Startling percentage of the adult population literally has no smart friends to help them in their quest for success and happiness. 1

What I learned:

  • Success causes passion more than passion causes success.
  • Manage your energy instead of being passion driven.
  • Systems over goals.
  • Adopt a practical illusion (Author chose to imagine that the book would do well because that illusion was highly motivating. It increased his energy.)

Guidance:

The most important form of selfishness involves spending time on your fitness, eating right, pursuing your career, and still spending quality time with your family and friends. Exercise, food, and sleep should be your first buttons to push if you’re trying to elevate your attitude and raise your energy. taking care of your own health is job one. your second-biggest priority—is economics. That includes your job, your investments, and even your house. 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. next rings are your local community, your country, and the world, in that order.

The best way to increase your odds of success—in a way that might look like luck to others—is to systematically become good, but not amazing, at the types of skills that work well together and are highly useful for just about any job.

The smartest system for discerning your best path to success involves trying lots of different things—sampling, if you will. For entrepreneurial ventures it might mean quickly bailing out if things don’t come together quickly.

There’s one more pattern I see in successful people: They treat success as a learnable skill. That means they figure out what they need and they go and get it. failure is your friend. It is the raw material of success. Invite it in. Learn from it. And don’t let it leave until you pick its pocket.

Author states: Affirmations only worked when I had a 100 percent unambiguous desire for success.

Happiness formula: Eat right. Exercise. Get enough sleep. Imagine an incredible future (even if you don’t believe it). Work toward a flexible schedule. Do things you can steadily improve at. Help others (if you’ve already helped yourself). Reduce daily decisions to routine. 1

  1. How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story fo My Life, by Scott Adams. ↩︎ ↩︎