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

by Adams, Scott

  The next ring—and your second-biggest priority—is economics. That includes your job, your investments, and even your house. You might wince at the fact that I put economics ahead of your family, your friends, and the rest of the world, but there’s a reason. If you don’t get your personal financial engine working right, you place a burden on everyone from your family to the country.

  Once you are both healthy and financially sound, it’s time for the third ring: family, friends, and lovers. Good health and sufficient money are necessary for a base level of happiness, but you need to be right with your family, friends, and romantic partners to truly enjoy life.

  The next rings are your local community, your country, and the world, in that order. Don’t bother trying to fix the world until you get the inner circles of your priorities under control.

  The problem, of course, with my neat little model of priorities is that life is never that simple. You can’t tell your boss that your assignment will be late because you want to go for a long, healthy walk. All of your priorities overlap and conflict. What you need is a simple rule for keeping your priorities on track while handling all of the inevitable exceptions. One simple way to keep your priorities straight is by judging how each of your options will influence your personal energy. It’s not a foolproof gauge, but if you know a particular path will make you feel more stressed, unhealthy, and drained, it’s probably the wrong choice. Right choices can be challenging, but they usually charge you up. When you’re on the right path, it feels right, literally.

  For example, if your boss asks you to work the weekend to finish something worthwhile and challenging, you might be willing to give up a little of your personal life and health. Meaningful work can be energizing. And if things work out, perhaps you will be promoted because of your efforts. That’s a trade-off that might charge you up in both the short run and the long run.

  On the other hand, if your boss routinely asks you to work overtime for no good reason other than to claw through piles of brain-deadening administrative work, you probably need to look for a new job.

  In both examples your boss is asking for extra work at the cost of your higher priorities, but only one of those situations increases your personal energy.

  The risk with using energy as your guide is that there are plenty of bad choices that also get you energized in the short run. But realistically, we all know, for example, that shoving cocaine up our noses isn’t a good long-term strategy. The dumb choices are generally quite obvious.

  When I speak of priorities I don’t mean that in terms of what you love the most. You can love your family more than you love your job and still spend all day working so your family has food and opportunities. Priorities are the things you need to get right so the things you love can thrive.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Managing Your Attitude

  Your brain is wired to continuously analyze your environment, your thoughts, and your health and to use that information to generate a sensation you call your attitude. You know from experience that you do better work, and you more enjoy life, when your attitude is good. If you could control your attitude directly, as opposed to letting the environment dictate how you feel on any given day, it would be like a minor superpower. It turns out you have that superpower. You can control your attitude by manipulating your thoughts, your body, and your environment.

  Your attitude affects everything you do in your quest for success and happiness. A positive attitude is an important tool. It’s important to get it right. The best way to manage your attitude is by understanding your basic nature as a moist robot that can be programmed for happiness if you understand the user interface. For starters, pay attention to the attitudes of people who have recently exercised. You’ll discover they are almost always happy and upbeat. Now also look at the attitudes of people who have recently eaten versus the people who are hungry. You’ll see a big difference. Tired people are grumpy, rested people are less so. 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. If your life doesn’t provide you with plenty of happy thoughts to draw upon, try daydreaming of wonderful things in your future. Don’t worry that your daydreams are unlikely to come true. The power of daydreaming is similar to the power of well-made movies that can make you cry or make you laugh. Your body and your mind will respond automatically to whatever images you spend the most time pondering. If you imagine winning a Nobel Prize, buying your own private island, or playing in the NBA, don’t worry that those things are unlikely. Putting yourself in that imagination-fueled frame of mind will pep you up. Imagination is the interface to your attitude. You can literally imagine yourself to higher levels of energy.

  This is the same reasoning for why you should avoid exposure to too much news of the depressing type and why it’s a good idea to avoid music, books, and movies that are downers. Show me someone who you think is always in a good mood and I’ll show you a person who (probably) avoids overexposure to sad forms of entertainment. The easiest way to manage your attitude is to consume as much feel-good entertainment as you can.

  Realistically, the last advice you want to hear when you are in a terrible mood is “Think of something happy.” If you’re experiencing genuine misfortune, you probably just need time and distance to recover. The daydreaming strategy is more of an everyday practice. It won’t get you out of a deep slump. For the truly bad moods, exercise, nutrition, sleep, and time are the smart buttons to push. Once you get back to your baseline level of happiness, you’ll be in a better position to get the benefits of daydreaming.

  A powerful variation on the daydreaming method involves working on projects that have a real chance of changing the world, helping humanity, and/or making a billion dollars. I try to have one or more change-the-world projects going at all times.

  As I write this I’m working on an Internet start-up called Calendar-Tree (www.calendartree.com) that has the potential to save time for tens of millions of people across the world. It’s a simple product that lets you create a list of upcoming events and send a link to anyone who wants to populate their personal calendars with your information with a few keystrokes. It won’t change the world the way the Gates Foundation will, but if things go well, you’ll never want to send out schedules the old, clunky way again. By analogy, do you remember sending out party invitations before Evite made it easy? I’m energized by the thought of making the world more efficient.

  Also, as I write this paragraph, I’m shopping for money partners to launch an idea that has the potential to transform the entire economy of the world, assuming it works as planned. Will it succeed? Probably not. But the idea of it excites me and raises my energy today. That’s my system.

  By the time you read this book, a lot will have transpired with both of those start-up efforts. Any new business is risky. But for the past several months my attitude and energy have been sky-high because of the potential that both projects have for making the world a better place. My imagined future acts as a cue to keep my mood elevated today.

  You might be thinking this is all well and good for famous authors and cartoonists, but ordinary people don’t have many chances to change the world. I disagree. Ideas change the world routinely, and most of those ideas originate from ordinary people. You might have a patent idea, a product idea, or a process idea that could change the world. Before my cartoon career, I had plenty of big ideas that didn’t work out. When one idea failed, I usually had two more to take its place. And every one of my ideas had real-world potential, even if the odds were bad.

  Don’t worry if your idea is a long shot. That’s not what matters right now. Today you want to daydream of your idea being a huge success so you can enjoy the feeling. Let your
ideas for the future fuel your energy today. No matter what you want to do in life, higher energy will help you get there.

  Another benefit of having a big, world-changing project is that you almost always end up learning something valuable in the process of failing. And fail you will, most of the time, so long as you are dreaming big. But remember, goals are for losers anyway. It’s smarter to see your big-idea projects as part of a system to improve your energy, contacts, and skills. From that viewpoint, if you have a big, interesting project in the works, you’re a winner every time you wake up.

  When I consider taking on a new big project, I first ask myself who I know who would be helpful and who might want to partner, invest, or just give advice. In my universe of contacts, which is fairly huge at this point in my career, I would say I met half of those folks in the process of failing at one thing or another. And if I ask myself what skills and knowledge I need for my next big idea, invariably that means drawing on knowledge I gained while circling the drain in some doomed project of yore.

  Let’s say you wake up tomorrow full of energy for your exciting new project. Over the course of the day you learn a few things in the process of doing your research, and you meet some new people along the way. If you accomplish that and nothing more, you’re succeeding, no matter what happens with your project.

  The Power of Smiling

  Smiling makes you feel better even if your smile is fake. This is the clearest example of how your brain has a user interface. When you’re in a bad mood, the physical act of forcing a smile may trigger the feel-good chemistry in your brain that is associated with happiness.1

  The smiling-makes-you-happy phenomenon is part of the larger and highly useful phenomenon of faking it until you make it. You’ll see this two-way causation in a wide variety of human activities. Later I’ll tell you that putting on exercise clothes will make you feel like working out. I’ve also discovered that acting confident makes you feel more confident. Feeling energetic makes you want to play a sport, but playing a sport will also make you feel energetic. Loving someone makes you want to have sex, but having sex also releases the bonding chemicals that make you feel love. High testosterone can help you win a competition, but winning a competition can also sometimes raise your testosterone.2 Being tired makes you want to lie down, but lying down when you are rested can put you in the mood for a nap. Feeling hungry can make you want to eat simple carbs, but eating simple carbs can make you feel 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.

  The next 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 warped soon 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 to accommodate her. The interesting thing is that I’m not sure she understands that it’s my choice whether I go play with her or not. Her mental control of me works so reliably that I’m certain she thinks all that matters is how hard she stares at me and how vividly she imagines† herself chasing a tennis ball.

  To me, the fascinating thing about Snickers’s flawed view of the world is that it works perfectly. She has a system for getting what she wants, and it seems to work, albeit for different reasons than she imagines. The deeper reality is that I’ve learned that her stares mean it’s time for some tennis-ball fun. My experience with Snickers begs a bigger question: Are humans so different from dogs in terms of having totally flawed assumptions about reality, and do our flawed assumptions work for reasons we don’t understand?

  Athletes are known to stop shaving for the duration of a tournament or to wear socks they deem lucky. These superstitions probably help in some small way to bolster their confidence, which in turn can influence success. It’s irrelevant that lucky socks aren’t a real thing. The socks can still improve an athlete’s performance, even if the wearer has a flawed idea of why.

  Our brains have a limited capacity to know the true nature of reality. Most times our misconceptions about reality are benign and sometimes, even helpful. Other times, not so much.

  Physicists tell us that reality seems to depend on the observer. If you and I were to move through an empty and infinitely large universe at the same speed and in the same direction, we would feel as if we weren’t moving at all. And arguably, that would be the case, since movement only makes sense in relation to other objects. If you and I strap identical rockets to our backs in this otherwise empty universe, face the same direction
and fire them up, it would be a matter of debate whether we were moving. You’d feel the rocket press into your back, but you wouldn’t know if that was the beginning of forward momentum or just a pressure on your back that relaxed after some time. (Okay, okay, a pressure on your body in space will always cause movement, and you’re smart enough to know that. But let’s assume for this example that you didn’t pay attention in science class.)

  Reality outside the quantum world of particles and waves might be fixed and objective, at least according to most scientists. But how we think of our reality is clearly subject to regular changes. We’ve all had the experience of meeting someone for the first time and having a wildly inaccurate first impression, which in turn drives the way we act. Later, once you know more about the person, you start behaving differently. The external reality doesn’t change, but your point of view does. In many cases, it’s your point of view that influences your behavior, not the universe. And you can control your point of view even when you can’t change the underlying reality.

  For over a decade I’ve been semifamous for creating Dilbert, but I’m still generally unrecognized in public. When I meet people for the first time without the benefit of a full introduction, I’m treated like any other stranger. But 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. If I had to bet my life, I’d say humans are more like my dog trying to use psychic powers on me to play fetch than we are like enlightened creatures that understand their environment at a deep level. Every generation before us believed, like Snickers, that it had things figured out. We now know that every generation before us was wrong about a lot of it. Is it likely that you were born at the tipping point of history, in which humans know enough about reality to say we understand it? This is another case where humility is your friend. 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 ways of looking at the world.