Scott Adams Quotes
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
Honesty is like food. Both are necessary, but too much of either creates discomfort.
Conversation is more than the sum of the words. It is also a way of signaling the importance of another person by showing your willingness to give that person your rarest resource: time.
As a general rule, wherever you find a large group of people who are baffled by complexity, you will find a smaller group of people making a good living screwing them.
If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions?
If there's a loophole, someone's going to drive a truck through it, and the people in the truck will get paid better than the people under it.
This is the source.
If you're taking risks, and you probably should, you can find yourself failing 90% of the time. The trick is to get paid while you're doing the failing and to use the experience to gain skills that will be useful later.
You can't manage luck directly, but you can manage your career in a way that makes it easier for luck to find you. To succeed, first you must do something. And if that doesn't work, which can be 90% of the time, do something else. Luck finds the doers.
Success doesn't come from bland acceptance by the entire world. It comes from the ability to inspire the few.
This is the source.
It's easy to feel trapped in your own life. Circumstances can sometimes feel as if they form a jail around you. But there's almost nothing you can't learn your way out of. If you don't like who you are, you have the option of learning until you become someone else. Life is like a jail with an unlocked, heavy door. You're free the minute you realize the door will open if you simply lean into it.
This is the source.
Our choice of clothes can influence how people treat us. That's a view that every living human agrees upon. Most of us act upon that belief once or twice a day. When I get dressed, the first two questions I ask myself are 1) "Who is going to see me?" and 2) "What do I want them to think of me?" You probably do the same thing. If not, there's something deeply wrong with you, or possibly you're an engineer.
This is the source.
Passionate people who fail don't get a chance to offer their advice to the rest of us.
This is the source.
Everything you want out of life is in that huge, bubbling vat of failure. The trick is to get the good stuff out.
This is the source.
[T]iming is often the biggest component of success. And since timing is often hard to get right unless you are psychic, it makes sense to try different things until you get the timing right by luck.
This is the source.
Goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary. That feeling wears on you. In time, it becomes heavy and uncomfortable. It might even drive you out of the game.
This is the source.
The systems-versus-goals point of view is burdened by semantics, of course. You might say every system has a goal, however vague. And that would be true to some extent. And you could say that everyone who pursues a goal has some sort of system to get there, whether it is expressed or not. You could word-glue goals and systems together if you chose. 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 every time they apply their system. That's a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.
This is the source.
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, it's a system. If you're waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it's a goal.
This is the source.
The world offers so many alternatives that you need a quick filter to eliminate some options and pay attention to others. Whatever your plan, focus is always important.
This is the source.
When you decide to be successful in a big way, it means you acknowledge the price and you're willing to pay it. That price might be sacrificing your personal life to get good grades in school, pursuing a college major that is deadly boring but lucrative, putting off having kids, missing time with your family, or taking business risks that put you in jeopardy for embarrassment, divorce, or bankruptcy. Successful people don't wish for success; they decide to pursue it.
This is the source.
[G]enerous people take care of their own needs first. In fact, doing so is a moral necessity. The world needs you at your best.
This is the source.
The way I approach the problem of multiple priorities is by focusing on just one main metric: my energy. I make choices that maximize my personal energy because that makes it easier to manage all of the other priorities.
This is the source.
[E]very time you wonder how to do something, a few hundred million people have probably wondered the same thing. And that usually means the information has already been packaged and simplified, and in some cases sold. But it's usually free for the asking.
This is the source.
If you could control your attitude directly, as opposed to letting the environment dictate how you feel on any given day, it would be like a minor superpower. It turns out you have that superpower. You can control your attitude by manipulating your thoughts, your body, and your environment.
This is the source.
Every generation before us believed...that it had things figured out. We now know that every generation before us was wrong about a lot of it. Is it likely that you were born at the tipping point of history, in which humans know enough about reality to say we understand it? This is another case where humility is your friend. When you can release on your ego long enough to view your perceptions as incomplete or misleading, it gives you the freedom to imagine new and potentially more useful ways of looking at the world.
This is the source.
You too can sometimes get what you want by adopting a practical illusion. Reality is overrated and impossible to understand with any degree of certainty. What you do know for sure is that some ways of looking at the world work better than others. Pick the way that works, even if you don't know why.
This is the source.
When you define yourself as a member of any group, you start to automatically identify with the other members and take on some of the characteristics of the group.
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It's a cliché that who you know is helpful for success. What is less obvious is that you don't need to know CEOs and billionaires. Sometimes you just need a friend who knows different things than you do. And you can always find one of those.
This is the source.
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. People are naturally drawn to the things they feel comfortable doing, and comfort is a marker for talent.
This is the source.
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.
That approach might conflict with the advice you've heard all your life—that sticking with something, no matter the obstacles, is important to success. Indeed, most successful people had to chew through a wall at some point. Overcoming obstacles is normally an unavoidable part of the process. But you also need to know when to quit. Persistence is useful, but there's no point in being an idiot about it.
This is the source.
There have been times I stuck with bad ideas for far too long out of a misguided sense that persistence is a virtue. The pattern I noticed was this: Things that will someday work out well start out well. Things that will never work start out bad and stay that way. What you rarely see is a stillborn failure that transmogrifies into a stellar success. Small successes can grow into big ones, but failures rarely grow into successes.
This is the source.
There's no denying the importance of practice. The hard part is figuring out what to practice.
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Children are accustomed to a continual stream of criticisms and praise, but adults can go weeks without a compliment while enduring criticism both at work and at home. Adults are starved for a kind word. When you understand the power of honest praise (as opposed to bullshitting, flattery, and sucking up), you realize that withholding it borders on immoral. If you see something that impresses you, a decent respect to humanity insists you voice your praise.
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If you believe people use reason for the important decisions in life, you will go through life feeling confused and frustrated that others seem to have bad reasoning skills.
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It is tremendously useful to know when people are using reason and when they are rationalizing the irrational. You're wasting your time if you try to make someone see reason when reason is not influencing the decision.
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No matter what you're doing or how well you're doing it, you can benefit from a deeper understanding of how the mind interprets its world using only the clues that somehow find a way into your brain through the holes in your skull.
This is the source.
If your view of the world is that people use reason for their important decisions, you are setting yourself up for a life of frustration and confusion. You'll find yourself continually debating people and never winning except in your own mind. Few things are as destructive and limiting as a worldview that assumes people are mostly rational.
This is the source.
Your job as a conversationalist is to keep asking questions and keep looking for something you have in common with the stranger, or something that interests you enough to wade into the topic. In my entire life I have never met a stranger who didn't have some fascinating life experiences that spilled out if I asked the right questions. Everyone is interesting if you make the situation feel safe.
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No matter how smart you are, educated people will think you're a moron if your grammar is lacking.
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It's hard to be a jerk and say no to any request that starts with “Would you mind.†The question comes across as honest, while also showing concern for the other person. It's a powerful combination.
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Decisiveness looks like leadership. Keep in mind that most normal people are at least a little bit uncertain when facing unfamiliar and complicated situations. What people crave in that sort of environment is anything that looks like certainty. If you can deliver an image of decisiveness, no matter how disingenuous, others will see it as leadership.
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Education and psychological bravery are somewhat interchangeable. If you don't have much of one, you can compensate with a lot of the other. When you see a successful person who lacks a college education, you're usually looking at someone with an unusual lack of fear.
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People who enjoy humor are simply more attractive than people who don't. It's human nature to want to spend time with people who can appreciate a good laugh or, better yet, cause one.
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I find it helpful to see the world as a slot machine that doesn't ask you to put money in. All it asks is your time, focus, and energy to pull the handle over and over. A normal slot machine that requires money will bankrupt any player in the long run. But the machine that has rare yet certain payoffs, and asks for no money up front, is a guaranteed winner if you have what it takes to keep yanking until you get lucky. In that environment, you can fail 99 percent of the time, while knowing success is guaranteed. All you need to do is stay in the game long enough.
This is the source.
Given our human impulse to pick up the habits and energy of others, you can use that knowledge to literally program your brain the way you want. Simply find the people who most represent what you would like to become and spend as much time with them as you can without trespassing, kidnapping, or stalking. Their good habits and good energy will rub off on you.
This is the source.
Happiness has more to do with where you're heading than where you are.
This is the source.
When you choose a career, consider whether it will lead to a lifetime of ever-improved performance, a plateau, or a steady decline in your skills.
This is the source.
Happiness is the natural state for most people whenever they feel healthy, have flexible schedules, and expect the future to be good.
This is the source.
Recapping the 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.
This is the source.
Your mood is a function of chemistry in your body, and food may be a far more dominant contributor to your chemistry than what is happening around you, at least during a normal day.
This is the source.
If you want to make a habit of something, the worst thing you can do is pick and choose which days of the week you do it and which ones you don't.
This is the source.
[A]lways remember that 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.
This is the source.
[I]f you have unreasonable expectations of other people they will continually disappoint you. But if you can learn to find joy from whatever people have to offer, life is like a candy store. Most people are givers, but they don't want anyone telling them what to give. Once you accept that reality, life is far more pleasant.
This is the source.
Evolution did not give us brains that can comprehend our reality. All we have is the type of brains that did not get our ancestors killed. So our brains create delusions of reality and we try to force reason onto them.
The world is like a reverse casino. In a casino, if you gamble long enough, you're certainly going to lose. But in the real world, where the only thing you're gambling is, say, your time or your embarrassment, then the more stuff you do, the more you give luck a chance to find you.
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