How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams
Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind Dilbert, shares his stories and lessons from his failed ventures.
Chapter 1: Passion is Bullshit
You know that when your energy is right, you perform better at everything you do, including school, work, sports and your personal life. Energy is good. Passion is bullshit.
Chapter 7: My System
I figured my competitive edge was creativity. I would try one thing after another until something creative struck a chord with the public. Then I would reproduce it like crazy. In the near term it would mean one failure after another. In the long term I was create a situation that would allow luck to find me.
I woke up with the same thought, literally, as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes, “Today’s the day.”
Chapter 9: Deciding Versus Wanting
If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it. It sounds trivial and obvious but if you unpack the idea it has extraordinary power.
Successful people don’t wish for success; they decide to pursue it
Chapter 10: The Selfishness Illusion
The most important form of selfishness involved spending time on your fitness, eating right, pursuing your career, and still spending quality time with your family and friends.
We humans are wired to be easily influenced by the people who are in relationships with us, no matter what those relationships are. Sometimes we call that influence peer pressure. Sometimes it’s called modeling or imitating. Sometime’s it’s learning by example. And most of the time, it’s just something we do automatically, without thinking.
Chapter 11: The Energy Metric
The way to approach problems of multiple priorities to focus on one main metric: your energy. If you make choices that maximizes your personal energy, it makes it easier to manage all other priorities.
Maximizing personal energy means eating right, exercising, avoiding unnecessary means of stress, getting enough sleep… but it also means having something in your life that makes you excited to wake up.
When you talk to a cheerful person who is full of energy, you automatically feel a boost. I’m suggesting that by becoming a person with good energy, you life the people around you.
While writing takes me away from my friends and family for a bit, it makes me a better person when I’m with them.
If the situation involves communication with others, simplification is almost always the right answer.
If the task if something you can do all by yourself, or with a partner who is on your wavelength, optimizing might be a better path if you can control most variables in the situation.
Your brain takes some of its cues from what your body is doing.
It’s a good idea to dedicate certain sitting positions and certain work spaces to work and other spaces to relaxation/play. That makes your physical environment a sort of user interface for your brain and it becomes a way to manipulate your energy levels and concentration.
Priorities are the things you need to get right so the thing you love can thrive.
Chapter 12: Managing Your Attitude
Your body and mind will respond to automatically to whatever images you spend the most time pondering
Putting yourself in that imagination-fueled frame of mind will pep you up. Imagination is the interface to your attitude. You can literally imagine yourself to higher levels of energy.
Let your ideas for the future fuel your energy today. No matter what you want to do in life, higher energy help you get there.
A great strategy for success in life is to become good at something, anything and let that feeling propel you to new and better victories. Success can be habit-forming.
What’s real to you is what you imagine and what you feel. (Kaila here, this line got me thinking hard…)
Chapter 14: My Pinkie Goes Nuts
Thanks to my odd life experiences and odder genes, I am weird to think things will work out well for me no matter how unlikely it might seem.
Chapter 15: My Speaking Career
I raised my speaking price and the requests kept coming in. By the time I got to $25,000 the Speakers Bureau started to see me as a source for bigger commissions and asked me to raise my price.
The largest offer I ever turned down was $100,000 to speak for an hour on any topic I wanted.
Sometimes you need a friend who knows different things than you do. And you can always find one of those.
Chapter 16: My Voice Problem Gets a Name
“There is none” she replied. But that isn’t what I heard. The optimist i 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, some way, I would spread the word to others.
Chapter 18: Recognizing Your Talents and Knowing When To Quit
People are born wired for certain preferences
A clue to talent involved tolerance for risk
Chapter 19: Is Practice Your Thing?
Craft a life plan for yourself that embraces your natural inclinations
Chapter 21: the Math of Success
My natural optimism always tells me I’m going to pull a rabbit out of the hat and win against all odds no matter how far behind I am. That feeling is so strong in me that the only reason it isn’t classified as mental illness is that it works more of often than you’d expect.
Some of the most powerful patterns in life are subtle.
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.
The future is thoroughly unpredictable when it comes to your profession and your personal life ten years out. The best is to increase you odds at success — in a way that might look like luck to other — is to systematically become good, but not amazing, at the type of skills that work well together and are highly useful for just about any job.
Adults are starved for a kind word. When you understand the power of honest praise, you realize that withholding it border on immoral. If you see something that impresses you, a decent respect to humanity insists you voice your praise.
Don’t assume you know how much potential you have. The only way to know what you can do is to test yourself.
Quality is not an independent force in the universe; it depends on what you choose as your frame of reference.
Success in anything usually means doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t.
Knowledge of psychology is the purest form of that power. No matter what you’re doing or how well you’re doing it, you can benefit from a deeper understand of how the mind interprets its world using only clues that somehow find a way into your brain
I considered making money as a hypnotist. I didn’t want to be in the business of selling my time.
If you believe people use reason for the important decisions in life, you will go through life feeling confused and frustrated that other seem to have bad reasoning skills. The reality is that the reason is just one of the drivers of our decisions and often the smallest one.
Few things are as destructive and limiting as a worldview that assumes people are mostly rational.
Apple owes much of its success to Steve Jobs’ understanding that the way a product makes users feel trumps most other considerations.
Cellphone companies exploit the fact by offering pricing plans that are too complicated to compare with the competition — “confusopoly”
Few people are skilled conversationalists. Most people are just talking, which is not the same thing.
People often want to talk about something interesting and to sound knowledgable. Your job is to make that easy.
Everyone is interesting if you make the situation feel safe.
The point of a conversation is to make the other person feel good.
It’s worth becoming a master of short but interesting stories. Get in the habit of asking yourself how you can turn your interesting experiences into story form
Scott Adam’s remarks about the public speaking training he was a student in:
My fellow employee bounded onto the stage as if he had just won the lottery. HIs energy and enthusiasm were infection. He had no notes. He prowled the stage and owned it. We, the audience, locked onto him like a tail and we let him wag us. He was funny, expressive, engaging, and spontaneous. It was the best speech by a non-professional I had ever seen. I could tell he loves every second onstage and yet he had the discipline to keep it brief
The instructor went to the front and looked at the broken student. The room was dead silent. I’ll always remember his words. He said “Wow. That was brave.”
Scott Adam’s advice about storytelling:
The key is a good storytelling is preparation. You don’t want to figure out your story as you tell it. Get it into a structure and try practicing to tell it.
Setup: Keep it brief like “So I took my car in for a brake job….”
It should be 1-2 sentences at most
Pattern: Establish a pattern that your story will violate like “Whenever I take my car in for any kind of service, I’m always amazed how expensive it is…” That established the pattern and the audience knows to expect it to be violated
Foreshadowing: Leave some clues about where the story is going.
Characters: If you’re talking to strangers who don’t know you, fill this in with character traits that will be relevant like “Our friend Bob has been borrowing our tools for years because he’s too cheap to buy his own…”
All good stories about personalities
Relatability: There is one topic that people care more about than any other: themselves. Pick story topics that your listeners will relate to
The twist: Your story isn’t a story unless something unusual or unexpected happens
Decisiveness looks like leadership
Energy is contagious. People like how it feels. If you show enthusiasm, others will want to experience the same rush.
Emotions don’t bend to reason. Wrap your arguments in emotion in whatever emotional blankets you can influence on others. A little bit of irrationality is a powerful thing.
The business world is a lot like a theater. Everyone tries to get into character for the job they have.
A lack of fear of embarrassment = key to success. This is what makes you take the first step before you know what the second step is. The one pattern in successful people = they treat successful like a learnable skill. That means they figure out what they need and they go and get it.
Chapter 24: Affirmations
Affirmations is the practice of repeating to yourself what you want to achieve while imagining the outcome you want. The process is about improving your focus, not summoning magic. You don’t need to know why something works to take advantage of it.
You need 100% unambiguous desire for success
Chapter 29: Association Programming
To change yourself, part of the solution might involve spending more time with the people who represent the change you seek.
Chapter 30: Happiness
The single biggest trick for manipulating your happiness chemistry is being able to do what you want, when you want.
Step on in your search for happiness to continually work toward having control of your schedule.
Happiness has more to do with where you’re heading than where you are.
Pessimism is often a failure of imagination. If you can imagine the future being brighter, it lifts your energy and gooses the chemistry in your body that produces a sensation of happiness. If you can’t even imagine a better future, you won’t be happy no matter how well your life is going.
Happiness is the natural state for most people whenever they feel healthy, have flexible schedules and expect the future to be good.
The primary culprit of your bad moods = flexible schedule, imagination, sleep, diet, and exercise.
I never waste a brain cell in the morning trying to figure out what to do when. Reducing daily decisions about your routine will improve happiness.
Chapter 31: Diet
Your mood is a function of chemistry in your body and food is a main contributor.
Try eating as much as you want of the foods that don’t include addictive, simple carbs.
The happier you are in one area of your life, the less effort you’ll be put into search for happiness elsewhere. if you get your entire life in order, it’s much easier to have an ideal weight.
Chapter 32: Fitness
Long distance runners are people who are born with a certain genetic gift that allows them to feel good when running. No one needs willpower for the things that they enjoy.
When you change how you think, it eventually changes how you behave.
Final Few Takeaways:
Every time we add new skills and broaden our network of contacts, our market value increases.
Optimists tend to notice opportunities that pessimists miss.
Perhaps only the people who know, deep down, that they have the right stuff to succeed, will even bother doing affirmations.
Avoid career traps such as pursuing jobs that require you to sell your limited supply of time while preparing you for nothing better.
Happiness tends to happen naturally whenever you have good health, resources, and a flexible schedule. Get your health right first, acquire resources and new skills through hard work, and look for an opportunity that gives you a flexible schedule someday.