Editor’s Note: I read a book recently by Scott Adams the creator of Dilbert Cartoons called, “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. It’s sorta the Story of his life, plus positive thinking suggestions, business rules and warnings, etc.
I’ve read a ton of such books over the years, but reminders never hurt, so I gave it a shot. I’ve shared it with lots of younger guys and girls who are struggling.
Toward the end I thought it might be a good notion to share the highlights, remind myself of them and put them down, so I could refer to them from time to time. So, here goes.
Chapter 3: Passion is Bullshit
Dilbert started out as just one of many get-rich schemes I was willing to try. When it started to look as if it might be a success, my passion for cartooning increased because I realized it could be my golden ticket. 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.
Editor’s Note: This wasn’t my case. I’ve been fortunate to survive doing what I loved. I never became rich, but always woke up to tinker with motorcycles and writing about them. –Bandit
Chapter 4: Some of My Many Failures
Failure is a resource that can be managed.
The market rewards execution, not ideas.
My bank, Wells Fargo, pitched me on its investment services, and I decided to trust it with half of my investible funds. Trust is probably the wrong term because I only let Wells have half; I half trusted it. I did my own investing with the other half of my money. The experts at Wells Fargo helpfully invested my money in Enron, WorldCom, and some other names that have become synonymous with losing money. Clearly my investment professionals did not have access to better information than I had. I withdrew my money from their management and have done my own thing since then, mostly in broad-market, unmanaged funds. That worked out better.
Chapter 11: Energy
One simple way to keep your priorities straight is by judging how each of your options will influence you4 personal energy. It’s not a foolproof gauge, but if you know a particular path will make you feel more stressed, unhealthy, and drained, it’s probably the wrong choice. Right choices can be challenging, but they usually charge you up. When you’re on the right path, it feels right, literally.
Chapter 12: Managing your Attitude
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 thing in your future. Meditation.
A great strategy for success is life is to become good at something, anything, and let that feeling propel you to new and better victories. Success can be habit-forming.
The external reality doesn’t change, but your point of view does. In many cases, it’s your point of view that influences your behavior, not the universe. And you can control your point of view even when you can’t change the underlying reality.
When you can release your ego long enough to view your perceptions as incomplete or misleading, it gives you the freedom to imagine new and potentially more useful ways of looking at the world.
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.
Chapter 21: The Math of Success
I made a list of the skills in which I think every adult should gain a working knowledge. I wouldn’t expect you to become a master of any, but mastery isn’t necessary. Luck has a good chance of finding you if you become merely good in most of these areas. Here’s the preview list:
Public Speaking
Psychology
Business writing
Accounting
The skills and insights I gleaned from studying hypnosis have improved my performance in just about everything I’ve done since then from business to my personal life. It was time well spent.
The reality is that reason is just one of the drivers of our decisions, and often the smallest one.
Chapter 22: Pattern Recognition
Here’s my own list of the important patterns for success that I’ve noticed over the years. This is purely anecdotal. I exclude the ones that are 100 percent genetic.
1. Lack of fear of embarrassment
2. Education (the right kind)
3. Exercise
Chapter 26: Affirmations Work
Affirmations are amazing. The pattern I noticed is that the affirmations only worked when I had a 100 percent unambiguous desire for success.
Chapter 30: Happiness
The next element of happiness you need to master is imagination. I wrote about this in the context of raising your energy, which is closely related to happiness. 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 and improved future, you won’t be happy no matter how well your life is going right now.
Recapping the happiness formula:
Eat right
Exercise
Get enough sleep
Imagine an incredible future
Work toward a flexible schedule
Do thing you can steadily improve at.
Help others (after you help yourself)
Reduce daily decisions to routine
If you do those eight things, the rest of what you need to stimulate the chemistry of happiness in your brain will be a lot easier to find.
Studies show that you need not be a natural-born optimist to get the benefits of better perception. You can train yourself to act like an optimist—and writing affirmations is probably good training so that you get the same benefits as natural optimists when it comes to noticing opportunities.
Whether you are a born optimist or become one thought affirmations, prayer, meditation, or positive thinking, you end up with several advantages that make it easier for luck to find you. Optimists notice more opportunities, have more energy because of their imagined future success and take more risks. Optimists make themselves an easy target to luck to find them.
Chapter 38: Summary
And always remember that failure is your friend. It is the raw material of success. Invite it in. Learn from it. And don’t let it leave until you pick its pocket. That’s a system…
