How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life by Scott Adams Page A
Authors: Scott Adams
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hungry.
Understanding this two-way causation is highly useful for boosting your personal energy. To take advantage of it, I find it useful to imagine my mind as a conversation between two individuals. It feels that way because I think in sentences, as if talking to another entity that is also me. One of me tends to be rational and reasonable, while the other me is a bit more emotional and instinctual. When the rational me wants to perk up the emotional me—the part of me that controls my energy—the rational me has to act as a programmer and push the right buttons.
Thenext time you’re in a gloomy mood, try smiling at a stranger you pass on the street. You’ll be surprised how many people reflexively return the smile, and if you smile often enough, eventually that cue will boot up the happiness subroutine in your brain and release the feel-good chemicals you desire.
As a bonus, smiling makes you more attractive to others. 3 When you’re more attractive, people respond to you with more respect and consideration, more smiles, and sometimes even lust. That’s exactly the sort of thing that can cheer you up.
If you’re not comfortable faking a smile, try hanging around friends who are naturally funny. Equally important, avoid friends who are full-time downers. You want friends with whom you can share both the good and the bad, but you aren’t a therapist. Walk away from the soul suckers. You have a right to pursue happiness and an equal right to run as fast as you can from the people who would deny it.
Success Premium
I’ve come to believe that success at anything has a spillover effect on other things. You can take advantage of that effect by becoming good at things that require nothing but practice. 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. When you’ve tasted success, you want more. And the wanting gives you the sort of energy that is critical to success.
In my case, I was extra talented at several trivial games:
Scrabble
Pool
Tennis
Ping-Pong
In each of those activities my so-called talent was little more than the result of insane hours of practice. I grew up in a small town where there weren’t many ways to stay entertained. We had the world’s cheapest and worst pool table in our converted cellar/bomb shelter. It was so cheap that it didn’t have a slate bed and it became warpedsoon after we got it. A soft shot meant your ball would roll to one side and stay there. On two ends of the table there wasn’t enough room between the table and the wall, so I needed to raise the cue toward the corner of the ceiling and shoot down on the cue ball. It wasn’t pretty. But I spent so many hours by myself practicing shot after shot that I became quite good. At this point in my life, the only people who can regularly beat me at pool are the ones who wasted an even greater proportion of their youth practicing.
The same was true for Scrabble, Ping-Pong, and tennis. I’m better than 99 percent of the world * in each of those games because I put in more practice time than 99 percent of the world. There’s no magic to it.
Thanks to my experience with these exceedingly minor successes, I have a realistic understanding of how many hours it takes to be good at something. That keeps me from bailing out of things too soon. But more important, I know what winning feels like (great!) and it energizes me to seek more of it. In that sense I’m like any trained animal seeking a treat.
A great strategy for success in life is to become good at something, anything, and let that feeling propel you to new and better victories. Success can be habit-forming.
Pick the Delusion That Works
When my dog, Snickers, wants to play fetch in the backyard, she follows me around and stares into my eyes with freakish intensity, as if using her Jedi doggy powers on me. More often than not, it works. I know what she wants and I take a break from work
Understanding this two-way causation is highly useful for boosting your personal energy. To take advantage of it, I find it useful to imagine my mind as a conversation between two individuals. It feels that way because I think in sentences, as if talking to another entity that is also me. One of me tends to be rational and reasonable, while the other me is a bit more emotional and instinctual. When the rational me wants to perk up the emotional me—the part of me that controls my energy—the rational me has to act as a programmer and push the right buttons.
Thenext time you’re in a gloomy mood, try smiling at a stranger you pass on the street. You’ll be surprised how many people reflexively return the smile, and if you smile often enough, eventually that cue will boot up the happiness subroutine in your brain and release the feel-good chemicals you desire.
As a bonus, smiling makes you more attractive to others. 3 When you’re more attractive, people respond to you with more respect and consideration, more smiles, and sometimes even lust. That’s exactly the sort of thing that can cheer you up.
If you’re not comfortable faking a smile, try hanging around friends who are naturally funny. Equally important, avoid friends who are full-time downers. You want friends with whom you can share both the good and the bad, but you aren’t a therapist. Walk away from the soul suckers. You have a right to pursue happiness and an equal right to run as fast as you can from the people who would deny it.
Success Premium
I’ve come to believe that success at anything has a spillover effect on other things. You can take advantage of that effect by becoming good at things that require nothing but practice. 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. When you’ve tasted success, you want more. And the wanting gives you the sort of energy that is critical to success.
In my case, I was extra talented at several trivial games:
Scrabble
Pool
Tennis
Ping-Pong
In each of those activities my so-called talent was little more than the result of insane hours of practice. I grew up in a small town where there weren’t many ways to stay entertained. We had the world’s cheapest and worst pool table in our converted cellar/bomb shelter. It was so cheap that it didn’t have a slate bed and it became warpedsoon after we got it. A soft shot meant your ball would roll to one side and stay there. On two ends of the table there wasn’t enough room between the table and the wall, so I needed to raise the cue toward the corner of the ceiling and shoot down on the cue ball. It wasn’t pretty. But I spent so many hours by myself practicing shot after shot that I became quite good. At this point in my life, the only people who can regularly beat me at pool are the ones who wasted an even greater proportion of their youth practicing.
The same was true for Scrabble, Ping-Pong, and tennis. I’m better than 99 percent of the world * in each of those games because I put in more practice time than 99 percent of the world. There’s no magic to it.
Thanks to my experience with these exceedingly minor successes, I have a realistic understanding of how many hours it takes to be good at something. That keeps me from bailing out of things too soon. But more important, I know what winning feels like (great!) and it energizes me to seek more of it. In that sense I’m like any trained animal seeking a treat.
A great strategy for success in life is to become good at something, anything, and let that feeling propel you to new and better victories. Success can be habit-forming.
Pick the Delusion That Works
When my dog, Snickers, wants to play fetch in the backyard, she follows me around and stares into my eyes with freakish intensity, as if using her Jedi doggy powers on me. More often than not, it works. I know what she wants and I take a break from work
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