Summary

Scott Adams’ philosophy on life and attaining success. Lots of practical perspectives and (simple) systems to apply to your life. “Timing drives success. Try different things, ensuring you fail forward, until you get timing down by luck. Prioritize personal energy.”

Key Takeaways

• Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success.
• Simplicity transforms ordinary into amazing.
• The market rewards execution, not ideas. (reminds me of Derek Sivers’ philosophy)
• Timing is often the biggest component of success. Try different things until you get the timing right by luck.
• Most failures involve bad luck, ignorance, and sometimes ordinary stupidity.
• One should have a system instead of a goal. The system was to continually look for better options.
  • 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.
• One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard goes something like this: If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it.
  • Success always has a price, but the reality is that the price is negotiable.
• One of the most important tricks for maximizing your productivity involves matching your mental state to the task.
• Simple systems are probably the best way to achieve success. Once you have success, optimizing begins to have more value.
• One of the biggest obstacles to success is the fear that you don’t know how to do the stuff that your ideal career plans would require.
• One simple way to keep your priorities straight is by judging how each of your options will influence your personal energy.
  • Priorities are the things you need to get right so the things you love can thrive.
• You can control your attitude by manipulating your thoughts, your body, and your environment.
• Smiling makes you feel better even if your smile is fake.
• Success at anything has a spillover effect on other things. Take advantage of it by becoming good at things that require nothing but practice.
• Small successes can grow into big ones, but failures rarely grow into successes.
• The smartest system for discerning your best path to success involves trying lots of different things—sampling.
• Bad luck doesn’t have the option of being that consistent forever.
• It’s generally true that if no one is excited about your art/product/idea in the beginning, they never will be.
• The Success Formula: Every Skill You Acquire Doubles Your Odds of Success
• The Knowledge Formula: The More You Know, the More You Can Know
• Looking at the familiar in new ways can change your behaviour even when the new point of view focuses on the imaginary.
• The sign of a good system: it feels easy and natural.
• The transformative power of praise versus the corrosive impact of criticism.
• 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.
• Try to get in the habit of asking yourself how you can turn your interesting experiences into story form (setup, twist, punchline).
• Decisiveness looks like leadership.
• Energy is contagious.
• To be humorous, avoid these traps:
  • Overcomplaining is never funny.
  • Don’t overdo the self-deprecation.
  • Don’t mock people.
  • Avoid puns and wordplay.
• Stay in the game long enough for luck to find you.
• To change yourself, part of the solution might involve spending more time with the people who represent the change you seek.
• The single biggest trick for manipulating your happiness chemistry is being able to do what you want, when you want.
• Happiness has more to do with where you’re heading than where you are.
• Pessimism is often a failure of imagination.
• Any approach is only sustainable if the required willpower is minimized.
• Simplification is often the difference between doing something you know you should do and putting it off.
• If you control the inputs, you can determine the outcomes, give or take some luck.

What I got out of it

How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big is Scott Adams’ philosophy on life and (attaining) success, interspersed with personal stories.

The book in a nutshell: the biggest component of success is timing. Try different things (sampling), ensuring you fail forward (obtain skills/relationships in the process), until you get timing down by luck. Have (simple) systems over goals. Prioritize personal energy to make everything else in life easier.

Other takeaways:

• “I try to have one or more change-the-world projects going at all times.”
• Energy Metric: prioritize what energizes you, reduce what drains you
• Skill stacking (the success formula): every skill doubles your odds. Not all skills are equal. Some skills are more useful, valuable or make others easier to learn.
• Goals versus systems
• Deciding versus wanting: success always has a price, but it’s often negotiable
• Simplifying versus optimizing: start simple, optimize later.
• Happiness, Success and Knowledge formulas

Summary Notes

Introduction

I pursued a conscious strategy of managing my opportunities in a way that would make it easier for luck to find me.

Book Tease 

1. Goals are for losers.
2. Your mind isn’t magic. It’s a moist computer you can program.
3. The most important metric to track is your personal energy.
4. Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success.
5. Happiness is health plus freedom.
6. Luck can be managed, sort of.
7. Conquer shyness by being a huge phony (in a good way).
8. Fitness is the lever that moves the world.
9. Simplicity transforms ordinary into amazing.

The Six Filters For Truth

1. Personal experience (Human perceptions are iffy.) 
2. Experience of people you know (Even more unreliable.) 
3. Experts (They work for money, not truth.) 
4. Scientific studies (Correlation is not causation.) 
5. Common sense (A good way to be mistaken with complete confidence.) 
6. Pattern recognition (Patterns, coincidence, and personal bias look alike.)

Passion Is Bullshit 

His success was a combination of desire, luck, hard work, determination, brains, and appetite for risk.

So forget about passion when you’re planning your path to success. In the coming chapters I’ll describe some methods for boosting personal energy that have worked for me. You already know that when your 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.

Some of My Many Failures in Summary Form 

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. And don’t worry if you’re lazy too.

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.

Failure is a resource that can be managed.

In the process I learned a valuable lesson: 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.

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. 

My total corporate experience formed the knowledge base upon which Dilbert was born.

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.

The secret to our initial success was the low number of restaurants in the area relative to the population. Every restaurant in the area was busy regardless of quality or price.

My Absolute Favorite Spectacular Failure 

Most failures involve bad luck, ignorance, and sometimes ordinary stupidity.

Goals Versus Systems 

Some career advice: every time he got a new job, he immediately started looking for a better one. For him, job seeking was not something one did when necessary. It was an ongoing process.

This was my first exposure to the idea that one should have a system instead of a goal. The system was to continually look for better options.

The new job simply had to be better than the last one and allow him to learn something useful for the next hop.

Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous presuccess failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system. That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.

• 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.

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.

If you study people who succeed, you will see that most of them follow systems, not goals.

The minimum requirement of a system is that a reasonable person expects it to work more often than not. Buying lottery tickets is not a system no matter how regularly you do it.

I have a friend who is a gifted salesman. He could have sold anything, from houses to toasters. The field he chose allows him to sell a service that almost always auto-renews. In other words, he can sell his service once and enjoy ongoing commissions until the customer dies or goes out of business.
Observers call him lucky. What I see is a man who accurately identified his skill set and chose a system that vastly increased his odds of getting “lucky.” In fact, his system is so solid that it could withstand quite a bit of bad luck without buckling. How much passion does this fellow have for his chosen field? Answer: zero. What he has is a spectacular system, and that beats passion every time.

My System 

I started to understand something called the odds. 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. The smart people in my little Republican-dominated town made practical plans and stuck to them.

As I learned more about the legal profession, I realized it wasn’t a good fit for my personality. 

I decided that my talents would be best suited for creating and running some sort of company. To acquire the necessary skills I would complete my economics degree and get an entry-level job at a big bank. I would take as many company-paid training classes as I could and learn all there was to know about business from a banking perspective. I also hoped to complete my MBA at night on the company’s dime. I was agnostic about what specific sort of business I would someday run. All I knew for sure is that I needed to be ready when the time was right.

My entrepreneurial plan. The idea was to create something that had value and—this next part is the 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 that model has an upward limit. And I didn’t want to build my own automobile factory, for example, because cars are not easy to reproduce. I didn’t want to do any sort of custom work, such as building homes, because each one requires the same amount of work. I wanted to create, invent, write, or otherwise concoct something widely desired that would be easy to reproduce.

Another perfectly good plan might involve becoming a salesperson who works on commission in an industry that handles extraordinarily expensive items such as rare art, airplanes, or office buildings.

I figured my competitive edge was creativity. I would try one 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, focus is always important.

My system of creating something the public wants and reproducing it in large quantities nearly guaranteed a string of failures. By design, all of my efforts were long shots. Had I been goal oriented instead of system oriented, I imagine I would have given up after the first several failures. It would have felt like banging my head against a brick wall. But being systems oriented, I felt myself growing more capable every day, no matter the fate of the project I happened to be working on. And every day during those years I woke up with the same thought, literally, as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and slapped the alarm clock off. Today’s the day.

Deciding Versus Wanting 

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard goes something like this: If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it. It sounds trivial and obvious, but if you unpack the idea it has extraordinary power.

Few of these wishful people have decided to have any of the things they wish for. It’s a key difference, for once you decide, you take action. Wishing starts in the mind and generally stays there. 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. 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.

The Selfishness Illusion 

When it comes to the topic of generosity, there are three kinds of people in the world:

1. Selfish 
2. Stupid 
3. Burden on others 

That’s the entire list. Your best option is to be selfish, because being stupid or a burden on society won’t help anyone. Society hopes you will handle your selfishness with some grace and compassion. If you do selfishness right, you automatically become a net benefit to society.

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 slip into the second category — stupid — which is a short slide to becoming a burden on society.

We humans are wired to be easily influenced by the people who are in relationships with us, no matter what those relationships are. Sometimes we call that influence peer pressure. Sometimes it’s called modeling or imitating. Sometimes it’s learning by example. And most of the time it’s just something we do automatically, without thinking.

Generous people take care of their own needs first. In fact, doing so is a moral necessity. The world needs you at your best.

Once all of my personal needs were met, my thoughts automatically turned to how I could make the world a better place.

The healthiest way to look at selfishness is that it’s a necessary strategy when you’re struggling. In hard times, or even presuccess times, society and at least one cartoonist want you to take care of yourself first. If you pursue your selfish objectives, and you do it well, someday your focus will turn outward. It’s an extraordinary feeling.

The Energy Metric

How do you organize your limited supply of time to get the best result?

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 the other priorities.

The main reason I blog is because it energizes me. I could rationalize my blogging by telling you it increases traffic on Dilbert.com by 10 percent or that it keeps my mind sharp or that I think the world is a better place when there are more ideas in it. But the main truth is that blogging charges me up. It gets me going. I don’t need another reason.

Organizing your life to optimize your personal energy will add up to something incredible that is more good than bad.

Matching Mental State to Activity 

One of the most important tricks for maximizing your productivity involves matching your mental state to the task. For example, when I first wake up, my brain is relaxed and creative. The thought of writing a comic is fun, and it’s relatively easy because my brain is in exactly the right mode for that task. I know from experience that trying to be creative in the midafternoon is a waste of time.

My comic-creating process is divided into two stages to maximize my natural energy cycles.

Most people aren’t lucky enough to have a flexible schedule. I didn’t have one either for the first sixteen years of my corporate life. So I did the next best thing by going to bed early and getting up at 4:00 A.M. to do my creative side projects. One of those projects became the sketches for Dilbert.

Simplifiers Versus 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 the extra complexity increases the odds of unexpected problems.

How do you know which approach works best in a given situation?

• If the 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.

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.

Simplification frees up time and energy, making everything else you do just a little bit easier. 

It’s a good idea to have an overarching plan to move toward simple systems as opportunities allow. You can chip away at the complexity of your life over time. Simplicity is a worthy long-term goal. 

To change how you feel, and how you think, you can simply change where you are sitting.

Tidiness is a personal preference, but it also has an impact on your energy. Every second you look at a messy room and think about fixing it is a distraction from your more important thoughts.

Knowledge and the Lack Thereof 

One of the biggest obstacles to success is the fear that you don’t know how to do the stuff that your ideal career plans would require.

When you don’t know anything about a particular topic, it’s easy to assume it would be too hard to learn it quickly.

When you start asking questions, you often discover that there’s a simple solution, a Web site that handles it, or a professional who takes care of it for a reasonable fee. It’s usually free for the asking.

I’m a big fan of flash research, the type you do in less than a minute using Google. You might think a topic is too complicated to master for your use, but you might learn otherwise in less than a minute if you bother to check.

My business mistakes, of which there have been plenty, were rarely caused by not being able to find the information that I knew I needed. Most of my problems were caused by my own bad decisions, lack of skill, and bad luck. I can’t think of a single instance in which I was stopped because there was information I needed and I couldn’t find it.

Priorities 

It’s useful to think of your priorities in terms of concentric circles, like an archery target.

1. In the center is your highest priority: you. If you ruin yourself, you won’t be able to work on any other priorities.
2. The next ring—and your second-biggest priority—is economics. That includes your job, your investments, and even your house.
3. Once you are both healthy and financially sound, it’s time for the third ring: family, friends, and lovers.
4. The next rings are your local community, your country, and the world, in that order. Don’t bother trying to fix the world until you get the inner circles of your priorities under control.

One simple way to keep your priorities straight is by judging how each of your options will influence your personal energy.

Priorities are the things you need to get right so the things you love can thrive.

Managing Your Attitude 

You can control your attitude by manipulating your thoughts, your body, and your environment.

• Exercise, food, and sleep should be your first buttons to push if you’re trying to elevate your attitude and raise your energy.
• A simple trick you might try involves increasing your ratio of happy thoughts to disturbing thoughts. If your life doesn’t provide you with plenty of happy thoughts to draw upon, try daydreaming of wonderful things in your future.
• Your body and your mind will respond automatically to whatever images you spend the most time pondering.
• The easiest way to manage your attitude is to consume as much feel-good entertainment as you can.
• If you’re experiencing genuine misfortune, you probably just need time and distance to recover. The daydreaming strategy is more of an everyday practice. It won’t get you out of a deep slump. For the truly bad moods, exercise, nutrition, sleep, and time are the smart buttons to push.
• A powerful variation on the daydreaming method involves working on projects that have a real chance of changing the world, helping humanity, and/or making a billion dollars. I try to have one or more change-the-world projects going at all times.
  • Another benefit of having a big, world-changing project is that you almost always end up learning something valuable in the process of failing.
  • It’s smarter to see your big-idea projects as part of a system to improve your energy, contacts, and skills.
  • When I consider taking on a new big project, I first ask myself who I know who would be helpful and who might want to partner, invest, or just give advice.
• My imagined future acts as a cue to keep my mood elevated today.

The Power of Smiling

Smiling makes you feel better even if your smile is fake. This is the clearest example of how your brain has a user interface. When you’re in a bad mood, the physical act of forcing a smile may trigger the feel-good chemistry in your brain that is associated with happiness.

The smiling-makes-you-happy phenomenon is part of the larger and highly useful phenomenon of faking it until you make it.

Success Premium 

I’ve come to believe that success at anything has a spillover effect on other things. You can take advantage of that effect by becoming good at things that require nothing but practice. Once you become good at a few unimportant things, such as hobbies or sports, the habit of success stays with you on more important quests. When you’ve tasted success, you want more. And the wanting gives you the sort of energy that is critical to success.

Pick The Delusion That Works

My main point about perceptions is that you shouldn’t hesitate to modify your perceptions to whatever makes you happy, because you’re probably wrong about the underlying nature of reality anyway.

Reality is overrated and impossible to understand with any degree of certainty. What you do know for sure is that some ways of looking at the world work better than others. Pick the way that works, even if you don’t know why.

No matter what reality delivers in the future, my imagined version of the future has great usefulness today.

What’s real to you is what you imagine and what you feel.

It’s Already Working 

We are designed to become in reality however we act.

My Speaking Career 

But how does one come up with a price for giving a speech? I had no idea where to start. So I did what anyone in that situation would do: I sought out a friend who might have a template for this sort of thing.

All of this was possible because I had access to a smart friend who told me how to find the simple entry point into the speaking circuit. All I needed to do was overprice myself and see what happened.

My Voice Problem Gets A Name 

“What’s the cure?” I whispered.

“There is none,” she replied.

But that isn’t what I heard. The optimist in me translated the gloomy news as “Scott, you will be the first person in the world to be cured of spasmodic dysphonia.” And I decided that after I cured myself, somehow, some way, I would spread the word to others. I wouldn’t be satisfied simply escaping from my prison of silence; I was planning to escape, free the other inmates, shoot the warden, and burn down the prison.

Sometimes I get that way. It’s a surprisingly useful frame of mind.

Recognizing Your Talents and Knowing When to Quit 

If you have world-class talent—for anything—you probably know it. In fact, your parents probably dragged you from place to place when you were young to develop your skill. But world-class talent is such an exception that I prefer ignoring it for this book. I’m going to focus on ordinary talents and combinations of ordinary talents that add up to something extraordinary. In the case of ordinary talent, how do you know which of your various skills can be combined to get something useful? It’s a vital question because you want to put your focus where it makes a real difference.

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.

Another clue to talent involves tolerance for risk. People generally accept outsized risk only when they expect big payoffs.

The smartest system for discerning your best path to success involves trying lots of different things—sampling, if you will. For entrepreneurial ventures it might mean quickly bailing out if things don’t come together quickly.

The pattern I noticed was this: Things that will someday work out well start out well. Things that will never work start out bad and stay that way.

Small successes can grow into big ones, but failures rarely grow into successes.

Compared with today’s episodes, the first season of The Simpsons was an awful product. Again, the quality didn’t predict success. The better predictor is that The Simpsons was an immediate hit despite its surface quality. It had the x factor. In time it grew to be one of the most important, most creative, and best shows of all time.

The thing that predicted Dilbert’s success in year one is that it quickly gained a small but enthusiastic following. My best estimate, based on shaky anecdotal evidence, is that 98 percent of newspaper readers initially disliked Dilbert, but 2 percent thought it was one of the best comics in the paper despite all objective evidence to the contrary. In other words, it had the x factor on day one. 

For television shows, 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 a subset of the public, even if the majority hates it.

I’ve been trying and failing to get a Dilbert movie made for about fifteen years. Every failure so far has been because of some freakish intersection of bad luck. But bad luck doesn’t have the option of being that consistent forever. I’ll get it done unless I die first.

Quality is one of the luxuries you can afford when the marketplace is spraying money in your direction and you have time to tinker.

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.

It’s generally true that if no one is excited about your art/product/idea in the beginning, they never will be.

Is Practice Your Thing?

There’s no denying the importance of practice. The hard part is figuring out what to practice.

My observation is that some people are born with a natural impulse to practice things and some people find mindless repetition without immediate reward to be a form of torture. Whichever camp you’re in, it probably won’t change. It’s naive to expect the average person to embrace endless practice in pursuit of long-term success. It makes more sense to craft a life plan for yourself that embraces your natural inclinations.

The first filter in deciding where to spend your time is an honest assessment of your ability to practice. If you’re not a natural “practicer,” don’t waste time pursuing a strategy that requires it. You simply need to pick a life strategy that rewards novelty seeking more than mindless repetition.

Your skills will increase with experience, which is the more fun cousin of practice. Practice involves putting your consciousness in suspended animation. Practicing is not living. But when you build your skills through an ever-changing sequence of experiences, you’re alive.

Managing Your Odds for Success 

The primary purpose of schools is to prepare kids for success in adulthood. That’s why it seems odd to me that schools don’t have required courses on the systems and practices of successful people. Success isn’t magic; it’s generally the product of picking a good system and following it until luck finds you.

The Success Formula: 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. Successwise, you’re better off being good at two complementary skills than being excellent at one. I’m ignoring the outlier possibility that you might be one of the best performers in the world at some skill or another.

When writing a résumé, a handy trick you’ll learn from experts is to ask yourself if there are any words in your first draft that you would be willing to remove for one hundred dollars each. Here’s the simple formula: Each Unnecessary Word = $100
You surprise yourself by how well the formula helps you prune your writing to its most essential form.

When you accept without necessarily believing that each new skill doubles your odds of success, you effectively hack (trick) your brain to be more proactive in your pursuit of success. Looking at the familiar in new ways can change your behavior even when the new point of view focuses on the imaginary.

When it comes to skills, quantity often beats quality. None of my skills are world-class, but when my mediocre skills are combined, they become a powerful market force.

I was a learning machine. If I thought something might someday be useful, I tried to grasp at least the basics. In my cartooning career I’ve used almost every skill I learned in the business world. Another huge advantage of learning as much as you can in different fields is that the more concepts you understand, the easier it is to learn new ones.

The Knowledge Formula: The More You Know, the More You Can Know

The simple entry point for developing a news-reading habit is that you read only the topics that interest you, no matter how trivial they might be. At first perhaps you’ll do little more than skim the headlines. But in time you’ll find yourself drawn in. It will feel easy and natural, which is the sign of a good system.

The Math of Success 

You can’t directly control luck, but you can move from a game with low odds of success to a game with better odds. That seems like an obvious strategy and you probably think you already do it. The hard part is figuring out the odds of any given game, and that’s harder than it looks.

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 types of skills that work well together and are highly useful for just about any job. 

I made a list of the skills in which I think every adult should gain a working knowledge. Luck has a good chance of finding you if you become merely good in most of these areas.

• Public speaking 
• Psychology 
• Business writing 
• Accounting 
• Design (the basics) 
• Conversation 
• Overcoming shyness 
• Second language 
• Golf 
• Proper grammar 
• Persuasion 
• Technology (hobby level)
• Proper voice technique

Public Speaking

The shortest and most persuasive sales pitch I have ever seen:

“Instead of describing the Dale Carnegie course myself, I’ve asked two of your fellow employees who took the course to tell you what they think.” He introduced the first guy and walked off. Tony Snow was done selling.

On day one our instructor explained the Dale Carnegie method he would be employing. 

• Rule one was that no one would ever be criticized or corrected. Only positive reinforcement would be allowed, from the instructor or from the other students.
• The next rule was that every person would speak to the rest of the class during each session, but we had to volunteer to go next.

There are several things to learn from that story. The most important is the transformative power of praise versus the corrosive impact of criticism.

“Wow. That was brave,” is the best and cleanest example I’ve seen in which looking at something in a different way changes everything. When the instructor switched our focus from the student’s poor speaking performance to her bravery, everything changed. Positivity is far more than a mental preference. It changes your brain, literally, and it changes the people around you. It’s the nearest thing we have to magic.

Another thing I learned from my Dale Carnegie experience is that we don’t always have an accurate view of our own potential. Sometimes the only way to know what you can do is to test yourself.

Psychology

Salespeople know they can manipulate buyers by controlling what they compare.

The sudden improvement was entirely due to Sarah’s compliment of my artistic ability. I became a more confident artist—and a better one—because she changed what I thought of my own talent. It was a Wizard of Oz moment.

Dilbert was the first syndicated comic that focused primarily on the workplace. At the time there was nothing to compare it with. That allowed me to get away with bad artwork and immature writing until I could improve my skills to the not-so-embarrassing level.

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 your lifelong study. Most of what you need to know as a regular citizen can be gleaned from the Internet.

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 reason is not influencing the decision.

Apple owes much of its success to Steve Jobs’s understanding that the way a product makes users feel trumps most other considerations, including price.

Business Writing

Business writing is all about getting to the point and leaving out all of the noise. 

Clean writing makes a writer seem smarter and it makes the writer’s arguments more persuasive.

Design

Design is actually rules based. One need not have an “eye” for design; knowing the rules is good enough for civilians.

Skim through any well-designed magazine and you’ll see the L design in 80 percent of the art and photography.

Conversation

Techniques for making conversation with strangers: all you do is introduce yourself and ask questions until you find a point of mutual interest.

The Dale Carnegie question stack:

1. What’s your name?
2. Where do you live?
3. Do you have a family?
4. What do you do for a living?
5. Do you have any hobbies/sports?
6. Do you have any travel plans?

The secret to making the list of six questions work without seeming awkward is in understanding that the person you meet will feel every bit as awkward as you. That person wants to talk about something interesting and to sound knowledgeable. Your job is to make that easy. Nothing is easier than talking about one’s self.

Good conversation technique:

1. Ask questions.
2. Don’t complain (much).
3. Don’t talk about boring experiences (TV show, meal, dream, etc.).
4. Don’t dominate the conversation. Let others talk.
5. Don’t get stuck on a topic. Keep moving.
6. Planning is useful but it isn’t conversation.
7. Keep the sad stories short, especially medical stories.

The point of conversation is to make the other person feel good. If you do that one simple thing correctly, the other benefits come along with the deal.

How do you get a stranger to like you? 

• It starts by smiling and keeping your body language open. 
• After that, just ask questions and listen as if you cared, all the while looking for common interests.

I reflexively translate whatever I observe into a story form with a setup, a twist if there is one, and some sort of punch line or thought that ties it in a bow. You can do the same thing. Try to get in the habit of asking yourself how you can turn your interesting experiences into story form.

Was it brief? Did you save the surprise for just the right moment? Did you have a way to end the story with a punch line or interesting observation?

It’s a good idea to always have a backlog of stories you can pull out at a moment’s notice. And you’ll want to continually update your internal story database with new material.

The basic parts of a good party story are:

• Setup – One important rule: 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.
• The Characters – If you are talking to strangers or talking about unfamiliar others, fill in the story with some character traits that will be relevant.
• Relatability – There is one topic that people care more about than any other: themselves. Pick story topics that your listeners will relate to. 
• The 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. 
• Topics to 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.

Overcoming Shyness

The secret of overcoming shyness by imagining you are acting instead of interacting. It turns out that a shy person can act like someone else more easily than he can act like himself.

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 thing people and which ones are people people. 

• Thing people enjoy hearing about new technology and other clever tools and possessions. They also enjoy discussions of processes and systems, including politics.
• People people enjoy only conversations that involve humans doing interesting things.

Remind yourself: everyone is a basket case on the inside. Some people just hide it better.

Try putting yourself in situations that will surely embarrass you if things go wrong, or maybe even if they don’t. Like any other skill, suppressing shyness takes practice. The more you put yourself in potentially embarrassing situations, the easier they all become.

Success builds confidence and confidence suppresses shyness.

Persuasion

No matter your calling in life, you’ll spend a great deal of time trying to persuade people to do one thing or another.

Persuasive Words and Phrases 

• Because 
• Would you mind … ?
• I’m not interested.
  • Don’t offer a reason why you aren’t interested. There’s no argument against a lack of interest.
• I don’t do that.
  • Another good persuasion sentence is “I don’t do that.” It’s not a reason and barely tries to be. But it sounds like a hard-and-fast rule.
• I have a rule …
  • Another good antipersuasion technique is to say you have a rule.
• I just wanted to clarify …
  • A more effective way to approach a dangerous social or business situation is sideways, by asking a question that starts with “I just wanted to clarify …”
• Is there anything you can do for me?
• Thank you 
• This is just between you and me.
  • Research shows that people will automatically label you a friend if you share a secret.

Some people act much more decisively than others. And that can be both persuasive and useful. Decisiveness looks like leadership.

Energy is contagious.

Pattern Recognition 

Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People:

1. Be proactive.
2. Begin with the end in mind. (Imagine a good outcome.) 
3. Put first things first. (Set priorities.) 
4. Think win-win. (Don’t be greedy.) 
5. Seek first to understand then be understood.
6. Synergize. (Use teamwork.) 
7. Sharpen the saw. (Keep learning.)

Here’s my own list of the important patterns for success that I’ve noticed over the years:

1. Lack of fear of embarrassment 
2. Education (the right kind)
3. Exercise
4. Success is a learnable skill

Humor 

To be humorous, avoid these traps:

• Overcomplaining is never funny.
• Don’t overdo the self-deprecation.
• Don’t mock people.
• Avoid puns and wordplay.

Two interesting points about storytelling: 

1. You can probably sense that the story would be far funnier in person. You will discover that some types of humor work best in written form and others work best in person.
2. Jim’s story saves the “bad part” for your imagination. You want your punch line to inspire listeners to complete the story—including the bad part—in their own minds. That allows every person to imagine the ending in the way that is most amusing.

Timing Is Luck Too

The biggest component of luck is timing.

I tried a lot of different ventures, stayed optimistic, put in the energy, prepared myself by learning as much as I could, and stayed in the game long enough for luck to find me. I hoped a buck would eventually walk by, and with Dilbert it did.

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. A normal slot machine that requires money will bankrupt any player in the long run. But the machine that has rare yet certain payoffs, and asks for no money up front, is a guaranteed winner if you have what it takes to keep yanking until you get lucky.

A Few Times Affirmations Worked  

The affirmations only worked when I had a 100 percent unambiguous desire for success.

Experts

My observation and best guess is that experts are right about 98 percent of the time on the easy stuff but only right 50 percent of the time on anything that is unusually complicated, mysterious, or even new.

Association Programming 

To change yourself, part of the solution might involve spending more time with the people who represent the change you seek.

Happiness 

My baseline is on the fence between happy and unhappy. 

• To do that I treat myself like the moist robot I am and manipulate my body chemistry as needed. 
• I also try to improve my situation and circumstances wherever I can, but I see that as 20 percent of the solution. 
• The big part—the 80 percent of happiness—is nothing but a chemistry experiment. And it’s hugely helpful to think of it that way. 
• You can’t always quickly fix whatever is wrong in your environment, and you can’t prevent negative thoughts from drifting into your head. 
• But you can easily control your body chemistry through lifestyle, and that in turn will cause your thoughts to turn positive, while making the bumps in your path feel less important.

The single biggest trick for manipulating your happiness chemistry is being able to do what you want, when you want.

It’s important to look at happiness in terms of timing because timing is easier to control than resources.

Step one in your search for happiness is to continually work toward having control of your schedule.

The next important mechanism for happiness: it has more to do with where you’re heading than where you are. We tend to feel happy when things are moving in the right direction and unhappy when things are trending bad.

The directional nature of happiness is one reason it’s a good idea to have a sport or hobby that leaves you plenty of room to improve every year.

The next element of happiness you need to master is imagination. Pessimism is often a failure of imagination. If you can imagine the future being brighter, it lifts your energy and gooses the chemistry in your body that produces a sensation of happiness. If you can’t even imagine an improved future, you won’t be happy no matter how well your life is going right now.

Happiness is the natural state for most people whenever they feel healthy, have flexible schedules, and expect the future to be good.

The primary culprit in your bad moods is a deficit in one of the big five: flexible schedule, imagination, sleep, diet, and exercise.
You might also want sex, a soul mate, fame, recognition, a feeling of importance, career success, and lots more. My contention is that your five-pronged pursuit of happiness will act as a magnet for the other components of happiness you need.

How I felt when my cartooning career reached its high point: I was feeling adrift. I no longer had a primary purpose in life because I’d already achieved it. The way I climbed out of my funk was by realizing that my newly acquired resources could help me change the world in some small but positive ways.
Seek happiness through service to others. I promise it will feel wonderful.

Routine

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.

Diet 

The simple diet plan that works for me is this: I eat as much as I want, of anything I want, whenever I want.

Once you want to eat the right kinds of food for enjoyment, and you don’t crave the wrong kinds of food, everything else comes somewhat easily.

My experience is that cravings can be manipulated.

Changing your food preferences is a fairly straightforward process, and it starts the way all change starts: by looking at things differently.

My experience, as odd as it sounds, is that I can change my food preferences by thinking of my body as a programmable robot as opposed to a fleshy bag full of magic. This minor change in perspective is more powerful than it seems.

Look For The Pattern

Some types of knowledge can be acquired only by experience. Diet’s connection to mood is one of those categories of knowledge that must be experienced.

Simply asking yourself how you feel at any given moment and then making a mental note of what you ate recently. Look for the pattern.

Whenever it’s practical and safe, consider your body a laboratory in which you can test different approaches to health. Eat something specific, such as a bowl of white rice, and see how you feel later. Or eat lots of carbs and weigh yourself at the end of the week. Look for the patterns. Which foods make you energetic and which ones make you sleepy? Which ones can you eat without gaining weight and which ones make you expand like a Macy’s parade float?

You can get good results by doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.

The Food-Exercise Connection

The traditional view of weight maintenance is that you need to exercise and watch your diet to get good results. That’s mostly true, but a more useful way to look at the connection between food and exercise is not that they are equal partners. A more practical view is that food is the fuel that makes exercise possible.

The main point for both diet and exercise is that you want to reduce the amount of willpower required. Any other approach is unsustainable.

A Diet Template from Your Smart(ish) Friend

I’ve learned to use my own laziness in a positive way. I’ll always eat what is most convenient during the day, and if the only easy options are healthy, laziness takes me in the best direction. Laziness can be a powerful tool.

The trick to eating right is to keep willpower out of the equation for your diet.

Laziness can make you choose healthy foods if you are clever enough to make those foods the most convenient in your house. You can further game your willpower by allowing yourself unlimited quantities of the good sort of food, at least until your cravings for the bad stuff subside.

Know Why You’re Eating

The first rule of eating right is avoiding foods that feel like punishment.

Hanging out with fit people can cause you to become more like them.

Coffee

Coffee costs money, takes time, gives you coffee breath, and makes you pee too often. It can also make you jittery and nervous if you have too much. But if success is your dream and operating at peak mental performance is something you want, coffee is a good bet.

The Healthy Eating Summary

The Simple, No-Willpower Diet System:

1. Pay attention to your energy level after eating certain foods. Find your pattern.
2. Remove unhealthy, energy-draining food from your home.
3. Stock up on convenient healthy food (e.g., apples, nuts, bananas) and let laziness be your copilot in eating right.
4. Stop eating foods that create feelings of addiction: white rice, white potatoes, desserts, white bread, fried foods.
5. Eat as much healthy food as you want, whenever you want.
6. Get enough sleep, because tiredness creates the illusion of hunger.
7. If your hunger is caused by tiredness, try healthy foods with fat, such as nuts, avocados, protein bars, and cheese, to suppress the hungry feeling.
8. If you’re eating for social reasons only, choose the healthiest options with low calories.
9. Learn how to season your healthy-yet-bland foods.

Fitness

After a lifetime of trying nearly every exercise tip, trick, and fad and sometimes scientifically proven techniques, I have condensed the entire field of fitness advice into one sentence: Be Active Every Day

Simplification is often the difference between doing something you know you should do and putting it off.

If you get one simple thing right—being active every day—all of the other elements of fitness will come together naturally without the need to use up your limited supply of willpower.

To stay fit in the long run you need to limit your exercise to whatever level doesn’t feel like work, just as kids do.

There are three practical ways to schedule exercise in a marriage or marriagelike situation:

1. Join an organized team.
2. Always exercise at the same time every day.
3. Exercise together (if you both really mean it).

The key is to have a predictable system. The method that never succeeds is exercising whenever you have some spare time.

The right amount of exercise today is whatever amount makes me look forward to being active tomorrow.

Reward

I find it important to reward myself after exercise with a healthy snack that I enjoy, some downtime that involves reading interesting articles on my phone, or a nice cup of coffee. By putting those pleasures at the immediate end of my exercise, I develop a strong association between the exercise and the good feelings. It forms a habit.

Here’s what I do when I know I should exercise but I feel too tired and droopy to imagine doing a vigorous workout: 

• Instead of doing what I feel I can’t do, I do what I can do—which is put on my exercise clothes and lace my sneakers. 
• Central to my method is that I grant myself 100 percent permission to not exercise, even after getting suited up for it.
• There’s one more step, and this too requires granting myself permission to back out at any time. I drive to my local gym, walk in, look around, and see how I feel.

What I have is not a goal; it is a system. And the system allows leakage. It is designed that way.

Luck 

Books change us automatically, just as any experience does. And if a book helps you see the world in a more useful way or amps up your energy level, it becomes part of the fabric of your personal luck.

CalendarTree Start-up 

Another big part of my system involves generating lots of opportunities for luck to find me and taking the sort of risks that will allow me to come out ahead even if the project fails.

Voice Update 3

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.

A Final Note About Affirmations 

The reality is that if affirmations somehow steered the universe like magic, science probably would have discovered that force by now.

I think we can all agree that affirmations are a phenomenon of the mind and belong in the domain of psychology and perception. Viewed in that light, one can imagine that doing affirmations might have a predictable impact on the brain, perhaps in terms of focus or motivation or any number of chemical reactions. Those reactions would, one assumes, be either beneficial or harmful to the pursuit of success. So in one sense, affirmations are no more special than any form of positive thinking, prayers, visualization, chanting, or the like.

Possible explanations for the apparent power of affirmations:

• Selective memory.
• People who report success with it are liars.
• False memory: perhaps we remember victories that weren’t so amazing in reality, or we remember normal events as being huge coincidences.
• Optimists tend to notice opportunities that pessimists miss.

Summary 

Scott Adam’s model for success:

• Focus on your diet first and get that right so you have enough energy to want to exercise.
• Exercise will further improve your energy, and that in turn will make you more productive, more creative, more positive, more socially desirable, and more able to handle life’s little bumps.
• Once you optimize your personal energy, all you need for success is luck. 
• You can’t directly control luck, but you can move from strategies with bad odds to strategies with good odds.
  • For example, learning multiple skills makes your odds of success dramatically higher than learning one skill. 
  • If you learn to control your ego, you can pick strategies that scare off the people who fear embarrassment, thus allowing you to compete against a smaller field. 
  • If you stay in the game long enough, luck has a better chance of finding you.

Happiness is the only useful goal in life. And happiness tends to happen naturally whenever you have good health, resources and skills, and a flexible schedule. 

Some skills are more important than others, and you should acquire as many of those key skills as possible. Develop a habit of simplifying. Learn how to make small talk with strangers, and learn how to avoid being an asshole. If you get that stuff right—and almost anyone can—you will be hard to stop.

If you control the inputs, you can determine the outcomes, give or take some luck.

Look for patterns in every part of life, from diet to exercise to any component of success. Try to find scientific backing for your observed patterns, and use yourself as a laboratory to see if the patterns hold for you.

Goals are for losers and systems are for winners. 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.