How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life by Scott Adams
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
While this book is a little scattered both in format and subject material, it has some very helpful ideas about reframing your approach to life in ways that are likely to maximize your chances of success overall and your happiness even in the meantime.
Some of my big takeaways:
- Arrange your life around processes, not goals. As you learn to routinize patterns that increase your energy level, skills, human connection, risk tolerance, etc. you’ll continually increase your chances of success while rarely having to power through big lifestyle changes on sheer willpower.
- Learn to think of failure as a resource, not an outcome. Select and arrange your endeavors in a way that will result in useful gain even if the endeavor fails. This will free you up to try lots of things, fail freely, and in the process keep gaining new skills, connections, experience, etc., increasing the likelihood of success on future endeavors.
- Best starting point is caring for your body. Energy levels (used kind of loosely to mean a mix of physical energy, optimism, and drive) are a linchpin to unlocking your capacity in most other areas. Learning to eat right (in enjoyable therefore sustainable patterns) will increase your tendency toward (enjoying therefore maintaining habits of) physical activity and fitness, which will tend to improve your mood, likeability, creative/productive capacity, and more, which will make it more likely that you will feel happy, try interesting things, enjoy and be enjoyed by other people, etc.
- Tips and tricks. Some helpful specifics on conversational skills, developing sustainably healthy diet and exercise patterns, and more.
