Author: Scott Adams

ISBN: 9781591846918

What a great book! So much wisdom intertwined with Scott's own true life stories. No BS advice on how to succeed in life. You better listen - the guy is making millions by selling cartoons.

EXCERPTS

A hammer is good only if you stop pounding after the nail is all the way in. Keep pounding and you break the wood.

 

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. [Survivorship bias.]

 

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.

 

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.

 

If you ask a billionaire the secret of his success, he might say it is passion, because that sounds like a sexy answer that is suitably humble. But after a few drinks I think he’d say his success was a combination of desire, luck, hard work, determination, brains, and appetite for risk.

 

Good ideas have no value because the world already has too many of them. The market rewards execution, not ideas.

 

This was about the time I started to understand that 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.

 

When you decide to be successful in a big way, it means you acknowledge the price and you’re willing to pay it. That price might be sacrificing your personal life to get good grades in school, pursuing a college major that is deadly boring but lucrative, putting off having kids, missing time with your family, or taking business risks that put you in jeopardy for embarrassment, divorce, or bankruptcy. 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.

 

Generous people take care of their own needs first. In fact, doing so is a moral necessity. The world needs you at your best. By becoming a person with good energy, you lift the people around you. That positive change will improve your social life, your love life, your family life, and your career.

 

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.

 

One of the most important tricks for maximizing your productivity involves matching your mental state to the task.

 

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.

 

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—and a real energy killer—is the fear that you don’t know how to do the stuff that your ideal career plans would require.

 

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

 

Don’t worry if your idea is a long shot. That’s not what matters right now. Today you want to daydream of your idea being a huge success so you can enjoy the feeling. Let your ideas for the future fuel your energy today.

 

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.

 

We are designed to become in reality however we act. [Quantum Mechanics: What we belive! Observer...]

 

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.

 

Childhood obsessions and tolerance for risk are only rough guides to talent at best. As you grow and acquire more talents, your potential paths to success multiply quickly. That makes it extra hard to know which possibility among many would put you in a position of competitive advantage.

 

Where there is a tolerance for risk, there is often talent.

 

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. That approach might conflict with the advice you’ve heard all your life—that sticking with something, no matter the obstacles, is important to success. Indeed, most successful people had to chew through a wall at some point. Overcoming obstacles is normally an unavoidable part of the process. But you also need to know when to quit. [Read: Seth Godin - the Dip]

 

Persistence is useful, but there’s no point in being an idiot about it.

 

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.

 

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

 

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. [Not strange at all: Successfull people will succeed nevertheless. Unsuccessful wouldn't even with such courses. Such courses could produce even more "success zombies".]

 

You can raise your market value by being merely good—not extraordinary—at more than one skill.

 

If you think extraordinary talent and a maniacal pursuit of excellence are necessary for success, I say that’s just one approach, and probably the hardest. When it comes to skills, quantity often beats quality.

 

I made a list of the skills in which I think every adult should gain a working knowledge.

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

Don’t assume you know how much potential you have. Sometimes the only way to know what you can do is to test yourself.

 

Quality is not an independent force in the universe; it depends on what you choose as your frame of reference.

 

Success builds confidence and confidence suppresses shyness.

 

It’s hard to be a jerk and say no to any request that starts with “Would you mind.”

 

The most effective way to stop people from trying to persuade me is to say, “I’m not interested.” Don’t offer a reason why you aren’t interested. No one can say why a thing holds interest for some and not for others.

 

Another good antipersuasion technique is to say you have a rule.

 

Effective way to approach a dangerous social or business situation is sideways, by asking a question that starts with “I just wanted to clarify …” That approach might look like this: “I just wanted to clarify: Are you saying you’re okay with an 80 percent chance of going to jail, or did I hear your plan wrong?”

 

All you need to do is be polite and ask a direct question: “Is there anything you can do for me?”

If you want people to like you, for business or for your personal life, pay special attention to the quality of your thanks.

 

Thank-you notes sent by snail mail are always appreciated and still a must for the bigger occasions.

 

No matter how you deliver a thank-you, make sure it includes a little detail of what makes you thankful.

 

This Is Just Between You and Me Research shows that people will automatically label you a friend if you share a secret.

 

Someone who is bad at keeping one kind of secret is probably bad at keeping all secrets. You won’t be exempt.

 

Unfamiliar and complicated situations. What people crave in that sort of environment is anything that looks like certainty. If you can deliver an image of decisiveness, no matter how disingenuous, others will see it as leadership.

 

You’ll do everyone in your life a favor by acting decisively, though, even if you have doubts on the inside.

 

People respond to energy in others. If you show how much you love a particular form of entertainment, it will be easier to persuade others to try it.

 

When you bring in an emotional dimension, people know they can’t talk you out of it. Emotions don’t bend to reason.

 

If you put your hand on your belly button and breathe correctly, that’s the only part of your torso that should be rising and falling. If your upper chest is expanding when you breathe normally, you’re doing it wrong. When you get your breathing right, your words will come out sounding more confident.

 

Simply speak the way you imagine a confident person would speak and you’ll nail it on the first try. [Harvey Specter]

 

The success of Dilbert is mostly a story of luck. But I did make it easier for luck to find me, and I was thoroughly prepared when it did. Luck won’t give you a strategy or a system—you have to do that part yourself.

 

If your gut feeling (intuition) disagrees with the experts, take that seriously.

 

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

 

A mediocre meal when you’re starving will contribute more to your happiness than an extraordinary meal when you’re not hungry. The timing of things can be more important than the intrinsic value of the things.

 

You need to control the order and timing of things to be happy. It’s important to look at happiness in terms of timing because timing is easier to control than resources.

 

A person with a flexible schedule and average resources will be happier than a rich person who has everything except a flexible schedule. Step one in your search for happiness is to continually work toward having control of your schedule.

 

In your personal life and your career, consider schedule flexibility when making any big decision. Realistically, sometimes you need to suck it up and work long hours, watch the kids, and do your duty. Just remember to keep your eye out for ways to maximize your schedule freedom in the long term. It’s something you want to work toward. You won’t all become work-at-home cartoonists, but you can certainly find a boss who values your productivity over your attendance.

 

Happiness has more to do with where you’re heading than where you are. [Read: The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt]

 

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.

 

When you choose a career, consider whether it will lead to a lifetime of ever-improved performance, a plateau, or a steady decline in your skills.

 

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.

 

Don’t let reality control your imagination. Let your imagination be the user interface to steer your reality.

 

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.

 

Optimists notice more opportunities, have more energy because of their imagined future successes, and take more risks. Optimists make themselves an easy target for luck to find them.