How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big Quotes

“Good ideas have no value because the world already has too many of them.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“My mother, in the style of the times, told me I could do anything I set my sights on. She said I could be the president, an astronaut, or the next Charles Schulz. I believed her because at that point in my life I hadn’t yet noticed the pattern of her deceptions.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“You should also try to figure out which people are thing people and which ones are people people.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“If you believe people use reason for the important decisions in life, you will go through life feeling confused and frustrated that others seem to have bad reasoning skills.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“money distorts truth like a hippo in a thong.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“Scott: What's the cure?
Doctor: There is none.
Scott: But that isn't what I heard. The optimist in me translated the gloomy news as "Scott, you will be the first person in the world to be cured of spasmodic dysphonia." And I decided that after I cured myself, somehow, someway, I would spread the word to others. I wouldn't be satisfied escaping from my prison of silence. I was planning to escape, free the other inmates, shoot the warden, and burn down the prison.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“I find it helpful to see the world as a slot machine that doesn’t ask you to put money in. All it asks is your time, focus, and energy to pull the handle over and over. 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.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“Good ideas have no value because the world already has too many of them. The market rewards execution, not ideas.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“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.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“The most effective way to stop people from trying to persuade me is to say, ‘I’m not interested.’ You should try it. Don’t offer a reason why you aren’t interested. No one can say why a thing holds interest for some and not for others. There’s no argument against a lack of interest.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“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.
I can’t think of an example in my life. It’s generally true that if no one is excited about your art/product/idea in the beginning, they never will be. 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.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“Capitalism is rotten at every level, and yet it adds up to something extraordinarily useful for society over time. The paradox of capitalism is that adding a bunch of bad-sounding ideas together creates something incredible that is far more good than bad. Capitalism inspires people to work hard, to take reasonable risks, and to create value for customers. On the whole, capitalism channels selfishness in a direction that benefits civilization, not counting a few fat cats who have figured out how to game the system. You have the same paradox with personal energy. If you look at any individual action that boosts your personal energy, it might look like selfishness. Why are you going skiing when you should be working at the homeless shelter, you selfish bastard! My proposition is that organizing your life to optimize your personal energy will add up to something incredible that is more good than bad.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success. Happiness”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“take care of yourself first and use that success as leverage to get everything else you need. I’ll”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“The only reasonable goal in life is maximizing your total lifetime experience of something called happiness. That might sound selfish, but it’s not. Only a sociopath or a hermit can find happiness through extreme selfishness. A normal person needs to treat others well in order to enjoy life.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“If eating a healthy diet feels unpleasant, you’re doing it wrong. And you’re wasting your limited stockpile of willpower.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“Inaccurate worldviews are the only kind there is.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“Every generation before us believed, like Snickers, that it had things figured out. We now know that every generation before us was wrong about a lot of it. 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.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“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.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“If I find a cow turd on my front steps, I’m not satisfied knowing that I’ll be mentally prepared to find some future cow turd. I want to shovel that turd onto my garden and hope the cow returns every week so I never have to buy fertilizer again.*”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“I wouldn’t be satisfied simply escaping from my prison of silence; I was planning to escape, free the other inmates, shoot the warden, and burn down the prison. Sometimes I get that way. It’s a surprisingly useful frame of mind.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“failure is your friend. It is the raw material of success.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“one of the primary factors in determining your energy level, and therefore your mood, is what you’ve eaten recently.*”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“Happiness has more to do with where you’re heading than where you are.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“Success isn’t magic; it’s generally the product of picking a good system and following it until luck finds you.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“It’s smarter to see your big-idea projects as part of a system to improve your energy, contacts, and skills.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“The power of daydreaming is similar to the power of well-made movies that can make you cry or make you laugh.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“The most important form of selfishness involves spending time on your fitness, eating right, pursuing your career, and still spending quality time with your family and friends. If you neglect your health or your career, you slip into the second category—stupid—which is a short slide to becoming a burden on society. I blame society for the sad state of adult fitness in the Western world. We’re raised to believe that giving of ourselves is noble and good. If you’re religious, you might have twice as much pressure to be unselfish. All our lives we are told it’s better to give than to receive. We’re programmed for unselfish behavior by society, our parents, and even our genes to some extent. The problem is that our obsession with generosity causes people to think in the short term. We skip exercise to spend an extra hour helping at home. We buy fast food to save time to help a coworker with a problem. At every turn, we cheat our own future to appear generous today. So how can you make the right long-term choices for yourself, thus being a benefit to others in the long run, without looking like a selfish turd in your daily choices? There’s no instant cure, but a step in the right direction involves the power of permission. I’m giving you permission to take care of yourself first, so you can do a better job of being generous in the long run. What? You might be wondering how a cartoonist’s permission to be selfish can help in any way. The surprising answer is that it can, in my opinion. If you’ve read this far, we have a relationship of sorts. It’s an author-reader relationship, but that’s good enough.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“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.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“This was my first exposure to the idea that one should have a system instead of a goal. The system was to continually look for better options.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life