Insights From How To Fail At Almost Everything & Still Win Big Pt. 1(#10)

Why passion is bullshit, the importance of goals vs. systems, success & selfishness

General Life Advice

• When it comes to any big or complicated question, humility is the only sensible point of view.
• The nearest we can get to truth is consistency.
• A smart friend can save you loads of time and effort.
• Sometimes you just need a friend who knows different things than you do.
• Research shows that loneliness damages the body in much the same way as aging.

Association Programming

• You become like the people around you.
• Simply find the people who represent what you would like to become and spend as much time with them. Their good habits and good energy will rub off on you.

Public Speaking

• When you stand in front of an audience, your sense of time is distorted. That’s why inexperienced presenters speak too rapidly

Experts

• Best guess is that experts are 98% right on easy stuff but only 50% right on anything unusually complicated, mysterious or even more.
• If your gut feeling (intuition) disagrees with the experts, take that seriously.

Failure

• Failure always brings something valuable with it. I don’t let it leave until I extract that value. I have a long history of profiting from failure.
• Failure is where success likes to hide in plain sight. Everything you want out of life is in that huge bubbling vat of failure. The trick is to get the good stuff out.

Photo by Ian Kim on Unsplash

Passion Is Bullshit

• It’s easy to be passionate about things that are working out and that distorts our impression of the importance of passion.
• Passion can also be a simple marker for talent. We humans tend to enjoy doing things we are good at, while not enjoying things we suck at. We’re also fairly good at predicting what we might be good at before we try.
• Sometimes passion is simply a by-product of knowing you will be good at something.
• Ask a billionaire the secret of success: He’d say his success was a combination of desire, luck, hard work, determination, brains and appetite for risk
• When your personal 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.

Goals vs. Systems

• The goal in a job is to find a better job.
• Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do.
• Goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement of each turn. The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system.
• A system is something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run. If you do something every day, it’s a system. If you’re waiting to achieve it someday in the future it’s a goal.
• A spectacular system beats passion every time.
• It helps a great deal to have at least a general strategy and some degree of focus.
• Whatever your plan, focus is always important.

Energy

• The way I approach the problem of multiple priorities is by focusing on just one main metric: my energy. I make choices that maximize my personal energy because that makes it easier to manage all of my priorities.
• Maximizing personal energy means eating right, exercising, avoiding unnecessary stress, getting enough sleep, all of the obvious steps.
• It also means having something in my life that makes me excited to wake up.
• Better energy means this will improve yours socially your love life, your family life, and your career.
• Exercise makes people smarter, psychologically braver, more creative, more energetic, and more influential.
• If the situation involves communication with others, simplification is almost always the answer.
• If the task is 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.
• If the cost of failure is high, simple tasks are the best because they are easier to manage and control.
• Every time you wonder how to do something a few hundred million people have wondered the same thing.
• If you know a particular path will make you feel more stressed, unhealthy, and drained it’s probably the wrong choice.
• Right choices can be challenging, but they usually charge you up. When you’re on the right path, it feels right, literally.
• Priorities are the things you need to get right so the things you love can thrive.

Recognizing Your Talents and Knowing When To Quit

• One helpful rule of thumb for knowing where you might have a little extra talent is to consider what you were obsessively doing before you were 10 years old
• There’s a strong connection between what interests you and what you’re good at.
• People are naturally drawn to the things they feel comfortable doing, and comfort is a marker for talent.
• People are born wired for certain preferences. Those preferences drive behavior, and that’s what can make a person willing to practice a skill.
• People generally accept outsized risk only when they expect big payoffs.
• Childhood obsessions and tolerance for risk are only rough guides to talent at best.
• As you grow and acquire more talents, your potential paths to success multiple quickly.
• The smartest system for discerning your best path to success involves trying lots of different kinds of sampling.
• For entrepreneurial ventures it might mean quickly bailing out if things don’t come together quickly.
• Overcoming obstacles is normally an unavoidable part of the process. But you also need to know when to quit.
• Things that will someday work out well start out well.
• Small successes can grow into big ones, but failures rarely grow into successes.
• Enthusiasm model is an X-factor.
• X-factor is elusive and hard-to-predict quality of a thing that makes some percentage of the public nuts about it when the X factor is present, public or a niche — picks up on it right away.
• Products that inspire excitement typically evolve to have quality too.
• One of the best ways to detect the X-factor is to watch what customers do about your idea or product, not what they say.
• If no one is excited about our art/product/idea in the beginning, they never will be.

Success & Selfishness Illusion

• If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it. Sounds like a trivial idea, but if you unpack the idea it has extraordinary power.
• Most successful people give more than they consume, in the form of taxes, charity work, job creation.
• Selfish successful people don’t cause worry and stress for those who care about them.
• The most important form of selfishness involves spending time on your fitness, eating right, pursuing your career, and still spending quality time with your friends and family.
• Being selfish means you take the long view on things.
• Humans are wired to take care of their own needs first, then family, tribe, country, and world.
• The healthiest way to look at selfishness is that it’s a necessary strategy when you’re struggling.

Happiness

• Maximizing your total lifetime experience of happiness should be your life goal.
• It’s tempting to imagine happiness as a state of mind cause, by whatever is happening in your life. This is a fallacy.
• Single biggest trick for manipulating your happiness, chemistry is being able to do what you want, when you want.
• Step one in your search for happiness is to continually work towards having control of your schedule.
• We tend to feel happy when things are moving in the right direction and unhappy when things are trending bad.
• Slow and steady improvement of anything makes you feel that you are on the right track.
• Happiness is the natural state for most people whenever they feel healthy, have flexible schedules, and expect the future to be good.
• Primary culprit in your bad mood is a deficit in either flexible schedule, imagination, sleep, diet, and exercise.
• Formula for happiness is as simple as daydreaming, controlling your schedule, napping, eating right, and being active every day.

Happiness Formula

• eat right => exercise => get enough sleep
• imagine an incredible future (even if you don’t believe it)
• work towards a flexible schedule => do things you can steadily improve at => help others (if you’ve already helped yourself) => reduce daily decisions to routine
• No one needs willpower to do the things they enjoy

Pt.2 soon to come