How to fail at almost everything and still win big

Many people are familiar with Scott Adams' Dilbert cartoons. His nonfiction works cover business topics with the same humor as his cartoons. I listened to his audiobook, How to Succeed at almost Everything and Still Win Big. He tells anecdotes from his life to highlight his ideas. His overarching theme is to focus on systems not goals. Systems include mindsets and processes rather than a focus on the big picture.

The overall system for achieving success is to focus on diet first and then exercise because this will provide you with the energy to be creative, productive, positive, socially desirable and able to handle life's little bumps. He describes how focusing on positive health behaviors helps put you in a position to move forward in other areas. Part of his idea of focusing on health issues is to know yourself and set your life up to maximize your personal self.

He believes in luck as the determining factor in life, but sees personal choices as increasing or decreasing the  odds of luck finding you. In order to improve your odds he suggests learning multiple skills, controlling your ego, developing persistence. and avoiding dead end jobs. I find his focus on learning skills to be fundamental. He thinks of learning one skill doubles the odds of success. We do not need to become experts with our skills, but proficient with them. He identifies key skills as: public speaking, business writing, understanding the psychology of persuasion and technical concepts, social skills, good grammar and accounting. Interestingly, while most people would agree on the importance of these skills, few of them are taught in school. Public speaking are a component of the Common Core skills, but since it is not tested, it is rarely focused on and even more rarely explicitly taught. Some English teachers might think they teach business writing, but do they teach how to composes a succinct email, a formal business letter, or a formal proposal? Some would say but we teach powerpoint- the presentation skill of business, but in business, the focus is on content, error-free slides not pretty slides, on brevity not sentences,  on truly understanding your information not including every detail. Those same English teachers would also argue that persuasion is taught- they teach a persuasive essay. We teach a small number of technical concepts- coding hour is in place because it is rare. We might teach word processing, but the aesthetic details are less important than being error free. Social skills are poorly taught if at all. We have limited our grammar instruction to be mostly worksheets (useless) or poorly sequenced, in context grammar. Accounting is understood by few outside of business teachers. We rarely teach kids about interest rates and the practical implementation of them. We graduate students who cannot balance a checkbook much less read a balance sheet. Perhaps these are some areas to think about when we look at preparing students for college and career.

This book is entertaining and informative. I would recommend it for people hoping to maximize their potential.

He sees the ultimate goal as happiness. For most people this means being good to others. We achieve happiness by having good health, having resources and skills, and having a flexible schedule. I think for most people these three things would bring them happiness.