"How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big" by Scott Adams

• When it comes to any big or complicated question, humility is the only sensible point of view.
• In our messy, flawed lives, the nearest we can get to truth is consistency. Consistency is the bedrock of the scientific method.
• Goals are for losers.
• Your mind isn’t magic. It’s a moist computer you can program.
• The most important metric to track is your personal energy.
• Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success.
• Happiness is health plus freedom.
• Luck can be managed, sort of.
• Conquer shyness by being a huge phony (in a good way).
• Fitness is the lever that moves the world.
• Simplicity transforms ordinary into amazing.
• Most people have poor filters for sorting truth from fiction, and there’s no objective way to know if you’re particularly good at it or not.
• When you stand in front of an audience, your sensation of time is distorted. That’s why inexperienced presenters speak too rapidly.
• Failure always brings something valuable with it.
• Success caused passion more than passion cases success.
• Passion can be a simple marker for talent. We humans tend to enjoy doing things we are good at, while not enjoying things we suck at.
• Forget about passion when you’re planning your path to success.
• Energy is good. Passion is bullshit.
• Failure is where success likes to hide in plain sight.
• If success were easy, everyone would do it. It takes effort. That fact works to your advantage because it keeps lazy people out of the game.
• Good ideas have no value because the world already has too many of them. The market rewards execution, not ideas.
• Timing is often the biggest component of success. And since timing is often hard to get right unless you are psychic, it makes sense to try different things until you get the timing right by luck.
• There is no such thing as useful information that comes from a company management.
• Every time you get a new job, immediately start looking for another one. Job seeking is an ongoing process.
• Always be looking for a better deal.
• Your job is not your job; your job is to find a better job.
• People who use systems do better.
• To put it bluntly, goals are for losers.
• 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.
• The minimum requirement of a system is that a reasonable person expects it to work more often than not.
• A spectacular system beats passion every time.
• The world offers so many alternatives that you need a quick filter to eliminate some options and pay attention to others. Whatever your plan, focus is always important.
• If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it.
• When you decide to be successful in a big way, it means you acknowledge the price and you’re willing to pay it.
• Successful people don’t wish for success; they decide to pursue it.
• When it comes to the topic of generosity, there are three kinds of people in the word:
• selfish
• stupid
• burden on others
• 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.
• Often all one needs is some form of permission to initiate a change, and it doesn’t really matter what form the permission is in, or if it even makes sense.
• I make choices that maximize my personal energy because that makes it easier to manage all of the other priorities.
• One of the most important tricks for maximizing your productivity involves matching your mental state to the task.
• You might not think you’re an early morning person. But once you get used to it, you might never want to go back. You can accomplish more by the time other people wake up than most people accomplish all day.
• Some people are what I call simplifiers and some are optimizers. A simplifier will prefer the easy way to accomplish a task, while knowing that some amount of extra effort might have produced a better outcome. An optimizer looks for the very best solution even if extra complexity increases the odds of unexpected problems.
• The cost of optimizing is that it’s exhausting and stress inducing.
• If a situation involves communication with others, simplification is almost always the right 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.
• I prefer simplicity whenever I”m choosing a system to use. People can follow simple systems better than complicated ones.
• If you can’t tell whether a simple plan or a complicated one will be the best, choose the simple one.
• If the cost of failure is high, simple tasks are the best because they are easier to manage and control.
• Optimizing is often the strategy of people who have specific goals and feel the need to do everything in their power to achieve them.
• Simplifying is generally the strategy of people who view the world in terms of systems.
• The best systems are simple. and for good reason. Complicated systems have more opportunities for failure.
• Simple systems are probably the best way to achieve success. Once you have success, optimizing begins to have more value.
• Start-ups often to better by slapping together some things that is 80 percent good and seeing how the public responds. There’s time to improve things later if the market cares about the product.
• Another big advantage of simplification is that it frees up time, and time is one of your most valuable resources in the world.
• One of the biggest obstacles to success--and a real energy killer-is the fear that you don’t know how to do the stuff that your ideal career plans would require.
• When you start asking questions, you often discover that there’s a simple solution.
• Keep in mind that every time you wonder how to do something, a few hundred million people have probably wondered the same thing.
• When you know how to do something, you feel more energized to take it on.
• One of the best ways to pollute the energy in a group situation is by being a total asshole. You might succeed in getting people fully energized, but it won’t be in a productive way.
• Your self-interest is best served by being a reasonable person whenever you can muster it.
• 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.
• Exercise, food, and sleep should be your first buttons to push if you’re trying to elevate your attitude and raise your energy.
• Your body and mind will respond automatically to whatever images you spend the most time pondering.
• Smiling makes you feel better even if your smile is fake. This is the clearest example of how your brain has a user interface.
• 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.
• You shouldn’t hesitate to modify your perception to whatever makes you happy, because you’re probably wrong about the underlying nature of reality anyway.
• Free yourself from the shackles of an oppressive reality. What’s real to you is what you imagine and what you feel. If you manage your illusions wisely, you might get what you want, but you won’t necessarily understand why it worked.
• Never assume you understand the odds of things.
• 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 ten years old.
• There’s a strong connection between what interests you and what you’re good at.
• Where there is a tolerance for risk, there is often talent.
• Things that will someday work out well start out well. Things that will never work start out bad and stay that way.
• The best predictor is not the average response. Averages don’t mean much for entertainment products. What you're looking for is an unusually strong reaction from some subset of the public, even if the majority hates it.
• 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. People tend to say what they think you want to hear or what they think will cause the least pain. What people do is far more honest.
• 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.
• There’s no denying the importance of practice. The hard part is figuring out what to practice.
• Success isn’t magic; it’s generally the product of picking a good system and following it until lucks finds you.
• You can manipulate your odds of success by how you choose to fill out the variables in the formula. The formulae, roughly speaking, is that every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success.
• The idea is that you can raise your market value by being merely good--not extraordinary--at more than one skill.
• When it comes to skills, quantity often beats quality.
• While we all think we knows the odds in life, there’s a good chance you have some blind spots. Finding those blinds spots is a big deal.
• I made a list of the skills in which I think every adult should gain a working knowledge:
• public speaking
• psychology
• business writing
• accounting
• design (the basics)
• conversation
• overcoming shyness
• second language
• golf
• proper grammar
• persuasion
• technology (hobby level)
• proper voice technique
• Praise has a transformative power versus the corrosive impact of criticism.
• Psychology is embedded in everything we do.
• 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.
• It’s a good idea to make psychology our lifelong study. Most of what you need to know as a regular citizen can be gleaned from the internet.
• 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. The reality is that reason is just one of the drivers of our decisions, and often the smallest one.
• It is tremendously useful to know when people are using reason and when they are rationalizing the irrational. You’re wasting your time if you try to make someone see reason when treason is not influencing the decision.
• A lie that makes a voter feel good is more effective than a hundred rational arguments. That’s even true when the voter knows the lire is a lie.
• Few things are as destructive and limiting as a worldview that assumes people are mostly rational.
• The way a product makes peoples feel trumps most other considerations, including price.
• Rational behavior is especially useless in any situation that is too complex for a human to grasp.
• Consumers make largely uninformed decisions and convince themselves they did well.
• Business writing is also the foundation for humor writing. Unnecessary words and passive writing kill the timing of humor the same way they kill the persuasiveness of your point.
• The most common [design] layout is the L-shaped layout. You imagine a giant letter L on the page and fill in the dense stuff along it’s shape, leaving less clutter in one of the four open quadrants.
• [To make conversation] all you do is introduce yourself and ask questions until you find a point of mutual interest.
• What’s your name?
• Where do you live?
• Do you have a family?
• What do you do for a living?
• Do you have any hobbies/sports?
• Do you have any travel plans?
• While most people enjoy humor, the typical person doesn’t go directly there before getting to know someone.
• Nothing is easier than talking about one’s self.
• Your job as a conversationalist is to keep asking questions and keep looking for something you have in common with the stranger, or something that interests you enough to wade into the topic.
• The most important key to good storytelling is preparation. You don’t want to figure out your story as you tell it.
• The basic parts of a good party story are:
• setup
• There’s only one important rule for a story setup: Keep it brief.
• Try to keep your setup to one sentence, two at most.
• pattern
• Establish a pattern that your story will violate.
• foreshadowing
• Foreshadowing means you leave some clues about where the story is going.
• characters
• Fill in the story with some character traits that will be relevant.
• All good stories are 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.
• twist
• Your story isn’t a story unless something unexpected or unusual happens.
• If you don’t have a twist, it’s not a story.
• Here are a few topics you should avoid:
• food
• television show plots
• dreams
• medical stories
• Smile, ask questions, avoid complaining and sad topics, and have some entertaining stories ready to go. It’s all you need to be in the top 10 percent of all conversationalists.
• Overcome shyness by imagining you are acting instead of interacting. And by that I mean literally acting.
• The single best tip for avoiding shyness involves harnessing the power of acting interested in other people.
• You should also try to figure out which people are thin people and which ones are people people. Thing people enjoy hearing about new technology and other clever tools and possessions. People people enjoy only conversations that involve humans doing interesting things.
• The thing that golf does well is that it allows males, especially, to bond. And for adult men, gold is as close as you can get to a universal activity.
• Nearly every interaction with others involves some form of persuasion, even if it’s subtle.
• Being a good persuader is like having a magic power.
• 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.
• People are more cooperative when you ask for a favor using a sentence that includes the word because, even if the reason you offer makes little or no sense.
• People tend to double down when challenged, no matter how wrong they are.
• Research shows that people will automatically label you a friend if you share a secret.
• Decisiveness looks like leadership.
• Reasonable people generally cave in to irrational people because it seems like the path of least resistance.
• Studies show a commanding voice is highly correlated with success.
• The 7 habits of highly effective people:
• be proactive
• begin with the end in mind
• put first things first
• think win-win
• seek first to understand then be understood
• synergize
• sharpen the saw
• Here’s my own list of the important patterns for success that I’ve notice over the years.
• Lack of fear of embarrassment.
• Education (the right kind)
• Exercise
• A lack of fear of embarrassment is what allows one to be proactive. It’s what makes a person take on challenges that others write off as too risky.
• Generally speaking, the people who have the right kind of education have almost no risk of unemployment.
• 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.
• Don’t make fun of people too often. If that starts to look like a pattern, people will assume you’re talking behind their backs as well.
• Affirmations are simply the practice of repeating to yourself what you want to achieve while imagining the outcome you want.
• You don’t need to know why something works to take advantage of it.
• To change yourself, part of the solution might involve spending more time with the people who represent the change you seek.
• The only reasonable goal in life is maximizing your total lifetime experience of something called happiness.
• Step one in your search for happiness is to continually work toward having control of your schedule.
• In your personal life and your career, consider schedule flexibility when making any big decision.
• Happiness has more to do with where you’re heading than where you are.
• Slow and steady improvement at anything makes you feel that you are on the right track.
• If you are lucky enough to have career options, and only one of them affords a path of continual improvement, choose that one, all else being equal.
• I’m here to tell you that the primary culprit in your bad moods is a deficit in one of the big five: flexible schedule, imagination, sleep, diet, and exercise.
• No one wants to believe that the formula for happiness is as simple as daydreaming, controlling your schedule, napping, eating right, and being active every day.
• The problem with options is that choosing any path can leave you plagued with self-doubt.
• Recapping 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
• Whenever it’s practical and safe, consider your body a laboratory in which you can test different approaches to health.
• Science has demonstrated that humans have a limited supply of willpower. If you use up your supply resisting one temptation, it limits your ability to resist others.
• The trick to eating right is to keep willpower out of the equation for your diet.
• Simplification is often the difference between doing something you know you should do and putting it off.
• No one needs willpower to do the things they enjoy.
• Fitness is a simple thing made absurdly complicated by market forces.
• There are three practical ways to schedule exercise in a marriage or marriage like situation:
• join an organized team
• always exercise at the same time every day
• exercise together (if you both really mean it)
• Exercise becomes a habit when you do it every day without fail.
• Every time we add new skills and broaden our network of contacts, our market value increases.
• If you think your odds of solving your problem are bad, don’t rule out the possibility that what is really happening is that you are bad at estimating odds.
• There is plenty of science to support the idea that we humans tend to remember the things we want to remember and forget the things we’d rather forget.
• Learning multiple skills makes your odds of success dramatically higher than learning one skill.
• If you stay in the game long enough, luck has a better chance of finding you.
• Avoid career traps such as pursuing jobs that require you to sell your limited supply of time while preparing you for nothing better.
• Happiness is the only useful goal in life.
• Some skills are more important than others, and you should acquire as many of those key skills as possible, including public speaking, business writing, a working understanding of the psychology of persuasion, an understanding of basic technology concepts, social skills, proper voice technique, good grammar, and basic accounting.
• Develop a habit of simplifying.
• Learn how to make small talk with strangers, and learn how to avoid being an asshole.
• People who seem to have good luck are often the people who have a system that allows luck to find them.
• Always remember that failure is your friend. It is the raw material of success. Invited it in. Learn from it.