Summary: How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big

by Scott Adams

finished 07/23/17; read completely

primary objective [SL]: Remember the good shit.

rating: 10/10 would recommend

Who should read this: Every college entrant, young adult, or any “unsuccessful” adults (so, everyone)

Summary: Scott Adams (SA) leads a less than interesting life only to stumble upon his own happiness and talents, mostly by adopting systems that allowed him to fail-forward. Peppered with his wit, Dilbert cartoons, and authentic stories from his life recounted in a way that only someone with his experience could, this book was both entertaining and insightful.

Reading notes (from SL): Not all things are properly attributed to the author (which I indicate with “ ”) but assume if it’s good writing, that it’s from the author and not I. [If anything is in brackets[]/parentheses()/braces{} those are my 2 cents/references explained/personal notes, although they will not be exclusively found in this format]. If it’s bolded and not a title, I thought it important.

SA’s TL;DR :

1. Goals are for losers. Systems are for winners.
2. The mind is a moist computer you can program. [and that should be our imperative]
3. Experiment with and track your personal energy. Very important
4. Every acquired skills doubles chance of success but yeah additional skill suffers from law of diminishing returns
5. happiness is health plus freedom (which means a flexible schedule)
6. Luck can be managed [i think he means timing is luck and working hard is luck]
7. “conquer shyness by being a huge phony”
8. Diet & Fitness are first principles
9. Simplicity transforms ordinary into amazing [?]

On truth:

Six filters for truth:

1. Personal experience
2. Experience of people you know (unreliable)
3. Experts (also mostly unreliable)
4. Studies (correlation vs causation)
5. Common sense (mistaken with confidence)
6. Pattern recognition

• look for truth based on two dimensions at least.

“the nearest we get to truth is consistency”

“When beginning process of tackling any new and complicated problem: ask a smart friend how he or she tackled the same problem.”

• very sage advice because it is unlikely that we are the first people to tackle a specific problem. If so, there are elements of it that have already been understood by someone with more experience than you.

On Passion:

his hypothesis: passionate people are more likely to take big risks in the pursuit of unlikely goals, and so you would expect to see more failures and more huge successes among the passionate. aka Passion is bullshit.

• he ties passion to some metrics of success citing his personal experiences of having more passion while his business ventures were doing well and losing passion when they were not.
• he also sees passion as an indicator of talent. You’ll probably be passionate about things you’re naturally talented at (or acquire talent for). This makes intuitive sense.

“If you ask a billionaire the secret of his success he might say it is passion, because that sounds like a sexy answer that suitably humble. But after a few drinks I think he’d say his success was a combination of desire, luck, hard work, determination, brains and appetite for risk”

Lessons from his failures in summary form:

Velcro Rosin Bad Invention: “Good ideas have no value because the world already has too many of them. The market rewards execution, not ideas. From that point on, I concentrated on ideas I could execute.”

Job interview at Xerox: “look for opportunities in which I had some natural advantage.”

Meditation guide: Wrote a beginners guide to meditation. Learned about local advertising

• (this may or may not serve use to someone in business ventures in the future, but some local marketing experience would probably be valuable about how to operate on a small scale and still hit the correct demographics with the right crafted message and product)

Computer Game 1: He learned programming and design.

Comp game 2: sometimes, you don’t have the technology to build the things you want #timing

Psychic Practice program: Computer program to track and graph the psychic abilities of users — essentially a game.

• This is example 3 of a side project that would ultimately lead him to be more valuable in his future job and in his particular case for the cartooning career

Gopher Offer: Declines a favorable opportunity to speed up the corporate ladder because of what it might have entailed and instead learned much about general business and banking which gets him his next and better paying job

Phone company career (pacific Bell): Learned more business from every angle.

Zippy ship: “gained a clearer understanding of how hard it would be to gnaw through a wall to make something work.”

• You can waste a lot of time trying to get something that works across multiple platforms only to have just wasted time. Know when to quit, essentially.

Crackpot idea website: learns about web design.

Video on Internet: About the time he learns that timing is often the biggest component of success.

Webvan: there is no such thing as useful information that comes from a company’s management (they’re liars). “Now I diversify and let the lying get smoothed out by all the other variables in my investments.

Professional Investors: They suck

Folderoo: Keep trying

Calendar patent: try and get a patent and learn?

Keypad patent: time lost chasing the puck instead of beating it

Dilberito: breaking into supermarket chains is basically too hard.

Restaurant 1 + Restaurant 2: A really fun failure.

Ninja closet: managing people in India to work on projects is a bitch and should be avoided. [I can personally attest to this]

from his best failure: the decision to sell his car and move to Cali [Yes, that was a good failure.]

The Gold from this book:

Goals are for losers. Systems are for winners.

his system for success was to create something of value that was easy to reproduce in unlimited quantities.

Doesn’t matter what you’re doing as long as you’re following a system that makes it easy for luck to find you.

first system he learned was from a CEO business man on his flight to Cali: Continually look for better options.

Systems allow you to feel good far more than goals because as long as you are adhering to the system, you are achieving success. 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.

Chasing the dream with his side business attempts, he would wake up every day and think: Today’s the day.

On deciding vs wishing

Practically dying from mono while on the last leg of his academic scholarship he decided to finish school. Doctor told him he was best suited to just try college again later (this was not an option considering the length of trouble he and his parents took to get him there).

If you want something — figure out the price, then pay it. [from Seth Godin: if you want something — figure out the price, decide if you’re willing to pay it and then don’t quit.]

Be selfish

Successful people usually don’t burden the world. You’re no use to anyone if you’re stupid or a burden on others. Best thing you can do is be selfish and take care of yourself and your finances so that you can begin to give back.

“Humans are wired to take care of their own needs first, then family, tribe, country, and world, roughly in that order”

Focus on Energy

[SA place particular emphasis on this and relates many future points back to this fundamental principle]

Maximizing personal energy makes it easier to manage all other priorities. Best way is to be happy/have good energy.

Match mental state to activity and know when you’re best suited to do certain kinds of work.

Some people are simplifiers and some are optimizers. simplifier will prefer the easy way to accomplish a task, while knowing that some amount of extra effort might have produced a better outcome. Optimizers look for the best solution even if the extra complexity increase odds of unexpected problems.

If the situation involves communication with others, simplification is almost always the right answer.

If the task is something you can do by yourself or with a partner on the same wavelength, optimization might be better if you have more control over variables present.

People can follow simple systems easier. Complicated systems have more opportunities for failure. Simple systems might be the best way to achieve success with optimization coming after when mistake can be afforded. Simplify for time.

Sit in a way that maximizes energy! Consistency is key here. don’t confuse your mind with postures used for diametrically opposed activities.

Be tidy to remove Resistance in the form of any thoughts related to the clutter or mess. [this is true for me but not for everyone]

“one of the biggest obstacles of success is the fear that you don’t know how to do the stuff that your ideal career plans would require”…but usually “when you start asking questions, you often discover that there’s a simple solution..”

Don’t be an asshole.

Asshole behaviors:

1. Changing the subject to him/herself
2. Dominating conversation
3. Bragging
4. Cheating, lying
5. Disagreeing with any suggestions, no matter how trivial
6. Using honesty as a justification for cruelty
7. Withholding simple favors out of some warped sense of social justice
8. abandoning the rules of civil behavior, such as saying hello or making eye contact

Priorities

Priorities can be viewed as concentric circles…

You are in the middle and the most important.

Next is economics, Job, investments, house, etc..

family, friends, and lovers

Local community

country

world

…

Attitude

Daydream for a better attitude. Feeling good is positive in all senses. Manage this for more personal energy. Have a world changing project or idea to increase energy.

Smile to override negative emotions

Success has a spillover effect. Become good at things to become good at other things. Taste success to be hungrier for it.

Be delusional — if you have weird superstitions or beliefs, use it to your advantage.

SA was the first person in the world (known) that cured his focal dystonia (pinky spasms) by hacking his brain and training himself to get over it, eventually breaking the spasm habit.

Use your smart friends as resources. Overprice and see what happens.

On knowing when to quit

where you might have a little extra talent is probably indicated by anything you were obsess with at a young age. Comfort is a marker for talent.

Risk is a clue to talent. You might act riskier for something you’re interested in.

Best way to discern best path to success involves trying many different things.

Things that will someday work out well start out well. Things that will never work out start out bad and stay that way. Small successes can grow into big ones, but failures rarely from into successes.

Trust a predisposition to practice…cause it might not be your thing

some people are just wired to obsessively practice. Everything requires practice, but some more than others. People best suited to practice should pursue practice intensive tasks. Otherwise, a life strategy that awards novelty seeking more than mindless repetition would be best.

It matters what you practice. His pen flipping skills have done little for him.

experience is the more fun cousin of practice.

Success

people don’t usually grow up around successful people and thus aren’t aware of their habits.

Every skill you acquire roughly doubles your odds of success. Just need to be good, not expert. You’re better off being good at two complementary skills than being excellent at one. Some skill are more valuable and there are diminishing returns.

Start with things that interest you.

Math of success [important]

We all think we know the odds in life, but there’s a good chance we have some blind spots.

See the world as math, not logic. Get good at these complementary skills:

Public speaking

• praise is transformative whereas criticism has corrosive impact. Many adults are starved for a kind word

Psychology

• knowledge of psychology is power

Business writing

• note to self: take a business writing course

Accounting

• part of the vocal of business

Design

Conversation

Good conversation technique:

• Ask questions
• Don’t complain (muchh)
• Don’t talk about boring experiences (tv show, meal, dream, etc.)
• don’t dominate the conversation. Let others talk.
• Don’t get stuck on a topic. Keep moving.
• Planning is useful but it isn’t conversation
• keep the sad stories short, especially medical stories.
• Point of convo is to make the other person feel good.
• smile and keep your body language open
• Master short but interesting stories
• put experiences in story form
• setup — literally, setup the story (i.e “so I took my car in for a brake job..). Keep it brief
• Pattern — establish a pattern that your story will violate (x y z always happens…)
• Foreshadowing
• The characters — fill in character traits that might be relevant
• Relatability — people care about themselves.
• The Twist — the story is not a story unless something unexpected or unusual happens

Topics to avoid

• Food
• Television show plots
• Dreams
• Medical stories

Overcoming shyness

• helpful to think of yourself as acting as a non shy person, not being one.
• remember that most people feel awkward too
• best way to avoid shyness is to harness the power of being interested in other people.
• Some people are thing people and some are people people. Figure out who is who to know what to talk about

Second language

Proper grammar

Persuasion

• Persuasive words and phrases
• Because
• Would you mind…?
• I’m not interested.
• I don’t do that
• I have a rule…
• I just wanted to clarify..
• Is there anything you can do for me?
• Thank you
• This is just between you and me.
• Decisiveness is key for confidence. Decisiveness looks like leadership
• Insanity
• Crazy people take more risks and act more confidently

Technology (hobby level)

Proper voice technique

• This is underrated but key. have different vocal strategies for different situations
• keep your fun voice and persuasion voice different
• eliminate um and uh & replace with silence.

Pattern Recognition

SA’s list of important patterns for success:

1. Lack of fear of embarrassment
2. Education (the right kind)
3. Exercise

Humor

Traps of humor:

1. over complaining is never funny
2. don’t overdo the self-deprecation
3. don’t mock people
4. avoid puns and wordplay

Tailor your humor

-

Affirmations could be working in ways that we do cannot yet comprehend, but should nonetheless take advantage of all the same.

seemed to only work when he had a 100% unambiguous desire for success. [this is consistent throughout literature]

Biggest component of luck is timing.

If your gut feeling disagrees with the experts, take that seriously.

Happiness

The only reasonable goal in life is maximizing total lifetime experience of happiness.

Being able to do what you wan, when you want is biggest trick for happiness. Have control of your schedule.

Happiness has more to do with where you’re heading than where you are.

We tend to feel happier when we are moving in the right direction.

Master imagination. imagine the future brighter.

H is the natural state of people whenever they feel healthy, have flexible schedules, and expect the future to be good

Exercise, Diet, and Sleep are the fundamentals to feeling healthy aka being happy.

Help others.

Reduce decisions by forming habits and routines

“The Simple, No-Willpower Diet System”

1. pay attention to your energy level after eating certain. Find patterns
2. Remove unhealthy, energy-draining food from home
3. stock up on convenient healthy food
4. stop eating foods that create feelings of addiction (white rice, white potatoes, desserts, white bread, friend food)
5. eat as much healthy food as you want, whenever.
6. Get enough sleep. Tiredness creates illusion of hunger
7. If hunger is caused by tiredness — try health foods and fats
8. If you’re eating for social reason only, choose the healthiest option
9. Learn to season veggies

Be active every day