How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big : Kind of the Story of My Life by Scott Adams

248 pages • Done Oct 29, 2014

Published by Penguin Books • October 22nd 2013 

Non-Fiction • Autobiography

Scott Adams has likely failed at more things than anyone you’ve ever met or anyone you’ve even heard of. So how did he go from hapless office worker and serial failure to the creator of Dilbert, one of the world’s most famous syndicated comic strips, in just a few years? In How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, Adams shares the strategy he has used since he was a teen to invite failure in, to embrace it, then pick its pocket.

No career guide can offer advice for success that works for everyone. As Adams explains, your best bet is to study the ways of others who made it big and try to glean some tricks and strategies that make sense for you. Adams pulls back the covers on his own unusual life and shares what he learned for turning one failure after another into something good and lasting. Adams reveals that he failed at just about everything he’s tried, including his corporate career, his inventions, his investments, and his two restaurants. But there’s a lot to learn from his personal story, and a lot of humor along the way. While it’s hard for anyone to recover from a personal or professional failure, Adams discovered some unlikely truths that helped to propel him forward. For instance:

• Goals are for losers. Systems are for winners. 

• "Passion" is bull. What you need is personal energy. 

• A combination of mediocre skills can make you surprisingly valuable. 

• You can manage your odds in a way that makes you look lucky to others.

You won’t find a road map to success in this audiobook. But Adams hopes you can laugh at his failures while discovering some unique and helpful ideas on your own path to personal victory. As he writes: "This is a story of one person’s unlikely success within the context of scores of embarrassing failures. 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."

My Thoughts

...forget about passion when you're planning your path to success...when your energy is right you perform better in everything you do, including school, work, sports, and even your personal life. Energy is good. Passion is bullshit. 

- excerpt, How to Fail at Almost Anything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams

I really enjoyed this book. He made some important points that made me stop, think, reconsider, and agree. Humorous, and beyond some norms, his experiences can be considered a benchmark for your own. Not in the sense of what he has (opportunities and choices), but for what you have, at the moment, and what you can do more to succeed. To see failure as a honing device, a motivation to find your own path, seek your destiny (?), or simply to find what makes you happy, can be enough to make you not just prod but take life with zest. I find his idea of affirmations encouraging (even with no scientific basis) simply because I believe in self-encouragement. And you make your own luck, all the stars and the moons in the universe can be there for you to pluck, but eventually, it is the choices you make in your life that begets difference.