I) Failure
Failure always brings something valuable with it. I don’t let it leave until I extract that value.
My failure taught me to seek opportunities in which I had an advantage.
The short answer is that 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.
II) Success
Successful people don’t wish for success; they decide to pursue it. And to pursue it effectively, they need a system. Success always has a price, but the reality is that the price is negotiable. If you pick the right system, the price be a lot nearer what you’re willing to pay.
Success isn’t magic; it’s generally the product of picking a good system and following it until luck finds you.
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.
One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard goes something like this: “If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it.” It sounds trivial and obvious, but if you unpack the idea it has extraordinary power.
My worldview is that all success is luck if you track it back to its source… that every element of your personality, from your perseverance to your risk tolerance to your ambition to your intelligence, is a product of pure chance. You needed the genes you were born with and the exact experiences of your life to create the person you are with the opportunities you have. Every decision you make is a simple math product of those variables.
You can’t directly control luck, but you can move from a game with low odds of success to a game with better odds.
III) Talent Stacking
The Success Formula: Every Skill You Acquire Doubles Your Odds of Success.
Notice I didn’t say anything about the level of proficiency you need to achieve for each skill. I didn’t mention anything about excellence or being world-class. The idea is that you can raise your market value by being merely good—not extraordinary— at more than one skill.
Good + Good > Excellent
My combined mediocre skills are worth far more than the sum of the parts. If you think
extraordinary talent and a maniacal pursuit of excellence are necessary for success, I say that’s just one approach, and probably the hardest. When it comes to skills, quantity often beats quality.
Another huge advantage of learning as much as you can in different fields is that the more concepts you understand, the easier it is to learn new ones.
The Knowledge Formula: The More You Know, the More You Can Know
I read the news to broaden my exposure to new topics and patterns that make my brain more efficient in general and to enjoy myself, because learning interesting things increases my energy and makes me feel optimistic. Don’t think of the news as
information. Think of it as a source of energy.
A smarter approach is to think of learning as a system in which you continually expose yourself to new topics, primarily the ones you find interesting.
The best way to increase your odds of success—in a way that might look like luck to others—is to systematically become good, but not amazing, at the types of skills that work well together and are highly useful for just about any job. This is another example in which viewing the world as math (adding skills together) and not magic allows you to move from a strategy with low odds of success to something better.
Every time we add new skills and broaden our network of contacts, our market value increases.
IV) Energy Metric
The way I approach the problem of multiple priorities is by focusing on just one main metric: my energy.
I make choices that maximize my personal energy because that makes it easier to manage all of the other priorities. Maximizing my personal energy means eating right, exercising, avoiding unnecessary stress, getting enough sleep, and all of the obvious steps.
The most important forms of selfishness involves spending time on your fitness, eating right, pursuing your career, and still spending quality time with your family and friends.
I’m talking about a calm, focused energy. To others it will simply appear that you are in a good mood. And you will be.
Ideally, you want to manage your personal energy for the long term and the big picture. Having one more cocktail at midnight might be an energy boost at the time, but you pay for it double the next day.
Exercise, food, and sleep should be your first buttons to push if you’re trying to elevate your attitude and raise your energy.
But what if you’re doing everything right on the physical-health front and you’re still not enjoying life as much as you think you should? A simple trick you might try involves increasing your ratio of happy thoughts to disturbing thoughts.
Try daydreaming of wonderful things in your future. Don’t worry that your daydreams are unlikely to come true… Imagination is the interface to your attitude. You can literally imagine yourself to higher levels of energy,.
V) Happiness
Smiling:
– Smiling makes you feel better even if your smile is fake.
– The smiling-makes-you-happy phenomenon is part of the larger and highly useful phenomenon of faking it until you make it.
– As a bonus, smiling makes you more attractive to others. 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.
The good news is that anyone who has experienced happiness probably has the capacity to spend more time at the top of his or her personal range and less time near the bottom.
The timing of things can be more important than the intrinsic value of the things. For starters, the single biggest trick for manipulating your happiness chemistry is being able to do what you want, when you want. I’m contrasting that with the more common situation, in which you might be able to do all the things you want, but you can’t often do them when you want.
It’s important to look at happiness in terms of timing because timing is easier to control than resources.
A person with a flexible schedule and average resources will be happier than a rich person who has everything except a flexible schedule. Step one in your search for happiness is to continually work toward having control of your schedule… whether in your personal life and your career, consider schedule flexibility when making any big decision.
Happiness has more to do with where you’re heading than where you are. The directional nature of happiness is one reason it’s a good idea to have a sport (e.g. golf) or hobby that leaves you plenty of room to improve every year.
The next element of happiness you need to master is imagination.
The next important thing to remember about happiness is that it’s not a mystery of the mind and it’s not magic. Happiness is the natural state for most people whenever they feel healthy, have flexible schedules, and expect the future to be good.
… the primary culprit in your bad moods is a deficit in one of the big five: flexible
schedule, imagination, sleep, diet, and exercise.
Based on a lifetime of observation, my best estimate is that 80 percent of your mood is based on how your body feels and only 20 percent is based on your genes and your circumstances, particularly your health. Ask yourself this question: At times when you’ve exercised earlier in the day, eaten well, hydrated, and had enough sleep, what percentage of those times have you found yourself in a good mood?
If the list of five elements for happiness seems incomplete, that’s intentional. I know you might also want sex, a soul mate, fame, recognition, a feeling of importance, career success, and lots more. My contention is that your five-pronged pursuit of happiness will act as a magnet for the other components of happiness you need. When you’re fit, happy, and full of energy, people are far more likely to have sex with you, be your friend, and hire you, sometimes all in the same day.
The way I climbed out of my funk was by realizing that my newly acquired resources could help me change the world in some small but positive ways.
Recapping the happiness formula:
– Eat right. Exercise. Get enough sleep.
– Imagine an incredible future (even if you don’t believe it).
– Work toward a flexible schedule.
– Do things you can steadily improve at.
– Help others (if you’ve already helped yourself).
– Reduce daily decisions to routine.
VI) Perceptions v. Reality
… if the topic of my job comes up, people immediately become friendlier, as if we had been friends forever. The underlying reality doesn’t change, but the way people think of me does, and that changes how they act.
My main point about perceptions is that you shouldn’t hesitate to modify your perceptions to whatever makes you happy, because you’re probably wrong about the underlying nature of reality anyway.
When you can release on your ego long enough to view your perceptions as incomplete or misleading, it gives you the freedom to imagine new and potentially more useful way of looking at the world.
You too can sometimes get what you want by adopting a practical illusion. Reality is overrated and impossible to understand with any degree of certainty. What you know for sure is that some ways of looking at the world work better than others. Pick the way that works, even if you don’t know why.
Quality is not an independent force in the universe; it depends on what you choose as your frame of reference.
VII) Execution
The best loan customer is one who has no passion whatsoever, just a desire to work hard at something that looks good on a spreadsheet. Maybe the loan customer wants to start a dry-cleaning store or invest in a fast-food franchise – boring stuff. That’s the person you bet on. You want the grinder, not the guy who loves this job.
Good ideas have no value because the world already has too many of them. The market rewards execution, not ideas.
VIII) Systems
His biggest problem in life is that he keeps trading his boat for a larger one, and that’s a lot of work. Observers call him lucky. What I see is a man who accurately identified his skill set and chose a system that vastly increases his odds of getting “lucky”. In fact, his system is so solid that it could withstand quite a bit of bad luck without buckling. How much passion does this fellow have for his chosen field? Answer: zero. What he has is a spectacular system, and that beats passion every time.
For him, job seeking was not something one did when necessary. It was an ongoing process. This makes perfect sense if you do the math. Chances are the best job for you won’t become available at precisely the time you declare yourself ready. Your best bet, he explained, was to always be looking for the better deal. The better deal has its own schedule. I believe the way he explained it is that your job is not your job; your job is to find a better job.
One should have a system instead of a goal. The system was to continually look for better options.
In most cases, the people who use systems do better. The systems-driven people have found a way to look at the familiar in new and more useful ways. To put it bluntly, goals are for losers.
Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous presuccess failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the 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. That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.
For our purposes, let’s say a goal is a specific objective that you either achieve or don’t sometime in the future. A system is something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run. If you do something every day, it’s a system. If you’re waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it’s a goal.
The minimum requirement of a system is that a reasonable person expects it to work more often than not.
The smartest system for discerning your best path to success involves trying lots of different things—sampling, if you will. For entrepreneurial ventures it might mean quickly bailing out if things don’t come together quickly.
IV) Patterns
The pattern I noticed was this: Things that will someday work out well start out well. Things that will never work start out bad and stay that way. What you rarely see is a stillborn failure that transmogrifies into a stellar success. Small successes can grow into big ones, but failures rarely grow into successes.
It’s generally true that if no one is excited about your art/product/idea in the beginning, they never will be.
The point is that while we all think we know the odds in life, there’s a good chance you have some blind spots. Finding those blind spots is a big deal.
If you find yourself in a state of continual failure in your personal or business life, you might be blaming it on fate or karma or animal spirits or some other form of magic when the answer is simple math. There’s usually a pattern, but it might be subtle. Don’t stop looking just because you don’t see the pattern in the first seven years.
X) Psychology
Almost any decision you make is in the context of managing what other people will think of you. We’re all in the business of selling some version of ourselves. Psychology is embedded in everything we do.
You’re wasting your time if you try to make someone see reason when reason is not influencing the decision.
That person wants to talk about something interesting and to sound knowledgeable. Your job is to make that easy. Nothing is easier than talking about one’s self. I would go so far as to say that 99 percent of the general public love talking about themselves. When you ask a stranger a personal question, you make that person happy. Your question relieves the stress of awkward silence and gets the conversation moving.
The point of conversation is to make the other person feel good. If you do that one simple thing correctly, the other benefits come along with the deal. For example, a person who likes you is more likely to be persuaded, to recommend you for good opportunities, to share information, and to want a relationship with you.
You’ll need to take your conversation skills up a notch. And that means becoming the master of short but interesting stories.
The single best tip for avoiding shyness involves harnessing the power of acting interested in other people… everyone appreciates it when you show interest. You should also try to figure out which people are thing people and which ones are people people.
– Thing people enjoy hearing about new technology and other clever tools and possessions. They also enjoy discussions of processes and systems, including politics.
– People enjoy only conversations that involve humans doing interesting things.
Crazy people also take more risks and act more confidently than the facts would warrant. That’s a potent combination. Crazy + confident probably kills more people than any other combination of personality traits, but when it works just right, it’s a recipe for extraordinary persuasion. Cults are a good example of insanity being viewed as leadership.
Suppose you’re not insane. Can insanity help you? The answer is yes, but you want to use
a calculated, emotional type of insanity. In any kind of negotiation, the worst thing you can do is act reasonable. Reasonable people generally cave in to irrational people because it seems like the path of least resistance.
Emotions don’t bend to reason. So wrap your arguments in whatever emotional blankets you can think of to influence others. A little bit of irrationality is a powerful thing.
The way fake insanity works in a negotiation is that you assign a greater value to some element of a deal than an objective observer would consider reasonable. (For example, you might demand that a deal be closed before the holidays so you can announce it to your family as a holiday present.) When you bring in an emotional dimension, people know they can’t talk you out of it.
… you see something that impresses you, a decent respect to humanity insists you voice your praise.
Money distorts truth like a hippo in a thong.
XI) Commitments
In our messy, flawed lives, the nearest we can get to truth is consistency. Consistency is the bedrock of the scientific method. Consistency is the best marker of truth that we have, imperfect though it may be.
… going to bed early and getting up at 4:00 A.M. to do my creative side projects… You might not think you’re an early-morning person. I didn’t think I was either. But once you get used to it, you might never want to go back. You can accomplish more by the time other people wake up than most people accomplish all day.
Priorities are the things you need to get right so the things you love can thrive.
XII) Affirmations
So I decided to try something call affirmations… I bought some art supplies, practiced drawing every morning before work, and wrote my affirmation fifteen times a day: “I, Scott Adams, will be a famous cartoonist.”
Affirmations are simply the practice of repeating to yourself what you want to achieve while imagining the outcome you want. You can write it, speak it, or just think it in sentence form. The typical form of an affirmation would be “I, Scott Adams, will become an astronaut.” The details of affirmations probably don’t matter much because the process is about improving your focus, not summoning magic.
My point then and now is that you don’t need to know why something works to take advantage of it.
Another possible reason that affirmations appear to work is that optimists tend to notice opportunities that pessimists miss. A person who diligently writes affirmations day after day is the very definition of an optimist, even if only by actions. Any form of positive thinking, prayer, or the like, would presumably put a person in a more optimistic mind-set.
Studies show that you need not be a natural-born optimist to get the benefits of better perception. You can train yourself to act like an optimist – and writing affirmations is probably good training – so that you get the same benefits as natural optimists when it comes to noticing opportunities.
Affirmations look a lot like focusing on goals. But I would argue that doing affirmations is 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.
I would recommend keeping your objectives broad enough to allow some luck… (it’s probably better to affirm future wealth than to try to win a specific lottery.) I think a deep and consistent focus on what you want is all that is required.
XIII) Other X Factors
Programmable Robot:
– And I advise you to consider this fact a primary tool for programming your moist robot self. The programming interface is your location. To change yourself, part of the solution might involve spending more time with the people who represent the change you seek.
– My experience, as odd as it sounds, is that I can change my food preferences by thinking of my body as a programmable robot as opposed to a fleshy bag full of magic.
Timing:
– Timing is often the biggest component of success. And since timing is often hard to get right unless you are psychic, it makes sense to try different things until you get the timing right by luck.
Networking:
– It’s a cliché that who you know is helpful for success. What is less obvious is that you don’t need to know CEOs and billionaires. Sometimes you just need a friend who knows different things than you do. And you can always find one of those.
– If you live near optimistic winners, those qualities are sure to rub off to some extent.
– Observe outgoing people and steal their little tricks if you can.
Diet & Exercise:
– Appearance matters.
– Changing your food preferences is a fairly straightforward process, and it starts the way all change starts: by looking at things differently. (See “Programmable Robot” above)
– The person who eats right won’t be bothered as much by the little bumps in life’s road, and he or she will have great optimism too. When bad luck comes around, your reaction to it is a combination of how bad the luck is plus how prepared your body is for the stress.
– Food is the fuel that makes exercise possible. When you eat simple carbs for lunch, you find yourself wanting a nap more than you want to spend an hour on the treadmill. If you stuff yourself for dinner, you might cancel your plans to go for a run.
– For a few months, eat as much as you want of anything that is not a simple carb. That frees up your willpower so you can use it to avoid those delicious and convenient simple carbs.
Optimism:
– My optimism is like an old cat that likes to disappear for days, but I always expect it to return.
– Optimists notice more opportunities, have more energy because of their imagined future successes, and take more risks.
Talent:
– One helpful rule of thumb for knowing where you might have a little extra talent is to consider what you were obsessively doing before you were ten years old. There’s a strong connection between what interests you and what you’re good at. People are naturally drawn to the things they feel comfortable doing, and comfort is a marker for talent.
– Another clue to talent involves tolerance for risk.
Summary
1. Focus on your diet first and get that right so you have enough energy to want to exercise. Exercise will further improve your energy, and that in turn will make you more productive, more creative, more positive, more socially desirable and more able to handle life’s little bumps.
2. Once you optimize your personal energy, all you need for success is luck. You can’t directly control luck, but you can move from strategies with bad odds to strategies with good odds. For example, learning multiple skills make your odds of success dramatically higher than learning one skill.
3. If you learn to control your ego, you can pick strategies that scare off the people who fear embarrassment, thus allowing you to complete against a smaller field. And if you stay in the game long enough, luck has a better chance of finding you. Avoid career traps such as pursuing jobs that require you to sell your limited supply of time while preparing you for nothing better.
4. Happiness is the only useful goal in life. Unless you are a sociopath, your own happiness will depend on being good to others. And happiness tends to happen naturally whenever you have good health, resources, and a flexible schedule. Get your health right first, acquire resources and new skills through hard work, and look for an opportunity that give you a flexible schedule someday.
5. Some skills are more important than others, and you should acquire as many of those skills as possible, including public speaking, business writing, a working understanding of the psychology of persuasion, an understanding of basic technology concepts, social skills, proper voice technique, good grammar, and basic accounting. Develop a habit of simplifying. Learn how to make small talk with strangers, and learn how to avoid being an asshole.
6. It might help to think of yourself as moist robots and not skin bags full of magic and mystery. If you control the inputs, you can determine the outcomes, give or take some luck. Eat right, exercise, think positively, learn as much as possible, and good things can happen.
7. Look for patterns in every part of life, from diet to exercise to any component of success. Try to find scientific backing for your observed patterns, and use yourself as a laboratory to see if the patterns hold for you.
8. Most important, understand that goals are for losers and systems are for winners. People who seem to have good luck are often the people who have a system that allows luck to find them.
9. 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.
Scott Adams © 2013
September 20, 2017
State of Being 