Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

by Scott Adams

Calling people stupid will not make them turn smart, but pointing out a bad technique and contrasting it with a good one can, in time, move people to a more productive way of thinking.

As the New York Times reported in 2018, the peer review process is defective to the point of being laughable.2

Consider the skeptical argument about the alleged “seventeen-year pause” in warming from 1996 to 2014 that NASA satellites measured. Skeptics say the pause disproves human-driven climate change because CO2 was rising sharply in that time while temperatures were not.

My point is that a concerned citizen is largely helpless in trying to understand how settled the science of climate change really is.

One thing I can say with complete certainty is that it is a bad idea to trust the majority of experts in any domain in which both complexity and large amounts of money are involved. You end up with this:

The best way to get the sort of attention that drives viewership and profits today is with provocative fake news, which in my way of thinking includes not only factual inaccuracies but also biased coverage and emotion-based presentations. Bias usually reveals itself with something I call opinion stacking. That involves news programming that involves panels of pundits who hold the same biased opinions, joined by only one relatively unpersuasive pundit for the other side.

capitalism. If something is legal and profitable, it will happen, a lot.

If you buy into the full-scary narratives promoted by either the political left or the political right, you’re probably experiencing loserthink. A more useful

way to think of the political news is that nearly every major story is exaggerated to the point of falsehood, with the intention of scaring the public.

If you are certain you know the inner thoughts of a stranger, that’s a sign you might have too much confidence in your opinion.

People who have good arguments use them. People who do not have good arguments try to win by labeling. If your criticism depends on assigning labels instead of cause-and-effect reasoning, you are engaged in loserthink.

The world is not a fair place, and there is a good chance the people you are dealing with did not get to where they are because of their intelligence, hard work, and character. As you gain experience in life, that truth becomes more obvious. We’re all putting on an act and hoping the audience buys it. Your act might be somewhat close to your true nature, or it might not be. But it is an act nonetheless. Once you embrace the reality that we all present the “enhanced” versions of our real selves, all the time, you can relax a bit and get into character.

when your ego makes your decisions for you, that’s loserthink.

When you are in an environment that is so casually cruel, people who see ego as a reflection of self are tempted to retreat. But I see ego as a tool, which in this case allowed me to gain experience in a new medium, get a lot of exposure, and build my talent stack. Today, most of the major news media companies follow me on Periscope, and so do a lot of political players at all levels. How important is that?

Effectiveness is more important than ego.

Put yourself in potentially embarrassing situations on a regular basis for practice. If you get embarrassed as planned, watch how one year later you are still alive. Maybe you even have a funny story because of it.

Note how other people’s embarrassments mean little to you when you are an observer. That’s how much your embarrassments mean to them: nothing.

It isn’t news if someone does a good job and gets a good outcome. Or at least it isn’t the exciting kind of news that gets clicks.

In reality, rarely does everything go wrong, and humans are quite handy at avoiding the worst-case scenarios when they see them developing. Persistent negativity is a harsh mental prison. Humans need optimism and hope to fuel progress. If all you see is the negative, while those around you seem to be experiencing optimism, that’s a signal you might be in a mental prison.

And your mental state has a huge impact on your health. Exposure to horrible and frightening thoughts can elevate your stress, which releases cortisol. The Mayo Clinic website explains that cortisol “curbs functions that would be nonessential or detrimental in a fight-or-flight situation. It alters immune system responses and suppresses the digestive system, the reproductive system and growth processes. This complex natural alarm system also communicates with regions of your brain that control mood, motivation and fear.”5

If you are having trouble keeping negative thoughts from your mind, don’t try to “not think” about them. That just makes you think about them more. Instead, find the most positive and “sticky” thoughts you can imagine, and focus on them until your mental shelf space is filled.

To imagine people like a person or a place for the same reasons is a serious lack of imagination and a denial of the most common experience in our shared reality.

Which history is the accurate one? Answer: neither. Both are filtered through politics and distorted to the point of being misleading if not outright untrue, except for the basic facts such as names and dates.

The past didn’t exist anywhere except in my memories, but that was enough to ruin my present happiness. I

We need a tool that better fits the task. Kanye suggested moving away from focusing on the past and getting on with the business of succeeding.

We should not forget or minimize the past, as it serves us in a number of ways. But we can choose to focus on the paths forward instead of the footprints behind us, and as a strategy for success, that mindset is probably the right tool for the job.

Whenever humans have an opportunity to do something illegal that would have a huge payoff should it work, and no risk of getting caught, the odds of someone doing that illegal thing approach 100 percent.

More importantly, no one much cares about your problems, at least not your minor health issues, as they see it. We imagine people care about our situations more than they do.

When the annual number of deaths from opioids exceeds the number of American troops killed in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan combined, which is the current situation, it is the entire country’s problem.

A more productive way to think is that solutions can come from anywhere.

One of my systems involves blogging and livestreaming on a variety of topics, then monitoring audience reaction to see where I should focus my energy. That system, which I have used for years, caused me to evolve from a cartoonist into a political pundit with a special focus on persuasion.

When it comes to your personal life, business life, and political opinions, it makes sense to favor systems over goals whenever that is practical. A goal gives you one way to win, whereas a system can surface lots of winning paths, some of which you never could have imagined.

That’s why it is smarter to not commit to a firm opinion when facts are still coming into focus. My mantra in these situations is: But I could be totally wrong. That gives me the mental freedom to later adjust my opinion if needed.

As I write this book, Democrats are accusing Republicans of being racists because some of them are. Meanwhile, Republicans are accusing Democrats of being socialists, criminals, and anarchists because some of them are. If your intention is to win at all costs, this sort of unethical branding of the other side can work wonders.

any part of your argument depends on asking critics to “prove it isn’t true,” you are thinking like a cult member.

People who are trained in decision-making know it is not rational to ask someone to prove a negative. So if you find yourself demanding that others do so, you are practicing loserthink.

The secret to thwarting couch lock of any sort is to stop imagining everything you need to do, and start imagining the smallest step that you can do without much real effort.

My nomination for the most loserthinkish advice in history is: “Stay in your lane.” That is the sort of advice that is better served to an enemy, not a friend. If everyone followed that advice, you wouldn’t have civilization.

Learning to take sensible chances outside your lane is one of the best life skills you will ever acquire. And it is available to all of us.

Successful people, and people who will someday be successful, seem to believe they can steer their fate by their actions.

I recommend one of my own books as a starter: How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. If I may ignore modesty here in the interest of being useful, people who read that book consistently report that it improved their lives by improving their mental game.

The main theme of the book is about how to think of your path to success as a series of systems instead of goals.

If we knew how often we were wrong about our understanding of just about everything, it would be deeply demotivating. And if we become demotivated, the portal to progress will shut tighter than a mosquito’s nozzle* in an ice storm.

But the reality is that entrepreneurs are making educated guesses and talking themselves into a degree of certainty that the facts do not support. People buck the odds because they don’t believe those odds apply to their situations.

As a general rule, people have to go find luck; it doesn’t find them. Luck is attracted to action and energy; it doesn’t come looking for you on the couch.

We all inhabit a reality of our own making. In each of our artificial realities, we know our version of things is both proper and right, while all the people who disagree with us are obviously wretched, ignorant, and weak. Sometimes we feel sorry for them.

Favoring action over inaction, even in the face of uncertainty, is generally a good approach to life. The world rewards energy, and it even rewards failure by teaching you valuable lessons and expanding your network of contacts.

It might seem as if there are only two options in life—do something or do nothing—and both paths have a high chance of failing. So what do you do? For the solution to that dilemma, I borrow from the fields of science, business management, and entrepreneurship for a better way to think. And they provide the answer. It goes like this:

The next time you find yourself in a debate about doing something big, ask yourself how the idea can first be tested small. The alternatives are loserthink.

Be skeptical of any experts who have a financial incentive to mislead you and almost no risk on their end.