This book was quite different from the others I usually read and comment on. I liked it because it contained the author’s own personal experiences and these experiences were things that I am interested in. Well, at least the first half of the book did (and I would recommend reading this book for this part). The second half felt – let’s just call it – less personal, more library-like.
The topic of failing and still finding ways to succeed (and find fulfillment and happiness) is a major premise in YCISL. Scott Adams in “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life” (2013) tells his personal story about the various paths he has taken, and analyzed what has succeeded and what has failed. He relates personal conclusions from his first-hand experience which I found substantive in life lessons. I would assume his messages are aimed at an adult audience but I think with a little reflection, they would become valuable messages for youth.
Here is a list of notes from my reading (selected 17 points from 115 total highlights – just too easy in the Kindle format):
1. “The most important metric to track is your personal energy.”
2. “It seemed as if other people were benefiting greatly from the wisdom of their friends and families.”
3. “Realistically, most people have poor filters for sorting truth from fiction, and there’s no objective way to know if you’re particularly good at it or not.”
4. “Failure always brings something valuable with it.”
5. “My hypothesis is that passionate people are more likely to take big risks in the pursuit of unlikely goals, and so you would expect to see more failures and more huge successes among the passionate.”
6. “Success causes passion more than passion causes success.”
7. “Good ideas have no value because the world already has too many of them. The market rewards execution, not ideas.”
8. “This was about the time I started to understand that timing is often the biggest component of success.”
9. “The systems-driven people have found a way to look at the familiar in new and more useful ways.”
10. “I know from experience that trying to be creative in the mid-afternoon is a waste of time.”
11. “One helpful rule of thumb for knowing where you might have a little extra talent is to consider what you were obsessively doing before you were ten years old. There’s a strong connection between what interests you and what you’re good at.”
12.”Small successes can grow into big ones, but failures rarely grow into successes.”
13. “Several years ago I gave a talk to a fifth-grade class. I started by asking them to finish my sentence. The sentence was ‘If you play a slot machine long enough, eventually you will…’ The class yelled out in unison ‘WIN!'”
14. “Positivity is far more than a mental preference. It changes your brain, literally, and it changes the people around you. It’s the nearest thing we have to magic.”
15. “Try to get in the habit of asking yourself how you can turn your interesting experiences into story form.”
16. “Another common trick is to hum the first part of the ‘Happy Birthday’ song and then speak in your normal voice right after.”
17. “The only reasonable goal in life is maximizing your total lifetime experience of something called happiness.”
