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1-Page Summary of How to Fail at Almost Everything
Overview
Most self-help books are garbage. That’s what Scott Adams believes, anyway. In his book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big (2013), he offers advice on how to achieve success and happiness in life. The most important thing is not to believe anything that sounds too good to be true. Following your passions might sound nice but it usually leads nowhere; likewise, a positive attitude can help you out but it never guarantees success by itself. These feel-good truisms of the self-help genre only prevent people from putting in the real work necessary for a successful endeavor or career.
All successes are the result of luck. This is because some people were born into wealthy families, and others were just in the right place at the right time to be successful. However, you can increase your chances of being lucky by focusing on what you can change instead of things that aren’t within your control.
There are several ways to increase your chances of success. The most important is getting enough sleep, eating healthy food, and exercising regularly. Having a positive attitude can help you feel better by creating good brain chemicals that make you happy, attractive, and likable. By increasing your mental and physical health, you can improve the odds of luck in your favor.
Learning new skills can help you be more successful. The more skills you have, the greater your chances of succeeding in life. While some skills might not seem important, they are beneficial to know and use in everyday situations. It’s important to create systems that make it easy for you to learn new things and keep yourself on track with reaching your goals. Having a goal is good at first, but then it becomes useless after the goal has been met because it doesn’t teach anything about how to change or improve upon what worked before. By shifting focus from having goals toward creating systems that allow one to learn from failure will enable one to become better at dealing with failures without losing hope or giving up completely
Everyone fails at some point in their lives. However, it doesn’t have to hold you back from succeeding. Scott Adams is a perfect example of that fact, as his failures never prevented him from being wildly successful and famous.
Key Point 1: Systems are superior to goals.
Goals are important but not enough to reach success. A goal of becoming a CEO is good, but it doesn’t tell us how we’re going to do that. Therefore, we need to focus on the systems that will help us achieve our goals and not just the goal itself. For example, if our goal is to become a CEO, then we should focus on building up our résumé so that when an opportunity for promotion comes along, we can take advantage of it and move into another position with more responsibilities.
Goals are meant to inspire people, but they can often have the opposite effect. If someone’s goal is to lose 10 pounds, but they don’t see results after months of following a strict diet and working out, it might make them feel demoralized. Even if goals are completed, some people may find themselves lacking purpose or meaning in their days.
This is not to say that goals are useless. On the contrary, it’s still important to set objectives. Every goal should have a system behind its achievement and this system should be one that extends beyond individual achievements or milestones. For example, losing weight is an objective but health and exercise are systems which offer benefits whether or not the objective is achieved. Achieving goals without any systems in place only indicates success or failure without any of the positive externalities of a system. Successful people develop systems rather than obsess over achieving specific goals.
