How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big Quotes

“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 upfront, 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

“the happiness formula: Eat right. Exercise. Get enough sleep. Imagine an incredible future (even if you don’t believe it). Work toward a flexible schedule. Do things you can steadily improve at. Help others (if you’ve already helped yourself). Reduce daily decisions to routine.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“A la hora en que se levantan otros usted ya puede haber hecho más de lo que la mayoría hará durante todo el día.”
― Scott Adams, Cómo fracasar en casi todo y aun así triunfar: Algo así como la historia de mi vida (Gestion Del Conocimiento)

“On the other hand, if your boss routinely asks you to work overtime for no good reason other than to claw through piles of brain-deadening administrative work, you probably need to look for a new job.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“goal is a specific objective that you either achieve or don’t sometime in the future. A system is something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“Thanks to my odd life experiences, and odder genes, I’m wired to think things will work out well for me no matter how unlikely it might seem.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“you should never make a loan to someone who is following his passion.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

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

“Anyone who is confident in the face of great complexity is insane.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“the happiness formula:

Eat right
Exercise
Get enough sleep
Imagine an incredible future (even if you don’t believe it)
Work toward a flexible schedule
Do things you can steadily improve at
Help others (if you’ve already helped yourself)
Reduce daily decisions to routine”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“One of my systems involves continually looking for patterns in life.

Here’s my own list of the important patterns for success that I’ve noticed over the years:

Lack of fear of embarrassment
Education (the right kind)
Exercise
Education and psychological bravery are somewhat interchangeable. If you don’t have much of one, you can compensate with a lot of the other. When you see a successful person who lacks a college education, you’re usually looking at someone with an unusual lack of fear.

There’s one more pattern I see in successful people: they treat success as a learnable skill. That means they figure out what they need and they go and get it.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“Decisiveness

Decisiveness looks like leadership. Keep in mind that most normal people are at least a little bit uncertain when facing unfamiliar and complicated situation. What people crave in that sort of environment is anything that looks like certainty. If you can deliver an image of decisiveness, no matter how disingenuous, others will see it as leadership.”
― 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 decision in life, you will go through life feeling confused and frustrated that others seem to have bad reasoning skills. The reality is that reason is just one of the drivers of our decisions, and often the smallest one.

People who study hypnosis see others as moist machines that are simply responding to inputs with programmed outputs. No reasoning is involved beyond eliminating the most absurd options.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“It’s useful to think of your priorities in terms of concentric circles.

In the center is your highest priority: you. If you ruin yourself, you won’t be able to work on any other priorities. So taking care of your own healthy is job one.
The next ring is economics. If you don’t get your personal financial engine working right, you place a burden on everyone from your family to the country.
The third ring: family, friends, and lovers. Good health and sufficient money are necessary for a base level of happiness, but you need to be right with your family, friends, and romantic partners to truly enjoy life.
The next rings are your local community, your country, and the world, in that order. Don’t bother trying to fix the world until you get the inner circles of your priorities under control.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“Your skills will increase with experience, which is the more fun cousin of practice. Practice involves putting your consciousness in suspended animation. Practicing is not living. But when you build your skills through an ever-changing sequence of experiences, you’re alive.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“Did the businessman owe his current employer loyalty? Not in his view. The businessman didn’t invent capitalism, and he didn’t create its rules. He simply played within the rules. His employers wouldn’t have hesitated to fire him at the drop of a hat for any reason that fit their business needs. He simply followed their example.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“But for what it is worth, I don’t think affirmations are sensitive to exactly how many times you write them, whether you use a keyboard or a pen, whether you throw away the paper you wrote on, how many weeks you do them for, or any other detail. I can’t imagine the process of affirmations—if it works at all—is sensitive to the little details. I think a deep and consistent focus on what you want is all that is required. But that’s just my gut feeling.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“Under this explanation of the power of affirmations, they act as a sort of message from your subconscious to your rational mind telling you that you have the right stuff, even if your common sense argues otherwise. This would be useful for people who have real talent but don’t believe in it; surely there are a lot of people in that camp.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“Another possible reason that affirmations appear to work is that optimists tend to notice opportunities that pessimists miss.1 A person who diligently writes affirmations day after day is the very definition of an optimist, even if only by actions. Any form of positive thinking, prayer, or the like, would presumably put a person in a more optimistic mind-set. And because optimists have been shown in studies to notice more opportunities than pessimists, the result can look like luck. Studies show that you need not be a natural-born optimist to get the benefits of better perception.2 You can train yourself to act like an optimist—and writing affirmations is probably good training—so that you get the same benefits as natural optimists when it comes to noticing opportunities”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“When I speak of affirmations these days, I try to say as clearly as possible that they appear to have a beneficial value. The reality is that if affirmations somehow steered the universe like magic, science probably would have discovered that force by now. I don’t foresee the day when affirmations get scientific backing, at least not in the sense of testing for the existence of magic or psychic powers. I think we can all agree that affirmations are a phenomenon of the mind and belong in the domain of psychology and perception. Viewed in that light, one can imagine that doing affirmations might have a predictable impact on the brain, perhaps in terms of focus or motivation or any number of chemical reactions. Those reactions would, one assumes, be either beneficial or harmful to the pursuit of success. So in one sense, affirmations are no more special than any form of positive thinking, prayers, visualization, chanting, or the like. That said, I can tell you that in my case affirmations appear to have more power than one might expect from positive thinking.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

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

“I can’t tell you that I believe affirmations caused my few successes, or that not doing affirmations doomed other projects to failure. I can only tell you what I did and when. As I’ve explained, there are a number of perfectly reasonable explanations for the pattern. The one that stands out in my mind is that I really had no love for the work involved in the TV show, the Dilberito, or the restaurants. And I felt relief when each ended. The pattern I noticed is that the affirmations only worked when I had a 100 percent unambiguous desire for success.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“Systems have no deadlines, and on any given day you probably can’t tell if they’re moving you in the right direction”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“You already know that when your energy is right you perform better at everything you do, including school, work, sports, and even your personal life. Energy is good. Passion is bullshit.”
― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

“expongo algunas formas nuevas de pensar en el proceso para alcanzar la felicidad y el éxito. Compárelas con lo que ya sabe, lo que hace y lo que le sugieren otros. Cada persona encuentra su propia fórmula especial.”
― Scott Adams, Cómo fracasar en casi todo y aun así triunfar: Algo así como la historia de mi vida (Gestion Del Conocimiento)

“Por ejemplo, si un estudio indica que no comer otra cosa que tarta de chocolate es una manera estupenda de perder peso, pero tiene un amigo que prueba esa dieta y no hace más que engordar, tiene dos dimensiones que no encajan. (Y si cuenta el sentido común, tres.) Eso es una falta de coherencia.”
― Scott Adams, Cómo fracasar en casi todo y aun así triunfar: Algo así como la historia de mi vida (Gestion Del Conocimiento)

“Cuando busque la verdad, su mejor opción es buscar una confirmación al menos en dos de las dimensiones que he incluido en la lista.”
― Scott Adams, Cómo fracasar en casi todo y aun así triunfar: Algo así como la historia de mi vida (Gestion Del Conocimiento)

“La coherencia es el mejor marcador de la verdad del que disponemos, por imperfecto que sea.”
― Scott Adams, Cómo fracasar en casi todo y aun así triunfar: Algo así como la historia de mi vida (Gestion Del Conocimiento)

“En nuestras vidas, desordenadas e imperfectas, lo más parecido que tenemos a la verdad es la coherencia.”
― Scott Adams, Cómo fracasar en casi todo y aun así triunfar: Algo así como la historia de mi vida (Gestion Del Conocimiento)