PNTV: How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams (#177)

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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today, another great book, how to fail at Almost everything and still win big. Kind of the story of my life by Scott Adams. Scott Adams created Dilbert, which is one of the most popular and distributed comic strips of the last quarter of a century ever. As you'd guess, this is a funny book. It's also brilliant, super witty, super wise, packed with big ideas. I've got a bunch of my favorite ones in this Philosopher's Note and we're going to look at five of them right now. Let's jump straight in. First, Scott talks about all of his failures and, and he's had a ton of them that are pretty funny. It's the first couple chapters of the book and then he says, okay, so how do we create success? And the very first big idea that he looks at is the comparison between systems versus goals. And he says, let me put it bluntly, goals are for losers. He says. He says, look, our human brains are wired to go after goals. No question about that. That's not going to change. But if we focus on goals, we going to struggle. What we want to focus on are the systems, the things that we're going to do day in and day out that are going to help us achieve the goals, such that the goals are a natural byproduct of us crushing it. We talk about this all the time in these episodes and in the notes. Process is primary is one of the ways we've described it, right? Remember that story of the golfer, PGA golfer who was on the 18th green and he was so focused on his systems of executing his next shot as well as he could. He wasn't obsessing about the goal. So focused on his systems. He had like an 18 inch or 36 inch putt to win the tournament and he didn't even know that it was a million dollar putt until his wife ran up on the green. That's a guy who's focused on the systems. Who wins because he's not thinking about the goals. John Wooden, all about the systems. Nick Saban, coach of the University of Alabama football team, all about the process. What are you obsessing about? Are you focused on your systems or are you focused on your goals? Pay attention to that. And Scott also tells us that when you're focused on goals, you're kind of always losing because you're never at your goal. You're always a step away. But if you focus on systems, you can celebrate the little wins throughout your day. And that boosts our personal energy. The energy we have throughout the day, which is a huge part of this book, is how do we optimize that, the energy that we have as we.

Go through everything in our day.

That is the first big idea. The second big idea is moving from wishing to deciding. He's hilarious. He says, look, so many people wish that they were successful or famous or had a ton of money and a castle with servants and private jets. They wish they had all these things. Successful people decide that they're going to have those things. And he says there's a three step process to figure this out. One, know what you want? What do you want? First step, what do you want in your life? Get clear on that. Figure out what price you're going to need to pay. It's not going to come for free. And then pay it. 1, 2, 3. What do you want? Figure out what you want. Decide that you're going to have it. Figure out what price you're going to need to pay. Everything has a price. And then go pay it. You pay it through action. If you're just wishing all the time you're in your head, it never gets out of your head. But when you make a decision, things start happening. You start taking action in the direction of your dream. So we want to move from wishing to deciding. That's the second big idea. Third big idea. This is like the 200 and I think 30 second note that I've done 232 books that I've read and distilled into the six page PDF, the 20 minute MP3, and basically one of these episodes. That's a lot of big ideas. And this is one of my favorite big ideas ever, he says. If you ask me where I'm going to be at 6:20am on a Saturday in 2017, he wrote the book in 2013. I know exactly where I'm going to be, he says. I'm going to be at my desk working on a cartoon that I had started earlier that week. That's just what I do on Saturdays, period. That's his system. There's something extraordinarily powerful about being able to say where you're going to be and what you're going to be doing at a certain time five years from today. That requires just an extraordinary amount of clarity of what's important to you and what the systems are that you're committed to rocking. Not for a month or a year or even a decade. He's been at this for 20 years, full time cartoonist, he's done over almost 9,000 cartoon strips. When he wrote this book, that's amazing. The amount of work and the price that he paid to achieve the success that he's achieved. It's truly staggering. And he references the paradox of choice. We did an episode on the paradox of choice recently. The short story on that is the paradox of choice is that the more choices that you have in your life, the less happy you're going to be. Paradoxically, when you restrict your choices, you actually increase your happiness. So he's restricted his choices and he knows what he's going to be doing. He doesn't wake up in the morning and think, well, I wonder what I'm going to do today. And he jokingly says, look, you know people who spend two hours in the morning to figure out what they're going to spend the next hour on. And he says directly, I'm happier than those people because I don't waste my time doing that. I have systems, I know what I'm going to do and I go out and I execute it. It's amazing. So I ask you, where are you going to be and what are you going to be doing at 6:20am on a Saturday in 2017? I'm going to be working on a philosopher's note and I'm excited to hear what you're going to be doing. Fourth big idea, moist robot. If you don't know what you're going to be doing, it's a good thing to think about moist robots. Scott tells us that that's what we are. We're basically moist robots. We're not some weird sack of skin that's kind of magical. We're just robots that happen to be in a body. Right? Moist is a little weird word for me, but we're robots. And he says if you look at it that way, that we're robots, we're programmable, we can figure out how to tweak our settings such that we feel and act a certain way more consistently. And he talks a lot about attitude and how incredibly important a positive attitude is to succeeding. He says, if you want to program your moist robot, the first things that you should program, the first buttons that you should push are rest. Actually, it says exercise, food and rest. So I'm going to write those down so we can look at them. Exercise, food and rest. Have you heard me talk about that before? These are our core three fundamentals. It's amazing, as he says, you just got to get these right. If you Want to do anything extraordinary? You have to master the basic fundamentals. He doesn't call them fundamentals, but that's what they are. Exercise, food and nutrition and rest. We talk about this all the time. And his number one tip is exercise. Exercising every single day. He's got some great ideas that I talked about in the note on how to create habits. The short story is that you need to make your habits every single day. We talked about this in The Class Habits 101 we recently did as part of my program. You can't have a habit and pick which days of the week you're going to do. It doesn't work and your voice is always going to come in that says, hey, today's the day. We should take a day off and tomorrow too. And then you never do anything. You've got to make your habits daily. And he suggests the number one habit you can build is your exercise habit. He works out at lunch every day. I'm going to borrow this habit from his. He gets up in the morning, he works in the morning. That's his system. It's when he's freshest. I find the exact same thing to be true. I can crank out a note easily in the morning. End of the day, it's incredibly hard to do relative to the morning. And then in the afternoon, it's hard for him to find time to exercise. So he puts it right in the middle of his day. He knows he can count on that every single day. So look at your fundamentals and figure out what you need to optimize. He's obviously got a ton of ideas on how to do that, as we do in the Philosopher's Notes, but those are your core fundamentals that you want to program into your moist robot. You have more control than you think. It's a superpower. He says. When you realize you can control your attitude, when you with a few key changes, that's like having a superpower. That's awesome. Final big idea. Be the first. Be the first. He tells some extraordinarily cool stories about some extraordinarily weird issues that he's had. So he's a cartoonist, right? He spent 16 years working in corporate America, which is where he got so much of his great content for Dilbert. And then he was able to go and become a full time cartoonist. But guess what? Before that, he'd get up at 4 o' clock in the morning to practice his cartooning. He decided he was going to be the best or a famous cartoonist. He was going to succeed as a Cartoonist. What are the odds of that succeeding as a cartoonist? Nearly impossible. But he got up at 4am, had his systems to rock it. End of the day, he'd go commute to work, spend his time in what he called his prison cubicle, come home and work some more on the weekends. Work some more. He did it so much that he tweaked his pinky. It would go nuts. He said anytime he put pressure on it, he started drawing. He couldn't because it'd become too painful. Long story a little shorter. He went to the doctor. The doctor told him it was incurable. He had some weird, bizarre brain thing going on that triggered this pinky. No one had ever been cured of this issue. And his doctor said, you need to find a new job. You're just not going to be able to be a cartoonist. And he said, are you kidding me? No. I'm going to be the first person ever to figure this out. I'm going to be the first person in the world to ever figure out how to solve this little issue. So what are the odds? One in a million? One in ten million? Who cares? I'm going to be the first one. Ridiculous. Then he tells another story about an even weirder thing that happened to his voice. He couldn't talk for years. He walks you through the story. Spoiler alert. He figured that out. No one, actually, that's not true. Other people had been cured, but none of his doctors figure out what was going on. And he had the audacity to say, I'm going to figure this out. We need to realize that sometimes it's not that the odds are so bad. Scott tells us, it's that we're so bad at believing the odds, we need to be willing to be the first. I remember a story of my grandfather once. I came home and 20 years old at UCLA. I was just coming back from a leadership retreat at Arthur Andersen back in the day. And I was a blue collar kid, first generation college student. And it was pretty exciting. And I was telling my grandfather, wow, only one. And I don't know how many hundreds of people make it to partner. That was what I thought I wanted to do at that time. And I was a little, you know, like, wow, that's gonna be really hard to do. And he said, well, how many of you are there? That sounds like great odds. There's only one. You only need one spot.

There's only one.

You go for it. So we need to realize that we can do a lot more than we think. Be the first one. You can do that. When you move from wishing to deciding, you create systems rather than obsessing about the goals and you're willing to pay the price. Day in and day out, you know where you're going to be long term. You program your robot well and you go out and you crush it. Such a good book. Again, again. If you like Dilbert, you'll love the book. Even if you don't know or like Dilbert. He's hilarious, extraordinary creator, lots of wit and wisdom in it. And I hope you enjoyed this little episode. And what was the big idea that resonated the most?

What jumped out?

What landed? How do you make that a bigger part of your life? Go out and do it. Have another awesome day and I look.

Forward to sharing more with you soon.

See ya.

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