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

Goals are for losers. Winners rely on systems. Your mind isn’t magic. It’s a moist computer you can program. The most important metric to track is your personal energy. Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success. Happiness is health plus freedom. Luck can be managed . . . sort of. Conquer shyness by being a huge phony (in a good way). Fitness is the lever that moves the world. Simplicity transforms ordinary into amazing.

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, available to all. It’s also mostly bullshit.

So sometimes passion is simply a byproduct of knowing you will be good at something.

Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous pre-success 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 feel good every time they apply their system. That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.

One of the most important tricks for maximizing your productivity involves matching your mental state to the task.

A simplifier will prefer the easy way to accomplish a task while knowing that some amount of extra effort might have produced a better outcome. An optimizer looks for the very best solution even if it means that the extra complexity increases the odds of unexpected problems.

Things that will someday work out well start out well. 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. Small successes can grow into big ones, but failures rarely grow into successes.

Adults are starved for a kind word. When you understand the power of honest praise (as opposed to bullshitting, flattering, and sucking up), you realize that withholding it borders on immoral. If you see something that impresses you, a decent respect for humanity insists you voice your praise.

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 only enjoy conversations that involve humans doing interesting things. They get bored in a second when the conversation turns to things.

When you bring in an emotional dimension, people know they can’t talk you out of it. Emotions don’t bend to reason. So wrap your arguments in whatever emotional blankets you can think of to influence others. A little bit of irrationality is a powerful thing.