“How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big” by Scott Adams

A broad reaching, humor filled book with lots of random life advice.

• Truth Detection Methods:
  1. Personal experience: Human perceptions are iffy
  2. Experience of people you know: More unreliable
  3. Experts: They work for money, not truth
  4. Scientific studies: Correlation is not causation; and often for money (either directly for pay or for funding)
  5. Common sense: A good way to be mistaken with complete confidence
  6. Pattern recognition: Patterns, coincidences, and personal bias look alike
• Consistency: The best way to determine truth
  • Look for at least two of the Truth Detection Methods agree
  • The more, the better
• “Failure always brings something valuable. I never let it go until I have extracted that value.”
• Passion
  • Passionate people tend to make big bets. When they fail, we rarely hear about them which skews our perception of passion.
  • Passion is highly correlated with what we are good at
  • Focus on energy not passion
•  Lessons
  • The world values execution, not good ideas
  • Seek opportunities where you have an advantage
• Systems are better than jobs because they are transferable and reproducible
  • Losing weight is a goal; Eating right is a system
• Giving to others
  • There are three kinds of people
    • Selfish people who are always looking to their futures
      • Selfish people tend to give more then they receive (and they tend to have more to give)
      • Enlightened selfish means you are taking long term plans into account
  • Stupid people who do not plan for the future at all
  • Burden on others people who waste their time and energy on unproductive things
• Some people are simplifiers, other optimizers; these are good at building processes
• “…sometimes you just need a friend who knows different things from you…”
• Few successes start out as failures; More often they start with some demand despite the product flaws
• When you feel inadequate just start acting
• Humor
  • Over complaining is not cool
  • Do not mock people
  • Self-deprecation is okay
  • All humor in moderation