reading

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big

• I pursued a conscious strategy of managing my opportunities in a way that would make it easier for luck to find me
• if you want success, figure out the price, then pay it
• Success is the product of picking a good system and following it until luck finds you
• The Success Formula: every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success
• small successes can grow into big ones, but failures rarely growing to successes
• few things are as destructive and limiting as a worldview that assumes people are mostly rational
• smile, ask questions, avoid complaining and sad topics, and have some entertaining stories ready to go
• if you can deliver an image of decisiveness, no matter how disingenuous, others will see it as leadership
• the only reasonable goal in life is maximizing your total lifetime experience of happiness
• failing forward - any time you learn something useful, you come out ahead
• failure always brings something valuable with it; don’t let it leave until I extract that value

• happiness has more to do with where you are heading than where you are

• A goal is a specific objective that you either achieve or don’t sometime in the future. A system is something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run. If you do something every day, its a system. If you’re waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it’s a goal. If you achieve your goal, you celebrate and feel terrific, but only until you realize you just lost the thing that gave you purpose and direction. Your options are to feel empty and useless, perhaps enjoying the spoils of your success until they bore you, or set new goals and reenter the cycle of permanent presuccess failure.

• All I’m suggesting is that thinking of goals and systems as very different concepts has power. Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous presuccess failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good everytime they apply their system. That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.