How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life (The Scott Adams Success Series)

by Scott Adams

Consider the people who routinely disagree with you. See how confident they look while being dead wrong? That’s exactly how you look to them.

I’m not an expert in any of the topics I’ll discuss here. But I am a professional simplifier.

Failure is a resource that can be managed.

The systems-driven people have found a way to look at the familiar in new and more useful ways.

Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems in the sense that they did what they intended to do.

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.

Is it likely that you were born at the tipping point of history in which humans know enough about reality to say we understand it? This is another case where humility is your friend. When you can release your ego long enough to view your perceptions as incomplete or misleading, you set yourself free to imagine new and potentially more useful ways of looking at the world.

people are born wired for certain preferences. Those preferences drive behavior, and that’s what can make a person willing to practice a skill. A

The smartest system for discerning your best path to success involves trying lots of different things—sampling, if you will. For entrepreneurial ventures, it might mean quickly bailing out if things don’t come together quickly.

Persistence is useful, but there’s no point being an idiot about it.

If the first commercial version of your work excites no one to action, it’s time to move on to something different. Don’t be fooled by the opinions of friends and family. They’re all liars.

The idea is that you can raise your market value by being merely good—not extraordinary—at more than one skill.

The point is that while we all think we know the odds in life, there’s a good chance you have some blind spots. Finding those blind spots is a big deal.

I didn’t want to be in the business of selling my time.

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.

We tend to feel happy when things are moving in the right direction and unhappy when things are trending bad.

And always remember that failure is your friend. It’s 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.