Readable and quite useful. Most of the chapters are bite-sized, quick, and usually contain a good insight or two: the writing equivalent of a three-panel comic strip. How to Fail also offers certain extremely helpful heuristics that you can add to your toolbox for navigating reality. Two of the best and most noteworthy:
* Set up systems rather than goals [see Chapter 6]
* Manage your personal energy levels so that they're higher not lower: work on things and think thoughts that make you feel more energetic rather than less [see Chapters 11 and 12]
The reader gets the impression that Scott Adams is deep down a very sensitive person: shy, socially awkward, with insecurities and shortcomings he worked hard to conquer. Social awkwardness is one of those things that almost nobody understands unless you have it, and Adams has found--and generously offers to readers--a few genuinely creative workarounds to deal with it. He's humble and self-effacing enough to admit candidly that he's mediocre in most domains, but as he explains, by developing a decent level of mediocrity in many domains, he also developed a well-roundedness that has served him extremely well in life. As it will likely serve you and me if we copy him.
[A quick affiliate link to Amazon for those readers who would like to support my work here: if you purchase your Amazon products via any affiliate link from this site, or from my sister site Casual Kitchen, I will receive a small affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you!]
It's also been unsettling to watch Scott Adams get famous all over again, both for good and not-so-good reasons. Several years ago, he was early to recognize the rise of Donald Trump, correctly predicting he would defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. He also became somewhat infamous for revisiting his decision to get the experimental mRNA vaccine, questioning whether it was the right or the wrong choice to get vaxxed, especially after much more information was later revealed about their (lack of) safety and efficacy. And most recently, we've all sadly learned that Adams has advanced prostate cancer, and he does not expect to live many more months.
As helpful as this book was, it is a mournful experience reading it, knowing that we may not have one of history's most original cartoonists with us much longer.
A final comment, a compliment: How to Fail may not be perfect, but throughout the entire book I failed to find a single typo, in stark contrast to certain other books I've read lately. Adams and his editorial team really put effort into making this as good a book as they possibly could. Kudos.
Scott, thank you. You helped us all make a little more sense out of this crazy world.
[Dear readers: what follows are my notes, quotes and reactions to the text. They are meant to help order my thinking and help me remember--and they are too long. It might be worth reading the bolded parts, but even then please remember that your time is valuable.]
Notes:
Introduction
1 "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."
3 Interesting tease here of the book's central ideas, which the author says "might give you a reason to finish the book." See photo:
4 Note Adam's list of "six filters for truth" each of which he considers to be a "train wreck," meaning that the filters we use for truth are unreliable, mislead us, etc. Note also the fact that Adams lists "experts" as one of these unreliable filters for truth, saying, "they work for money, not truth."
6 Setting up good rhetoric here as Adams denigrates himself in front of the reader: "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."
Chapter 1: The Time I Was Crazy
7ff On Scott Adams' dysphonia; he has an upcoming gig giving a canned speech in front of a thousand people and isn't sure if he can do it.
Chapter 2: The Day of the Talk
10ff He manages to get the speech off, but then immediately after lost his ability to speak right after he walked off stage. See also this quote: "...over the years I have cultivated a unique relationship with failure. I invite it. I survive it. I appreciate it. And then I mug the shit out of it. Failure always bring something valuable with it. I don't let it leave until I extract that value. I have a long history of profiting from failure."
Chapter 3: Passion Is Bullshit
13ff When Adams worked as a loan officer for a bank in San Francisco, his boss told him "you should never make a loan to someone who is following his passion." On how "passion" is a reason people give because it sounds more accessible, it feels democratic.
Chapter 4: Some of My Many Failures in Summary Form
17ff "Prior to launching Dilbert, and after, I failed at a long series of day jobs and entrepreneurial adventures." Some of the takeaways here are: the market rewards execution, not just coming up with an idea; look for areas where you have some natural advantage; also insights here on transferring knowledge and experience across domains, see for example how he learned about the dumbasseries of the business world at Pacific Bell which he was able to translate to Dilbert; also on appreciating the power of timing, as he was given stock in a company that was like YouTube but was "too early"... the company didn't make it.
20 Fascinating to see him state, bluntly, that his career at the bank "ultimately failed when I hit the diversity ceiling." Remember: this book was written in 2013, long before it was even possible to talk about this openly.
20 Worth seeing how he used his W-2 as a platform to get out of Shawshank, all along he was working on his own business ideas, lots of them, while collecting a W-2 salary.
23 "There is no such thing as useful information that comes from a company's management." Adams wrote this as a takeaway after getting his face ripped off losing a large investment in Webvan. [I empathize. This can be true with certain managements, but it is not always true. In any event you need to hear what management says, even lying management, to compare it later against what they actually ended up doing. This is how you learn they lie.]
Chapter 5: My Absolute Favorite Spectacular Failure
28ff This is a quite shocking story here as Adams almost froze to death when his car conked out on an isolated road during a freezing cold upstate New York winter night. He wasn't properly dressed and likely would have died if not for a traveling shoe salesman driving the other way. He vows that if he survives he's going to get the hell out of upstate New York and move to California... and so he moves to California.
Chapter 6: Goals Versus Systems
30ff On the flight to California Adams happens to sit next to a CEO of a company who explains to him your job is not your job; your job is to find a better job. "This was my first exposure to the idea that one should have a system instead of goal. The system was to continually look for better options." Goals are for losers... goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary. That feeling wears on you." On various semantic issues: what makes a system, what makes a goal, goals have systems too, etc. "All I'm suggesting is that thinking of goals and systems as very different concepts has power. Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous pre-success failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in a 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." [This is quite a useful insight.] "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."
Chapter 7: My System
35ff Backstory on Adams' life as a student, going to college at Hartwick, catching mono and almost losing a scholarship, learning to distrust experts. "This was about the time that my opinion of experts, and authority figures in general, begin a steady descent that continues to this day."
40 He figures out that he wants to do something entrepreneurial, perhaps make something that had value and yet was easy to reproduce; he understands early on the value of scalable businesses.
Chapter 8: My Corporate Career Fizzled
41ff Adams is hired on the spot as a teller in a San Francisco bank, but is so incompetent and makes so many money errors that he almost gets fired; but then he "fails his way into a promotion" into the bank's management training program, thanks to a witty letter he wrote to a senior vice president at the bank. Ultimately he's (self-admittedly) incompetent at everything he did at the bank, but keep getting promoted in spite of his failures. [If you think about it, this is a steroidal version of the Peter Principle!] But then his banking career ends as he's told that an order came down across the company to stop promoting white males. Then he moves to Pacific Bell, the local phone company which "unwisely offered me a job... Little did they realize that looking good on paper was my best skill." He considers his life at Pac Bell "a truly absurd existence."
44 He hits the "diversity ceiling" [his words] at Pac Bell as well, and his career path there becomes a failure once again. "I no longer felt the need to give my employer my best efforts, or even to occasionally work long hours for no extra pay. It was an unwanted freedom, but freedom nonetheless." [See the BowTiedBull philosophy of doing the minimum necessary to keep your job and/or remain on a career path, no more.] He begins once again drawing cartoons every morning before work and practicing affirmations: "I, Scott Adams, will be a famous cartoonist."
Chapter 9: Deciding Versus Wanting
46 Unpacking the phrase "If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it." Adams talks about how wishing exists in the mind but deciding is different in that "it means you acknowledge the price and you're willing to pay it."
Chapter 10: The Selfishness Illusion
47 "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."
49 "...generous people take care of their own needs first. In fact, doing so is a moral necessity. The world needs you at your best." The argument here is essentially selfishness will give way to success which will cause you to no longer be selfish.
Chapter 11: The Energy Metric
52 "For years, the prospect of starting 'my own thing' and leaving my cubicle behind gave me an enormous amount of energy." [Obtaining your own freedom is a tremendously motivating goal.]
52ff This is a wide-ranging, somewhat unfocused chapter discussing managing your energy levels, taking advantage of creative work when your energy is well matched to doing such work; discussion of simplifying your daily routine or your life situation versus optimizing [which produces fragilities]; discussion of your sitting position, how it lends itself to (or counters) the kind of work (or relaxation) you're trying to do; on doing things that help your energy level: meaning eat right, exercise, sleep properly, etc., so you maximize your energy levels. [The author doesn't phrase it this way, but I would say also do what's necessary to put yourself in a flow state, particularly for creative activity.]
Chapter 12: Managing Your Attitude
65 "If you could control your attitude directly, as opposed to letting the environment dictate how you feel on any given day, it would be like a minor superpower. It turns out you have that superpower. You can control your attitude by manipulating your thoughts, your body, and your environment." [I'd add here that this is one of these belief sets that is fully self-fulfilling, thus you are better off adopting it for pragmatic reasons and live as if it is true.] On managing exercise, food and sleep, also on increasing your ratio of happy thoughts to disturbing thoughts, including "daydreaming of wonderful things in your future." Also on working on projects that raise your energy.
66 Second mention here of the Gates foundation: "It won't change the world the way the Gates foundation will..." [It's amazing how things change and how things that were seen as good are suddenly not seen as so good any more. All it takes is a plandemic, several flights to Epstein Island, and a book discussing in depth all your vile medical experiments in poor countries to permanently change everybody's perspective on you.]
68 On how many energy-boosting or energy-depleting activities are self-fulfilling or circular, like acting energetic, smiling, lying down for a nap; these things cause the specific internal mental state they manifest. This is a form of "two-way causation" that you can use, as the author puts it. Thinking of it like programming yourself, or having a conversation between you and your mind.
71ff More here on the self-fulfilling nature of our expectations and perceptions, and how we should modify our perceptions and expectations towards whatever makes us happy "because you're probably wrong about the underlying nature of reality anyway." [I like it! Applied epistemic humility.]
Chapter 13: It's Already Working
74 Amusing rhetoric here. "By reading this book you've established yourself as a seeker of knowledge... Your decision to read this book is confirmation that you are a person of action who has a desire to be more effective." [Note that in the first few sentences of the book he hypnotically repeats the same idea as well; it's effective on a few levels, even though the reader would probably feel insulted if it were too obvious that such tools were being used on him.]
Chapter 14: My Pinkie Goes Nuts
76ff Just as Dilbert starts to get traction, but before it was successful enough for him to quit his job at Pac Bell, Adams begins experiencing spasms in his pinkie finger whenever he tries to draw; the doctor tells him there's nothing that can be done; his life is "demolished," his dreams over. Adams deadpans: "It took a few days for my baseline optimism to return." The reader also learns here that Scott Adams learned hypnosis in his twenties. He beats this problem, but it ultimately returned years later. But by that time he had taught himself to draw using a tablet computer, which for some reason never triggered his pinkie issues. Ultimately he "came out the other end a far more efficient cartoonist."
Chapter 15: My Speaking Career
80 Adams gets a call to do a speech in Canada, doesn't want to do it; he calls his syndication organization to get advice from someone who does paid public speaking; Adams asks for $5,000, what he thought would be an outrageous price; they agree and fly him up and back first class. Adams just keeps raising his speaking prices after that. [Here's a good example of pricing things at a level at which you know you're price yourself out of a job, but every once in a while somebody hits your bid. Kind of using reverse psychology for a job you're lukewarm on doing in the first place.] "All I needed to do was overprice myself and see what happened."
Chapter 16: My Voice Problem Gets a Name
82ff [Interesting discussion here that (indirectly) gets you thinking about how having a name for something--in Adams' case a name and a diagnosis for a medical condition--somehow gives you power over that thing.] Adams figures out what he has by putting together two disparate ideas/terms: "voice" and "dystonia" (this was the name for the problem he had with his pinkie finger) and discovers his condition: dysphonia. He decides that he will be the first person in the world to be cured of it. [A nice synchronicity: this chapter is an excellent example of the method taught in the book A Technique for Producing Ideas.]
Chapter 17: The Voice Solution that Didn't Work
84 He tries botox injections in the vocal cord region, it doesn't work; [Disturbing to think about how botox treatment really hinges on the (usually unknown and variable) level and nature of the patient's response to the toxin, also they have to get the location exactly right, etc.]
Chapter 18: Recognizing Your Talents and Knowing When to Quit
86ff On considering what you were obsessively doing before you were ten years old, this might indicate something that you are good at; on the idea that things that tend to start out well often ultimately work out well; in contrast, things that start out bad and tend to stay that way--thus you can quit doing those things fairly safely; thoughts also on measuring early initial demand (at least from some fraction of your audience that is truly enthusiastic), see for example how Dilbert caught a very small but very enthusiastic following right away, likewise with The Simpsons; finally, don't ask your friends and family for their opinions. "They're all liars." [What he means here is they won't give you the unfiltered feedback that you actually need]
Chapter 19: Is Practice Your Thing?
92ff An example of a three-year-old who had a bizarrely intense focus on tennis, this kid loves to practice. The author goes through some odd things that he practiced intensely, like spinning a basketball on his finger before discovering there was no economic value in it. "It matters what you practice." [Yes, yes it does!] "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, assuming you're not a cannibal." [Respect for the textbook misdirection humor at the end of that sentence.]
Chapter 20: Managing Your Odds for Success
95 On success as "the product of picking a good system and following it until luck finds you."
96 "Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success." [He's speaking by analogy or metaphor here, and he anticipates the reader's critiques and "akshuallies" and deflects them in the following paragraphs. This is also a good reminder that it's always best to mine a book for ideas by thinking of ways to apply the ideas rather than thinking of reasons why the idea won't work.] Note here also a rhetorically interesting example of working on your resume and seeing how many words in your first draft you would be willing to remove for $100 each--this is basically omit needless words with an economic incentive--although the incentive isn't even real, it's just a mental construct! But yet if you're willing to give the idea some rope, it becomes an incredibly helpful heuristic.
99 On the meta-advantage as you learn more and more domains:, "the more concepts you understand, the easier it is to learn new ones." [This fits well with Charlie Munger's idea of a mental matrix: the more nodes you have in your own mental matrix the more places you can anchor or map new knowledge to your existing matrix. Adding skills has its own direct benefit, but there's an additional second-order benefit.] Adams uses this to arrive at what he calls "the knowledge formula: the more you know, the more you can know." [Note however that he discusses this idea in the context of reading news about world events every day, a practice I do not recommend for a wide variety of reasons! He's appropriately cynical about the value of seeing the news as truth--he knows it's not--but I think it's important to take one more step and see the news as literal anti-information.]
Chapter 21: The Math of Success
101ff On paying attention to the odds of the various games you're playing, and on moving from games with low odds to games with better odds; also a good example here using tennis: on paying attention to the odds of specific shots: basically you're talking about the idea that the true odds are actually the exact opposite of how they feel when you're inside the game.
103ff Scott Adams' list of skills in which every adult should gain a working knowledge: [the remainder of this chapter is a topic by topic defense of each of these knowledge domains, it's a monster chapter compared to the other little chapters of this book.]
Public speaking
Psychology
Business writing
Accounting
Design
Conversation
Overcoming shyness
Second language
Golf
Proper grammar
Persuasion
Technology
Proper voice technique
105-6 Adams tells a striking story here about a Dale Carnegie course he attended where a terrified woman went up to attempt to speak to the rest of the class, only to return to her seat embarrassed and humiliated; the instructor said, "Wow that was brave," completely reframing everything, both for her and everyone else in the class. Adams writes, "I rank it as one of the most fascinating things I have ever witnessed...We had just witnessed an extraordinary act of personal bravery, the likes of which one rarely sees."
106 Also on Scott Adams' own affirmation that he says before he goes up to speak in front of a crowd: "a little recording goes off in my head that says today is a good day. I'm the happiest person in the room. The audience only gets to listen, but I get to speak, to feel, to be fully alive. I will absorb their energy and turn it into something good. And when I'm done, there's a 100 percent chance that people will say good things about me."
107 "When you understand the power of honest praise (as opposed to bullshitting, flattery, and sucking up), you realize that withholding it borders on immoral." [He's right.]
108ff Insights here on psychology, discussing errors of perception, inaccurate/irrational comparisons we make, the author gives an example here of rolling out a new comic that was far better in the beginning than Dilbert was initially, but it wasn't anywhere near as good as Dilbert was at that time; likewise other cartoonists trying to roll out workplace-based comics that were uncompetitive with the mature Dilbert even though when it began Dilbert was far worse in quality; "Quality is not an independent force," it's always relative.
111ff On knowing psychological traps: he includes a list that he pulled from Wikipedia over the next three pages here. "Every psychological trap on this list can be used to manipulate you. If there's something on this list that you're not familiar with, you're vulnerable to deception." [He's absolutely right, it's important to be conversant in as many cognitive and psychological biases and traps as you possibly can, learning about these things is like seeing for the first time.]
116ff Adams talks about his training in hypnosis. "My experience with hypnosis completely changed the way I view people and how I interpret the choices they make. I no longer see reason as the driver of behavior. I see simple cause and effect, similar to the way machines operate. If you believe people use reason for the important decisions in life, you will go through life feeling confused and frustrated that others seem to have bad reasoning skills. The reality is that reason is just one of the drivers of our decisions, and often the smallest one... It is tremendously useful to know when people are using reason and when they are rationalizing the irrational... Few things are as destructive and limiting as a worldview that assumes people are mostly rational."
119ff On the value of business writing, writing in a tight, "omit needless words" style, setting things up in a certain order, using active words, improving your persuasiveness; also on business writing as the foundation of humor writing.
120ff On accounting and its value. [As boring as this topic appears at first, I agree it's important to know something about it if you want to understand how the world works.]
121ff On learning design, at least learning certain key rules like using odd numbers of things like three, also on laying things out with an L-shaped layout; on active space versus negative space, etc.
122ff On learning the art of conversation; on the Dale Carnegie question stack; on not complaining or talking about boring experiences; on keeping your story short and not talking about your health or your medical problems; also on the keys to good storytelling: a setup, a pattern that you violate, use foreshadowing techniques, then a twist.
128ff On learning how to overcome shyness: the trick here that he learned from a college friend was to imagine you're acting instead of interacting; literally you act like someone you know who is confident; also on harnessing the power of acting interested in other people.
130ff Unfortunately his advice here on learning a second language is purely vicarious, as he admits he can't speak nor understand another language at all.
132ff Comments here on avoiding basic grammar errors, mainly because of the signals you send to intelligent and successful people who would notice. [I think another thing worth adding here is you may want to adjust your grammar to your audience, using flawless grammar with people who don't can be seen as insulting in certain cases. Better to blend.]
134ff On persuasion: the best persuasion words:
Because (reasonableness)
Would you mind...? (sounds reasonable)
I'm not interested (no reason to bite on, conversation killer)
I don't do that (sounds like a hard and fast rule)
I have a rule... (sounds convincing and polite)
I just wanted to clarify... (approaches a debate sideways, indirectly)
Is there anything you can do for me? (persuasive question that frames the other person as the hero/problem solver)
Thank you (written, with specific details on what you are thanking the person for)
This is just between you and me (creates an alliance)
141ff On proper voice technique: using your fun voice, your serious voice when appropriate; on eliminating ums and ahs from your speech, replacing them with silence.
Chapter 22: Pattern Recognition
148ff He makes a reference to Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and then lists his own three patterns to follow, which are:
* Having a lack of fear of embarrassment (let's you be proactive or take risks)
* Having the right kind of education (engineers have a 0% unemployment rate for example)
* Exercise (brings vitality, makes you smarter, braver, more influential)
148 "There's one more pattern I see in successful people: they treat success as a learnable skill." [This is a brief comment at the end of the chapter but it is yet another very useful and self-fulfilling meta-insight]
Chapter 23: Humor
149ff "People who enjoy humor are simply more attractive than people who don't." Humor raises your energy, it compensates for other shortcomings; see Adams' other works for his formulas for writing humor; Traps to avoid: over-complaining, overdoing self-deprecation, mocking people, and puns/wordplay. Also on a story about a colonoscopy appointment and a technical discussion of the structure and why it's not as funny in written form as it sounds in person.
Chapter 24: Affirmations
155ff You don't need to know why something works in order to take advantage of it. [Holy cow is this ever an enormous insight, and it's why "smart boy" types are screwed in life: they have to know why something works before they're willing to try it.]
155 Comment here about a caveman who could use a cell phone even though he might think the inner workings were based on magic: "his faulty perceptions would have no impact on the usefulness of the phone, at least until it broke and he started praying to it." On the idea that an affirmation basically works for reasons we don't understand, but so what? We can just get the results.
155ff One of his classmates from a hypnosis class Adams once took finds a book on affirmations and experienced "hugely unlikely results" and this got Adams to try to debunk the idea of affirmations. He starts with "I, Scott, will become rich" and then he has two ridiculously lucky stock picks. Also another visualization/affirmation story where he visualizes a 94 on his GMAT, and then finally, "The next time I used affirmations it was in pursuit of the rarest, most desirable job I have ever imagined. The affirmation went like this: 'I, Scott Adams, will be a famous cartoonist.' That worked out better."
Chapter 25: Timing Is Luck Too
159 On the luck that his first comics editor was married to someone who was basically a real life Dilbert, who saw the humor in what Adams was trying to do, in spite of the objections of others within her company; likewise the engineer spouse of syndication employee at the Boston Globe stumbled onto a sales packet of Dilbert and began laughing, his wife trusted his reaction and recommended Dilbert for the paper, after landed a major regional newspaper, many other papers in the region then followed suit. More luck: the western regional salesperson who hated Dilbert died of heart attack in a hotel room on the road, and his replacement was one of the biggest salesman behind the comic strip: "John is the best salesman I've ever seen. Had he not been available for the job, or had the original salesman lived, Dilbert might have been a small comic that ran in the Northeast for a few years before fading Into obscurity."
160 Other lucky timing factors: it was the era of corporate downsizing, the internet was making technologist, geeks and nerds sexier, also the authors of both Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbes happened to have retired at young ages.
160 "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."
160 "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 again."
Chapter 26: A Few Times Affirmation Worked
161ff Adams writes a guest editorial about the workplace for the Wall Street Journal and then was asked by Harper Business to write a book; Adams begins writing The Dilbert Principle along with the affirmation "I, Scott Adams, will be a number one best-selling author." And then he doesn't use affirmations for the Dilbert TV show, his restaurants, or his vegetarian burrito company, all of which failed. "The pattern I noticed is that the affirmations only worked when I had a 100 percent unambiguous desire for success."
Chapter 27: Voice Update
163ff [Interesting here how he operates with quite a lot of psychological agency and volition in dealing with his dysphonia: he tries various therapies, keeps a spreadsheet tracking data on any factor he thinks might be involved, including his diet, sleep, exercise; he tracks keywords on Google for medical contacts and new developments. All of this would be helpful and copy-able tactics that anyone could use with their efforts to manage a problem or a medical condition.] Finally he repeats the mantra "I, Scott Adams, will speak perfectly."
Chapter 28: Experts
165ff In his late 20s Adams finds a strange lump on his neck, has it x-rayed, worries himself quite a lot that it might be cancer; it turns out to be benign.
166 "Dealing with experts is always tricky. Are they honest? Are they competent? How often are they right? My observation and best guess is that experts are right about 98 percent of the time on easy stuff but only right 50 percent of the time on anything that is unusually complicated, mysterious, or even new." [A reader can't help but see this in the context of his highly uncharacteristic trust in "experts" to decide on the MRNA injections.] "If your gut feeling (intuition) disagrees with the experts, take that seriously. You might be experiencing some pattern recognition you can't yet verbalize."
Chapter 29: Association Programming
167ff Various examples here showing that who you associate with makes a big difference in your life outcome; see alcoholics anonymous, whether you hang around with overweight people, etc. Note also here that Adams in the past mocked a former colleague for thinking his choice of neighbors would influence his career, Adams later comes to realize he was right, and he apologizes in this book.
Chapter 30: Happiness
173ff "The single biggest trick for manipulating your happiness chemistry is being able to do what you want, when you want." [Holy cow is this ever true for me.] On the timing of things, and being able to control the timing of things: like enjoying a good meal when you're actually hungry rather than after you had a huge meal of junk food. Or taking a nap midday rather than right before bedtime; thus try to consider "schedule flexibility" when making any major decisions.
175ff See also the idea of embracing domains where you can show slow and steady improvement; also on the value of imagining the future to be good, on developing expectations that the future will be good. "Don't let reality control your imagination. Let your imagination be the user interface to steer your reality." [This is a very useful and volition-inducing quote.]
177 He describes how he got sad after he reached the high point of his cartooning career, depositing a huge paycheck from a multibook deal; he feels adrift, without a primary purpose because he had actually achieved it. [Often the pleasure and the charge come from the journey, not the destination.]
178 Finally on the value of a good routine; on eliminating many of your bandwidth-wasting daily decisions.
Chapter 31: Diet
180ff [This chapter should have been cut down by two-thirds.] Adams offers the [highly volitional!] strategy of changing what you want to eat so "you can eat whatever you want"; recursively, this makes it so that "what you want" will be things that are healthy for you and good for you; in other words deliberately change your preferences so they serve you. On the idea that you can actually manipulate your own cravings; on looking at your body "as a programmable robot as opposed to a fleshy bag full of magic." On the "fleshy bag of magic worldview" where you see your body in terms of inputs, outputs and programmability.
186 On structuring a diet system that does not require you to use up willpower, as it is a finite resource. [My take here is that, yes, willpower is finite in the short run, but you can still train yourself to have more at any given time by practicing it over the long term.]
191 On dietary recommendations and the US government's daily recommended levels of vitamins and minerals; "The main thing I learned is that nutrition presents itself as a science but is perhaps 60 percent bullshit, guessing, bad assumptions, and marketing." [A quick sidebar here on persuasion and rhetoric here: the use of the phrase "The main thing I learned is" makes the following part of the sentence appear to be already assumed as true--which it largely is of course--but this sentence well-crafted to be extra-persuasive. Well done.]
191 [Useful, albeit sad and sobering, sidebar here at the bottom of page 191, given Adams' recent cancer diagnosis] "In the process of failing at the fortified-burrito business, I learned most of what you'll read in this chapter. That's what I call failing forward. Anytime you learn something useful, you come out ahead. In this case, my focus on a healthy diet probably increased my life span."
198 [This chapter is one of the longest in the book, and one of the chapters that least fit the book's overall theme. Also it's conspicuous to see absolutely no discussion of fasting at all.]
198ff Discussion of the merits of a vegetarian diet; Adams also eats fish occasionally "just for the health benefits."
203 On his summary of healthy eating, basically his central ideas are: pay attention to patterns between your energy level and the foods you eat, let laziness and convenience help you, and don't set up a system requiring willpower. [These are all great ways to apply systems theory to diet.]
Chapter 32: Fitness
205 "Be active every day. Allow me to acknowledge how spectacularly useless that sounds... My challenge in this chapter is to convince you that 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."
206ff The insights on pattern-making and system creation towards a healthy lifestyle are all useful here: on permitting the idea of "being active" stay deliberately vague so that you can flexibly define it for yourself; have it be self-reforcing, make it social, easy to schedule, easy to do, reward yourself, etc., so you are positively reinforced; also using an idea from hypnosis: manipulating cues so that your mind is already programmed to engage in habitual physical activity--Adams give an example where he puts on his exercise clothes and laces up his sneakers, while giving himself permission to not exercise; it always works to trigger him to go to the gym and work out. "But what I have is not a goal; it is a system. And a system allows leakage... I win if I exercise, and I win (albeit less) if I use my system and decide not to."
212ff This chapter ends strangely with a weird segment on women who allegedly skip exercise because they don't want their hair to get wet or sweaty; he picked up this idea from an article in the New York Times. [I submit this as another example of how the news is anti-information, you literally become dumber reading articles like this.]
Chapter 33: Voice Update 2
215ff "Half my life was great, while half was darkly broken." A stumbles onto a surgeon who offers a novel surgical procedure for his dysphonia, it involves cutting nerves that lead from the brain to vocal cords, then building a new path using nerves borrowed elsewhere in the neck, a sort of rewiring. Adams schedules the surgery.
Chapter 34: Luck
219 "...if I've done my job right, you've changed in a way that will someday make people say you were lucky."
Chapter 35: CalendarTree Start-up
220ff On how the startup he's working on is a framework for showcasing the difference between systems and goals. Even if the project fails he'll have new learnings, new jokes for Dilbert, a new network of contacts, etc.
Chapter 36: Voice Update 3
222ff He has the nerve cutting surgery, the recovery period was "wretched" [basically he had months of dysphagia], three and a half months after the surgery is how long it is supposed to take for the nerve recovery to happen; he began speaking right time, his voice improved to even better than it was before all this happened. "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."
Chapter 37: A Final Note About Affirmations
225ff "Allow me to offer some explanations of why affirmations appear to be influencing more than just the person doing them." [Again we see good rhetoric here to disarm various midwit, nitpicking objections up front; it is quite a disarming technique.] He starts with reasons that are kind of contra-reasons: because people lie, because they have false memories, etc. [Again, this is disarming.] Then he gets to the real reason: we are limited in our perceptions and our brains create illusions, thus "affirmations might work for perfectly logical reasons our brains aren't equipped to understand." Also on affirmations as "a system that helps you focus, boosts your optimism and energy, and perhaps validates the talent and drive that your subconscious always knew you had."
Chapter 38: Summary
230 "Keep in mind that if you skipped to the end of the book to read the section, it will seem extraordinarily unpersuasive out of context." [The assumed implication here is that the book itself is persuasive, thus making it so!]
230ff Focus on your diet first so that you have energy to want to exercise; exercise further improves your energy, which makes you more productive or creative and more positive; once you optimize your personal energy put yourself in better places to be lucky; move from strategies with bad odds to strategies with good odds (like learning multiple skills, controlling your ego, avoiding jobs that don't prepare you for something better, etc.); on how happiness tends to follow when you have good health, resources and a flexible schedule; certain skills are more important, like public speaking, business writing, psychology of persuasion, understanding basic technology concepts, proper voice technique etc; learn how to avoid being an asshole; think of yourself as a moist programmable robot and then control the inputs, looking for patterns in every part of your life. "Most important, understand that goals are for losers and systems are for winners."
231 "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."
To Read:
[Note that on Goodreads Scott Adams has a persuasion reading list of some 31 books. It's worth checking out.]
Scott Adams: The Joy of Work
Scott Adams: Dilbert 2.0
Scott Adams: Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain!