How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big Book Summary

Book Summary

15 min

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Brief Summary

Failure is an important part of success. Failing can teach us where we need to focus our efforts, what doesn’t work, and can show us where we need to change. In fact, the writer of How to Fail at Almost Anything and Still Win Big failed in multiple ways until he made it big with his comic, Dilbert. Tired of failing to meet your own goals? Read on to learn why setting goals is actually a waste of time, and how you can better get the results you want. Learn why it's important to make your career about you, and not about meeting other people’s expectations. Are delusions so bad? Read on to learn why the author doesn’t think so, and about how they can be an element of success.

About the Author

Scott Adams is the creator of the Dilbert comic strip. He is the author of several nonfiction works of satire, commentary, and business. He graduated from Hartwick College in 1979. He earned an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley in 1986. He created Dilbert during the 1980s. He worked at Pacific Bell between 1986 and 1995. The characters he encountered there became the inspiration to many of his Dilbert characters. He created Dilbert while working at Pacific Bell. He woke up at 4 am to work on the cartoon. Eventually, he became a full-time cartoonist. n 1996, he published The Dilbert Principle, his first business book. In 1998, Dilbert began as a TV series, which was canceled in 2000. He is the CEO of Scott Adams Foods, Inc, makers of the Dilberito and Protein Chef.

Topics

Self Development Biography & Memoir

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big Book Summary Preview

Failure is a scary concept, and many people will do just about anything to avoid it. This is a bummer because many people don’t realize is that failure is an important part of success. Failing can teach us where we need to focus our efforts, what doesn’t work, and can show us where we need to change. If you’ve failed big, you’re in good company. Many, many people have also failed on their path to become insanely successful. In fact, the writer of How to Fail at Almost Anything and Still Win Big failed in multiple ways: he started a business that went under, got fired from a job, and failed to create a patent. Though he failed repeatedly, he refused to give up, and eventually experienced incredible success with his creation of the comic Dilbert. You can also move past failures and find meaningful success. Read on to learn how to avoid the pitfalls of failure, why humans are really just “soft robots”, and how to decide on a career path that really suits you.

Don’t set goals

Often when we want to achieve something, or the first step is to set a goal. What if you approached achievement differently? On a flight, the author began talking to a man he was seated next to. The man told him he had created a system where he just kept moving up in jobs: getting whatever new job became available and forgetting the old one. He didn’t have a goal. He had a system. And pretty soon, he was a CEO.

Setting goals is simple enough. The process of achieving them can be dismal. Especially if you don’t reach your goal. Let's say you want to run a mile in 6 minutes by the end of January, you go for a run at the end of January and you get just a little past 6 minutes. You’ll feel like a failure, and (worst of all) you won’t get to celebrate all of your hard work. Instead, you can create a system where you run every day. The reward will be constant, and there’s no goal to make you feel as though you failed. The best part? Your system can lead to the same results, with none of the bad feelings.

Goals can also be problematic because you don’t get to hit your target immediately, which means that there will be a lot of days of work with no results - making motivation difficult to maintain. Having a system means you’ll get to reap the reward every day that you do the behavior that’s required. The system will also create a habit: and once a habit is formed, it can be hard to break. Good habits can lead to great changes. Setting your sights on only one particular goal can also be limiting. If the author had only had one goal, he would have felt like such a failure if his goal had been to get a patent or keep a job. Feeling like a failure...