How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

by Adams, Scott

  First Attempt at Cartooning: My first attempt at professional cartooning involved sending some single-panel comics to the two magazines that paid the most: Playboy and the New Yorker. The comics were dreadful. Both magazines wisely rejected them.

  Ninja Closet: I had an idea for a Web site that would make it easier to know what gifts to buy for kids, especially kids that are not your own. Gift buying can be a huge hassle if your kid is getting invited to a birthday party every two weeks. Does little Timmy already have a particular toy? Does he want one? Who else is thinking of buying him the same toy? Who wants to pitch in for a more expensive gift? The current process involves too much guesswork and too many e-mails and phone calls.

  I decided to hire some inexpensive programmers in India to build a Web-based gift registry (essentially) for kids. I called it Ninja Closet because the metaphor was that friends and family could peek into your secret closet of wishes but also see what stuff you already owned, negotiate for shared gift buying, and more. I figured kids would love seeing what other kids owned too. No one would be able to see a kid’s closet unless a parent granted permission.

  I still think it was a great idea, but managing programmers in India turned out to be impractical for me because of time differences, language issues, and my own time limitations. After too much time and expense on this side project, I let it go.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  My Absolute Favorite Spectacular Failure

  Most failures involve bad luck, ignorance, and sometimes ordinary stupidity. One day in college I managed to combine all three into one experience. It was breathtaking.

  In the winter of my senior year I started to think I might have the right stuff to become a good accountant and perhaps someday a CPA. I figured that career path would be a good way to learn the innards of business from the numbers side. I would need that sort of experience no matter what kind of business I someday started on my own. All I needed was an entry-level position with one of the so-called Big Eight (at the time) accounting firms. I managed to line up an interview in Syracuse, New York, a two-hour drive from campus.

  The day of the interview featured a typical upstate New York half blizzard with ass-freezing temperatures. I decided I didn’t need a jacket for the trip because I was only going from building to car and back. This was only one of the remarkably stupid decisions I made that day.

  My second mistake was not realizing I should wear a suit and tie to an interview with an accounting firm. I figured they knew I was in college, since it said so on my résumé, so why not dress like a college student? Yes, I was that ignorant. Remember, I didn’t even know anyone who worked in a traditional white-collar environment. Nor did I own a suit or a tie.

  My interviewer took one look at me and remarked that apparently I didn’t know why I was there. He escorted me to the door and suggested that the next time I go to an interview perhaps I should wear a suit. I was devastated. But my evening was far from over. So far I had only exercised my ignorance and my stupidity. The bad luck part of the day was ahead.

  On the way home I took a newly constructed highway through a sparsely populated valley in the Catskill Mountains. My engine conked out and I managed to coast the car into a snowbank on the side of the road. There were no other cars on the road in either direction. It was after dark and the already-frosty temperature was dropping fast. I saw no signs of civilization for miles. The temperature was about zero degrees Fahrenheit. It wasn’t a good day to have left my jacket at home. In the days before cell phones, this was the worst-case scenario.

  I knew I couldn’t stay in the car for long. The temperature inside started dropping the moment the engine died. I knew I couldn’t run back in the direction from which I had come because it had been miles since I’d seen a house. I wouldn’t make it that far. My only hope was to run forward and hope there were homes around a bend or over a hill. And so I started running.

  In less than a minute the frozen air sucked the warmth from my body and distributed it into the atmosphere. My feet were like blocks of ice clunking on the frozen pavement. My breath formed cumulus clouds around my head. I lost most of the feeling in my hands. My ankles hardened. I figured I was about thirty minutes from falling into a frozen death sleep in the nearest snowbank. And now my legs were failing. I couldn’t go much farther, and when I stopped running, I knew the cold would finish me off.

  As I struggled to stay upright and keep moving, I made myself a promise: If I lived, I would trade my piece-of-shit car for a one-way plane ticket to California and never see another f@$#!#& snowflake for the rest of my life.

  Headlights appeared on the horizon. I stood in the middle of the road and signaled, like the frozen idiot I was, for the car to stop. A traveling shoe salesman in a beat-up station wagon saved my life. He drove me all the way back to campus.

  A few months later, I kept my promise to myself. I traded my car to my sister for a one-way plane ticket to the vibrant economy and easy climate of northern California. It was the smartest decision I ever made. The experience of nearly dying in the frozen tundra of upstate New York inspired me to move to California. Thank you, failure. I no longer fear death when I go outdoors.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Goals Versus Systems

  At the age of twenty-one, college diploma in hand, I boarded an airplane for the first time in my life, destination California. I knew one thing about success: It wouldn’t be easy to find in Windham, New York, population two thousand. A few years earlier, my older and more adventurous brother Dave had driven his Volkswagen beetle cross-country to Los Angeles, looking for warmer weather and attractive women. He slept in his car and camped along the way. My plan was to fly to Los Angeles, sleep on his crumb-laden couch until I could find a job in banking, and make my home in the Golden State.

  A few days before my flight to California I traded my rusted-out Datsun 510 to my sister for a one-way ticket to California. I proudly donned the cheap three-piece suit that my parents had given me as a college graduation present—my first real suit. At the time, I assumed everyone dressed in business or formal attire to fly. I grew up in a small town and I didn’t know many people who had flown in a commercial aircraft. My father had taken some flights twenty-some years earlier, but he didn’t volunteer much information about them, or anything else for that matter. He was a man of few words. I had only a few relatives nearby and none of them had ever flown. I was mostly guessing how the process worked, and I didn’t want to take the chance of getting kicked off the flight for being poorly dressed. That’s exactly the sort of mistake I make.

  I also didn’t know how I would go about getting my suit ironed if it got wrinkled in my luggage. I figured I would be going on job interviews as soon as I reached California and I needed my one and only suit to look relatively less hoboish. It just made sense to wear it on the flight.

  I was seated next to a businessman who was probably in his early sixties. I suppose I looked like an odd duck with my serious demeanor, bad haircut, and cheap suit, clearly out of my element. He asked what my story was and I filled him in. I asked what he did for a living and he told me he was CEO of a company that made screws. Then he offered me some career advice. He said that every time he got a new job, he immediately started looking for a better one. 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.

  This was my first exposure to the idea that one should have a system instead of a goal. The system was to continually look for better options. And it worked for this businessman, as he had job-hopped from company to company, gaining experience along the way, until he became a CEO. Had he approached his career with a specific goal in mind, or p
erhaps specific job objectives (e.g., his boss’s job), it would have severely limited his options. But for him, the entire world was his next potential job. The new job simply had to be better than the last one and allow him to learn something useful for the next hop.

  Did the businessman owe his current employer loyalty? Not in his view. The businessman didn’t invent capitalism, and he didn’t create its rules. He simply played within the rules. His employers wouldn’t have hesitated to fire him at the drop of a hat for any reason that fit their business needs. He simply followed their example.

  The second thing I learned on that flight—or confirmed, really—is that appearance matters. By the end of the flight, the CEO had handed me his card and almost guaranteed me a job at his company if I wanted it. Had I boarded the flight wearing my ratty jeans, threadbare T-shirt, and worn-out sneakers, things would have gone differently.

  Throughout my career I’ve had my antennae up, looking for examples of people who use systems as opposed to goals. In most cases, as far as I can tell, 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. That’s literally true most of the time. For example, if your goal is to lose ten pounds, you will spend every moment until you reach the goal—if you reach it at all—feeling as if you were short of your goal. In other words, goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary. That feeling wears on you. In time, it becomes heavy and uncomfortable. It might even drive you out of the game.

  If you achieve your goal, you celebrate and feel terrific, but only until you realize you just lost the thing that gave you purpose and direction. Your options are to feel empty and useless, perhaps enjoying the spoils of your success until they bore you, or set new goals and reenter the cycle of permanent presuccess failure.

  The systems-versus-goals point of view is burdened by semantics, of course. You might say every system has a goal, however vague. And that would be true to some extent. And you could say that everyone who pursues a goal has some sort of system to get there, whether it is expressed or not. You could word-glue goals and systems together if you chose. All I’m suggesting is that thinking of goals and systems as very different concepts has power. 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.

  The system-versus-goals model can be applied to most human endeavors. In the world of dieting, losing twenty pounds is a goal, but eating right is a system. In the exercise realm, running a marathon in under four hours is a goal, but exercising daily is a system. In business, making a million dollars is a goal, but being a serial entrepreneur is a system.

  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.

  Language is messy, and I know some of you are thinking that exercising every day sounds like a goal. The common definition of goals would certainly allow that interpretation. For our purposes, let’s agree that goals are a reach-it-and-be-done situation, whereas a system is something you do on a regular basis with a reasonable expectation that doing so will get you to a better place in your life. Systems have no deadlines, and on any given day you probably can’t tell if they’re moving you in the right direction.

  My proposition is that if you study people who succeed, you will see that most of them follow systems, not goals. When goal-oriented people succeed in big ways, it makes news, and it makes an interesting story. That gives you a distorted view of how often goal-driven people succeed. When you apply your own truth filter to the idea that systems are better than goals, consider only the people you know personally. If you know some extra successful people, ask some probing questions about how they got where they did. I think you’ll find a system at the bottom of it all, and usually some extraordinary luck. (Later in this book I’ll tell you how to improve your odds of getting lucky.)

  Consider Olympic athletes. When one Olympian wins a gold medal, or multiple gold medals, it’s a headline story. But for every medalist there are thousands who had the goal of being on that podium and failed. Those people had goals and not systems. I don’t consider daily practices and professional coaching a system because everyone knows in advance that the odds of any specific individual winning a medal through those activities are miniscule. The minimum requirement of a system is that a reasonable person expects it to work more often than not. Buying lottery tickets is not a system no matter how regularly you do it.

  On the system side, consider Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook. It’s apparent that his system for success involved studying hard, getting extraordinary grades, going to a top college—in his case Harvard—and developing a skill set with technology that virtually guaranteed riches in today’s world. As it turns out, his riches came quickly through the explosive growth of Facebook. But had that not worked out, he would likely be a millionaire through some other start-up or just by being a highly paid technical genius for an existing corporation. Zuckerberg’s system (or what I infer was his system) was almost guaranteed to work, but no one could have imagined at the time how well.

  Warren Buffett’s system for investing involves buying undervalued companies and holding them forever, or at least until something major changes. That system (which I have grossly oversimplified) has been a winner for decades. Compare that with individual investors who buy a stock because they expect it to go up 20 percent in the coming year; that’s a goal, not a system. And not surprisingly, individual investors generally experience worse returns than the market average.

  I have a friend who is a gifted salesman. He could have sold anything, from houses to toasters. The field he chose (which I won’t reveal because he wouldn’t appreciate the sudden flood of competition) allows him to sell a service that almost always auto-renews. In other words, he can sell his service once and enjoy ongoing commissions until the customer dies or goes out of business. 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 increased 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.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  My System

  When I was six years old, I got hooked on the comic strip Peanuts. The drawings fascinated me. They were so simple and yet so perfect in an indescribable way. As soon as I learned to read, I devoured every Peanuts book I could get my hands on. I declared to my parents that one day I would be a famous cartoonist like Charles Schulz. That was my goal, clear as can be. I spent countless hours with crayons, pencils, markers, and paper. I practiced and practiced. But I never became good. I wasn’t even the best artist in my class of forty kids. I didn’t give up, though.

  At the age of eleven I applied to the Famous Artists School Course for Talented Young People. It was a correspondence course. This was perfect for me because I wouldn’t need to leave home, which would have been problematic. I filled out the application, drew the assignments they requested, and answered the multiple-choice questions about design. Sadly, I was rejected by the Famous Artists School for Young People because their cutoff age wa
s twelve. I was too young. I was crushed.

  My mother, in the style of the times, told me I could do anything I set my sights on. She said I could be the president, an astronaut, or the next Charles Schulz. I believed her because at that point in my life I hadn’t yet noticed the pattern of her deceptions. Her lies included Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and something about a whale eating a guy named Jonah.

  In time I started to understand something called the odds. Some things were, by their very nature, likely, and some were not. I learned by observation that people who pursued extraordinarily unlikely goals were overly optimistic at best, delusional at worst, and just plain stupid most of the time. The smart people in my little Republican-dominated town made practical plans and stuck to them. Some joined the Marines to get experience and education. Some went into the family business. Some married and became homemakers and moms. A few superstars studied hard and pursued jobs in medicine and the law. At the time, if you had asked me to name twenty different types of jobs an adult could have, I would have tapped out after fifteen. The jobs I had heard of were the ones I saw around me in my little town plus whatever I saw on television. And by television I mean the one channel we received (via rabbit ears) that had both a picture and sound.

  My father worked at the local post office and painted houses at night when the weather allowed. His advice to my brother and me was to pursue a career in the postal profession. The United States Postal Service was steady work, it was mostly indoors, and it had excellent benefits. Sometimes when my mother was busy, my siblings and I would hang out at the post office with my dad. We were fascinated by the loaded handgun that was always within easy reach. Apparently the government expected its employees to resist armed robberies by reaching for their pieces and blazing away. Those were different times.