How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big
Systems Beat Goals. Energy is Good. Passion is Bullshit. Be Selfish - in the Right Way. Manage Your Odds for Success. See Failure is a Tool, not as an Outcome. Stay in the Game Long Enough. Be Happy.
When I read "How to Fail at Almost Anything And Still Win Big" by Scott Adams it seemed at times a bit chaotic and unpolished - I don't care. It is authentic and sincere, and most importantly, has a few big ideas that the author has figured out through his entire life and career. Many of them speak to me in a big way. "Systems Beat Goals" is my #1.
Systems Beat Goals
To put it bluntly, goals are for losers. That’s literally true most of the time. For example, if your goal is to lose ten pounds, you will spend every moment until you reach the goal—if you reach it at all—feeling as if you were short of your goal. In other words, goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary. That feeling wears on you. In time, it becomes heavy and uncomfortable. It might even drive you out of the game.
The system-versus-goals model can be applied to most human endeavors. In the world of dieting, losing twenty pounds is a goal, but eating right is a system. In the exercise realm, running a marathon in under four hours is a goal, but exercising daily is a system. In business, making a million dollars is a goal, but being a serial entrepreneur is a system. For our purposes, let’s say a 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. 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.
For our purposes, let’s agree that goals are a reach-it-and-be-done situation, whereas a system is something you do on a regular basis with a reasonable expectation that doing so will get you to a better place in your life. Systems have no deadlines, and on any given day you probably can’t tell if they’re moving you in the right direction.
The Energy Metric
The way I approach the problem of multiple priorities is by focusing on just one metric: my energy. I make choices that maximize my personal energy because that makes it easier to manage all of the other priorities.
Maximizing my personal energy means eating right, exercising, avoiding unnecessary stress, getting enough sleep, and all of the obvious steps. But it also means having something in my life that makes me excited to wake up.
I define personal energy as anything that gives you a positive lift, either mentally or physically. Like art, you know it when you see it.
If you look at any action that boosts your personal energy, it might look like selfishness. My proposition is that organizing your life to optimize your personal energy will add up to something incredible that is more good than bad.
When you manage your energy, match your mental state - it will vary during the day - to activity.
Another piece of advice: simplify instead of optimizing. Optimizing is often the strategy of people who have specific goals and feel the need to do everything in their power to achieve them.
Passion is Bullshit
My hypothesis is that 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. Passionate people who fail don’t get a chance to offer their advice to the rest of us. But successful passionate people are writing books and answering interview questions about their secrets for success every day. Naturally, those successful people want you to believe that success is a product of their awesomeness, but they also want to retain some humility. You can’t be humble and say, “I succeeded because I am far smarter than the average person.” But you can say your passion was a key to your success because everyone can be passionate about something. Passion sounds more accessible.
It’s easy to be passionate about things that are working out, and that distorts our impression of the importance of passion. I’ve been involved in several dozen business ventures over the course of my life, and each one made me excited at the start. You might even call it passion. The ones that didn’t work out—and that would be most of them—slowly drained my passion as they failed. The few that worked became more exciting as they succeeded.
In hindsight, it looks as if the projects I was most passionate about were also the ones that worked. But objectively, my passion level moved with my success. Success caused passion more than passion caused success.
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. I was passionate about tennis the first day I picked up a racket, and I’ve played all my life. But I also knew in an instant that it was the type of thing I could be good at, unlike basketball or football. So sometimes passion is simply a by-product of knowing you will be good at something.
Energy is good. Passion is bullshit.
Be Selfish (in the right way)
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. If you neglect your health or your career, you can slip from the "selfish" category to the "stupid" category.
Give yourself permission to take care of yourself first, so you can do a better job of being generous to others in the long run. The world needs you at your best.
Being selfish doesn't mean being a sociopath. It just means you take the long view of things.
The healthiest way to look at selfishness is that it's a necessary strategy when you're struggling.
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 health is job one.
The next ring is economics: your job, your investments, your house. If you don't get your personal financial engine working right, you place a burden on everyone.
Once you are both healthy and financially sound, it's time for the third ring: relationships - family, friends, lovers.
The next ring is your local community and the world. Don't bother trying to fix the world until you get the inner circles of your priorities under control.
Manage Your Odds for Success
Success isn't magic; it's generally the product of picking a good system and following it until luck finds you.
You cannot directly control luck, but you can move from a game with low odds of success to a game with better odds.
Success formula: Good + Good > Excellent
Each new skill doubles your odds for success.
It helps to see the world as math and not magic.
The best way to increase your odds of success - in a way that might look like luck to others - 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. They include public speaking, psychology of influence, business writing, accounting, design (the basics), conversation, overcoming shyness, second language, golf. proper grammar, persuasion, technology. proper voice technique
We don't always have an accurate view of our own potential. Don't assume you know how much potential you have. Sometimes the only way to know what you can do is to test yourself.
Deciding Versus Wanting
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.
Once you DECIDE, you take action. Wishing starts in the mind and stays there.
Successful people don't wish for success; they decide to pursue it. And to pursue it effectively, they need a system.
Success always has a price, but the reality is that the price is negotiable. If you pick the right system, the price will be a lot nearer what you're willing to pay.
Identify your skillset and choose a system that increases your odds of getting "lucky"
Understand the odds. Some things are, by their nature, likely, some are not. I learned by observation that people who pursued extraordinarily unlikely goals were overly optimistic at best, delusional at worst, and just plain stupid most of the time.
My entrepreneurial plan after college: create something that had value and - the next part is key - I wanted the product to be something that was easy to reproduce in unlimited quantities. I didn't want to sell my time, at least not directly, because this model has an upward limit.
I figured my competitive edge was creativity. I would try one creative 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 creating a situation that would allow luck to find me.
It helps a great deal to have at least a general strategy and some degree of focus. The world offers so many alternatives that you need a quick filter to eliminate some options and pay attention to others. Whatever your plan, the focus is always important.
If you are system-oriented, you feel more capable every day, no matter the fate of the project I happened to be working on.
How do you know which of your various skills can be combined to get something useful?
One 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.
Another clue for talent involves tolerance for risk. You will run a risk for something that really matters to you.
The smartest system for discerning your best path to success involves trying a lot of different things - sampling. b=But you also need to know when to quit.
The pattern I noticed was this: Things that will someday work out well START OUT well. Small successes can grow into big ones, but failures rarely grow into successes. Example of startup ventures: there was a small but very enthusiastic following; customers were clamoring for the BAD versions of the product before the good versions were even invented: as if a future success left bread crumbs that were visible in the present.
Predictor for the success of the pilot: unusually strong reaction from a subset of the public, even if the majority hates it.
If the first commercial version of your work excites no one to action, it's time to move on to something different.
If your work inspires some excitement and some action from customers, get ready to chew through some walls. You might have something worth fighting for.
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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.
Timing is Luck Too
The biggest component of luck is timing. When your timing is off, no amount of hard work or talent matters.
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.
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. All you need is to stay in the game long enough.
Luck won't give you a strategy or a system - you have to do that part yourself.
See Failure as a Tool, not as an Outcome
I’m an optimist by nature, or perhaps by upbringing—it’s hard to know where one leaves off and the other begins—but whatever the cause, I’ve long seen failure as a tool, not an outcome. I believe that viewing the world in that way can be useful for you too. Nietzsche famously said, “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” It sounds clever, but it’s a loser philosophy. I don’t want my failures to simply make me stronger, which I interpret as making me better able to survive future challenges. Becoming stronger is obviously a good thing, but it’s only barely optimistic. I do want my failures to make me stronger, of course, but I also want to become smarter, more talented, better networked, healthier, and more energized.
The market rewards execution, not ideas.
That failure taught me to look for opportunities in which I had some natural advantage. When I later decided to try cartooning, it was because I knew there weren’t many people in the world who could draw funny pictures and also write in a witty fashion.
Failure always brings something valuable with it. I don’t let it leave until I extract that value.
Be Happy
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.
Happiness is the natural state for most people whenever they feel healthy, have flexible schedules, and expect the future to be good.
A primary culprit in your bad moods is a deficit in one of the big five: flexible schedule, imagination, sleep, diet, and exercise.
Eat right
Exercise
Get enough sleep
Imagine an incredible future
Work toward a flexible schedule
Do things you can steadily improve at
Help others (if you have already helped yourself)
Reduce daily decisions to routine
When bad luck comes around, your reaction to it is a combination of how bad the luck is plus how prepared your body is for the stress.
Whenever it is practical ad safe, consider your body a laboratory in which you can test different approaches to health. Pay attention to your energy level after eating certain foods. Look for patterns.
Remove unhealthy, energy-draining food from your home
Stock up on CONVENIENT healthy food and let laziness be your co-pilot in eating right
Stop eating foods that create a feeling of addiction
get enough sleep because tiredness creates an illusion of hunger
Be active every day