is based on how your body feels and only 20 percent is based on your genes and your circumstances, particularly your health.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that celebrities do a good job of staying thin. Obviously they have the free time and resources to do it right. And for them, fitness has an enormous financial upside. But I think celebrities have another ace in the hole too, because their lives are fabulous in general. The happier you are in one area of your life, the less effort you’ll put into searching for happiness elsewhere. And that can translate into caring less about the taste quality of your meal.

I’ve covered a lot of topics in this book, and I thought it would be helpful to provide a summary to wrap it all up. Keep in mind that if you skipped to the end of the book to read this section, it will seem extraordinarily unpersuasive out of context. 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. Unless you are a sociopath, your own happiness will depend on being good to others. And happiness tends to happen naturally whenever you have good health, resources, and a flexible sc...