How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life PDF
Preview How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life
Scott Adams HOW TO FAIL AT ALMOST EVERYTHING AND STILL WIN BIG Kind of the Story of My Life Contents Introduction Chapter One The Time I Was Crazy Chapter Two The Day of the Talk Chapter Three Passion Is Bullshit Chapter Four Some of My Many Failures in Summary Form Chapter Five My Absolute Favorite Spectacular Failure Chapter Six Goals Versus Systems Chapter Seven My System Chapter Eight My Corporate Career Fizzled Chapter Nine Deciding Versus Wanting Chapter Ten The Selfishness Illusion Chapter Eleven The Energy Metric Chapter Twelve Managing Your Attitude Chapter Thirteen It’s Already Working Chapter Fourteen My Pinkie Goes Nuts Chapter Fifteen My Speaking Career Chapter Sixteen My Voice Problem Gets a Name Chapter Seventeen The Voice Solution That Didn’t Work Chapter Eighteen Recognizing Your Talents and Knowing When to Quit Chapter Nineteen Is Practice Your Thing? Chapter Twenty Managing Your Odds for Success Chapter Twenty-one The Math of Success Chapter Twenty-two Pattern Recognition Chapter Twenty-three Humor Chapter Twenty-four Affirmations Chapter Twenty-five Timing Is Luck Too Chapter Twenty-six A Few Times Affirmations Worked Chapter Twenty-seven Voice Update Chapter Twenty-eight Experts Chapter Twenty-nine Association Programming Chapter Thirty Happiness Chapter Thirty-one Diet Chapter Thirty-two Fitness Chapter Thirty-three Voice Update 2 Chapter Thirty-four Luck Chapter Thirty-five CalendarTree Start-up Chapter Thirty-six Voice Update 3 Chapter Thirty-seven A Final Note About Affirmations Chapter Thirty-eight Summary Notes Acknowledgments Follow Penguin ABOUT THE AUTHOR Scott Adams is the creator of Dilbert, one of the most popular and widely distributed comic strips of the past quarter century. He has been a full-time cartoonist since 1995, after sixteen years as a technology worker for companies like Crocker National Bank and Pacific Bell. His many bestsellers include The Dilbert Principle and Dogbert’s Top Secret Management Handbook. He lives outside San Francisco. HOW TO FAIL AT ALMOST EVERYTHING AND STILL WIN BIG ‘I’m not an expert in any of the topics I’ll discuss here. But I am a professional simplifier. My main job for the past few decades has been creating the Dilbert comic strip. Making comics is a process by which you strip out the unnecessary noise from a situation until all that is left is the absurd-yet-true core. A cartoonist has to accomplish that feat with as few as four short sentences. I’ve performed that trick nearly nine thousand times, sometimes successfully. ‘Later in this book I will describe a simplification that can inform all of the steps you take toward your own personal success. It’s the human equivalent of profit. It’s the one simple thing you can measure that will give clarity to all of the complicated decisions in your life. ‘I wish I could give you a surefire formula for success, but life doesn’t work that way. What I can do is describe a model that you can compare with your current way of doing things. The right answer for you might be some combination of what you’re already doing and what you read here. You’re the best judge of what works for you, as long as you acquire that wisdom through pattern recognition, trial, and observation. ‘In summary, allow me to stipulate that if you think I’m full of crap on any particular idea or another, there’s a healthy chance you’re right. But being 100 percent right isn’t my goal. I’m presenting some new ways to think about the process of finding happiness and success. Compare them with what you know, what you do, and what others suggest. Every person finds his or her own special formula.’ Introduction If you’re already as successful as you want to be, both personally and professionally, all you are likely to get from this book is a semientertaining tale about a guy who failed his way to success. But you might also notice some familiar patterns in my story that will give you confirmation (or confirmation bias) that your own success wasn’t entirely luck. That’s the sort of validation you can’t get from your family and friends who see you as a hot mess. This is the story of one person’s unlikely success within the context of scores of embarrassing failures. If you’re just starting your journey toward success— however you define it—or you’re wondering what you’ve been doing wrong until now, I expect you’ll find some novel ideas here. Maybe the combination of what you know plus what I think I know will be enough to keep you out of the wood chipper. Was my eventual success primarily a result of talent, luck, hard work, or an accidental just-right balance of each? All I know for sure is that I pursued a conscious strategy of managing my opportunities in a way that would make it easier for luck to find me. Did my strategy make a difference, or is luck just luck, and everything else is just rationalization? Honestly, I don’t know. That’s why I suggest you compare my story with the stories of other people who found success and see if you notice any patterns. That’s exactly the process I have used since childhood, and either it worked for me or I simply got lucky. I’ll never know which it was. If you pick up some ideas in this book and go on to great success, you won’t know exactly what made the difference either. But you might think you do, and that reason will probably have something to do with your many levels of awesomeness. That’s how human brains work. But hey, maybe in your case it’s true. In my case, I prefer to embrace my ignorance and leave it an open question.
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