Notes on - How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big

Good ideas have no value because the world already has too many of them. The market rewards execution, not ideas.

Systems are always better than just having a goal

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.

People who pursued extraordinarily unlikely goals were overly optimistic at best, delusional at worst, and just plain stupid most of the time.

Entrepreneurial plan

The idea is to create something that had value and the product should be something that is easy to reproduce in unlimited quantities.

Something to keep in mind

The universe makes sure there isn’t much of a link between job performance in the corporate world and outcomes.

There's always a price of success - If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it.

Why being selfish might be the best thing for you?

When it comes to the topic of generosity, there are three kinds of people in the world:

1.Selfish

2.Stupid

3.Burden on others

That’s the entire list. Your best option is to be selfish, because being stupid or a burden on society won’t help anyone.

Society hopes you will handle your selfishness with some grace and compassion.

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. If you neglect your health or your career, you slip into the second category—stupid—which is a short slide to becoming a burden on society.

Maximizing my personal energy means eating right, exercising, avoiding unnecessary stress, getting enough sleep, and all of the obvious steps. But it also means having something in my life that makes me excited to wake up. When I get my personal energy right, the quality of my work is better, and I can complete it faster. That keeps my career on track. And when all of that is working, and I feel relaxed and energetic, my personal life is better too.

By becoming a person with good energy, you lift the people around you. That positive change will improve your social life, your love life, your family life, and your career.

How to not quit even when you have a bad job?

Before Scott became a cartoonist, he worked in a number of awful corporate jobs. But he still enjoyed going to work, partly because he exercised most evenings and usually woke up feeling good, and partly because he always had one or two side projects going on that had the potential to set him free. Cartooning was just one of a dozen entrepreneurial ideas he tried out during my corporate days.

For years, the prospect of starting “my own thing” and leaving my cubicle behind gave him an enormous amount of energy.

Importance of communication

If the situation involves communication with others, simplification is almost always the right answer.

Simple systems are probably the best way to achieve success.

How should you work in a startup?

Start-ups often do better by slapping together something that is 80 percent good and seeing how the public responds. There’s time to improve things later if the market cares about the product.

Priorities to keep in mind

It’s useful to think of your priorities in terms of concentric circles, like an archery target. In the center is your highest priority: you. If you ruin yourself, you won’t be able to work on any other priorities. So taking care of your own health is job one.

The next ring—and your second-biggest priority—is economics. That includes your job, your investments, and even your house. You might wince at the fact that I put economics ahead of your family, your friends, and the rest of the world, but there’s a reason. If you don’t get your personal financial engine working right, you place a burden on everyone from your family to the country.

Once you are both healthy and financially sound, it’s time for 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.

The next rings are your local community, your country, and the world, in that order. Don’t bother trying to fix the world until you get the inner circles of your priorities under control.

Exercise, food, and sleep should be your first buttons to push if you’re trying to elevate your attitude and raise your energy.

How to feel good?

The easiest way to manage your attitude is to consume as much feel-good entertainment as you can.

The smiling-makes-you-happy phenomenon is part of the larger and highly useful phenomenon of faking it until you make it. You’ll see this two-way causation in a wide variety of human activities. Putting on exercise clothes will make you feel like working out. I’ve also discovered that acting confident makes you feel more confident. Feeling energetic makes you want to play a sport, but playing a sport will also make you feel energetic. Loving someone makes you want to have sex, but having sex also releases the bonding chemicals that make you feel love. High testosterone can help you win a competition, but winning a competition can also sometimes raise your testosterone.

Being tired makes you want to lie down, but lying down when you are rested can put you in the mood for a nap. Feeling hungry can make you want to eat simple carbs, but eating simple carbs can make you feel hungry.

I’m better than 99 percent of the world* in each of those games because I put in more practice time than 99 percent of the world. There’s no magic to it.

Strategy for success

A great strategy for success in life is to become good at something, anything, and let that feeling propel you to new and better victories. Success can be habit-forming. 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.

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. Things that will someday work out well start out well. Things that will never work start out bad and stay that way. Small successes can grow into big ones, but failures rarely grow into successes.

If the first commercial version of your work excites no one to action, it’s time to move on to something different. Don’t be fooled by the opinions of friends and family. They’re all liars.

If your work inspires some excitement and some action from customers, get ready to chew through some walls. You might have something worth fighting for.

Importance of Practice

There’s no denying the importance of practice. The hard part is figuring out what to practice. Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success. When it comes to skills, quantity often beats quality.

Open a direct channel to your customers and modify your product based on their feedback.

Everything you learn becomes a shortcut for understanding something else.

The Knowledge Formula: The More You Know, the More You Can Know

Skills to acquire

Public speaking

Psychology

Business writing

Accounting

Design (the basics)

Conversation

Overcoming shyness

Second language

Golf

Proper grammar

Persuasion

Technology (hobby level)

Proper voice technique

Why praising your colleagues might be the best idea?

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.

Don’t assume you know how much potential you have. Sometimes the only way to know what you can do is to test yourself.

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. The reality is that reason is just one of the drivers of our decisions, and often the smallest one.

Basic understanding of Design;

Art composition for anything from a magazine cover to an oil painting to a PowerPoint slide should conform to a few basic templates. The most common is the L-shaped layout. You imagine a giant letter L on the page and fill in the dense stuff along its shape, leaving less clutter in one of the four open quadrants. Artists call the uncluttered part negative space. In the case of an oil painting, you might have a tree going up one side, some landscape on the bottom, and the open sky in the top left. You can change it up by rotating the L and leaving a different quadrant less busy than the rest, but it’s still the L concept.

Conversation starters

1.What’s your name?

2.Where do you live?

https://www.dhirubhai.net/redir/general-malware-page?url=3%2eDo you have a family?

4.What do you do for a living?

5.Do you have any hobbies/sports?

6.Do you have any travel plans?

Everyone is interesting if you make the situation feel safe. Here’s a summary of good conversation technique.

1.Ask questions.

2.Don’t complain (much).

https://www.dhirubhai.net/redir/general-malware-page?url=3%2eDon’t talk about boring experiences (TV show, meal, dream, etc.).

4.Don’t dominate the conversation. Let others talk.

5.Don’t get stuck on a topic. Keep moving.

6.Planning is useful but it isn’t conversation.

7.Keep the sad stories short, especially medical stories.

So how do you get a stranger to like you? It’s simple, actually. It starts by smiling and keeping your body language open. After that, just ask questions and listen as if you cared, all the while looking for common interests. Everyone likes to talk about his or her own life, and everyone appreciates a sympathetic listener. Eventually, if you discover some common interests, you’ll feel a connection without any effort.

It’s a good idea to always have a backlog of stories you can pull out at a moment’s notice. And you’ll want to continually update your internal story database with new material. For example, if I know I’ll be seeing friends in a few days, I make a special note to myself to turn my recent experiences into story form because I know I’ll have a reason to bust one out. The most popular type of stories is … funny stories

How to overcome shyness?

Secret of overcoming shyness by imagining you are acting instead of interacting. And by that I mean literally acting.

It turns out that a shy person can act like someone else more easily than he can act like himself. That makes some sense because shyness is caused by an internal feeling that you are not worthy to be in the conversation. Acting like someone else gets you out of that way of thinking.

Try putting yourself in situations that will surely embarrass you if things go wrong, or maybe even if they don’t. Like any other skill, suppressing shyness takes practice. The more you put yourself in potentially embarrassing situations, the easier they all become. Success builds confidence and confidence suppresses shyness. If you can’t control your shyness directly through the tricks I outlined, wait until you’re rich and famous; the shyness might leave on its own.

Persuasive Words and Phrases

? Because

? Would you mind … ?

? I’m not interested.

? I don’t do that.

? I have a rule …

? I just wanted to clarify …

? Is there anything you can do for me?

? Thank you

? This is just between you and me.

How to say Thank You?

No matter how you deliver a thank-you, make sure it includes a little detail of what makes you thankful. Was it the surprise, the thoughtfulness, or how helpful the favor or gift was? Be specific.

Why you should be persuasive?

If you see persuasion as a form of manipulation, and you see manipulation as a form of evil, that worldview will keep you from being as persuasive as you might be. I think most people hold back their full powers of persuasion because it doesn’t feel good to be manipulative. It’s one thing to speak your mind and voice your preferences, but you hope that other people agree with you because of the thundering rightness of your arguments. Sadly, we do not live in a world where good arguments always win. Sometimes you need to nudge people onto the right path even if they firmly believe it to be wrong. In some cases you have a moral obligation to be manipulative if you know it will create a good result for all involved. For example, manipulating coworkers to do better work is usually good for everyone.

How to appear successful?

Studies show a commanding voice is highly correlated with success.

Few common methods for developing your best “success voice.”

For starters, it helps to learn to breathe from the bottom of your lungs, not in the upper chest area. Proper breathing has lots of other benefits, including stress reduction, increased and more efficient metabolism, and better physical stamina, so it’s worth learning.  If you put your hand on your belly button and breathe correctly, that’s the only part of your torso that should be rising and falling. If your upper chest is expanding when you breathe normally, you’re doing it wrong. When you get your breathing right, your words will come out sounding more confident.

When you’re trying to convey a fake sense of confidence—which is often handy—you need to tell yourself you’re acting. Simply speak the way you imagine a confident person would speak and you’ll nail it on the first try.

1.Be proactive.

2.Begin with the end in mind. (Imagine a good outcome.)

3.Put first things first. (Set priorities.)

4.Think win-win. (Don’t be greedy.)

5.Seek first to understand then be understood.

6.Synergize. (Use teamwork.)

7.Sharpen the saw. (Keep learning.)

1.Lack of fear of embarrassment

2.Education (the right kind)

3.Exercise

if you can’t handle the risk of embarrassment, rejection, and failure, you need to learn how, and studies suggest that is indeed a learnable skill.

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.

How to become Happier?

Exercise makes people smarter, psychologically braver, more creative, more energetic, and more influential.

If you see humor as an optional form of entertainment, you’re missing some of its biggest benefits: 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.

You become like the people around you.

Happiness isn’t as dependent on your circumstances as you might think. For example, amputees often return to whatever level of happiness they enjoyed before losing a limb.

You need to control the order and timing of things to be happy. It’s important to look at happiness in terms of timing because timing is easier to control than resources.

Step one in your search for happiness is to continually work toward having control of your schedule.

In your personal life and your career, consider schedule flexibility when making any big decision. Realistically, sometimes you need to suck it up and work long hours, watch the kids, and do your duty. Just remember to keep your eye out for ways to maximize your schedule freedom in the long term. It’s something you want to work toward. You won’t all become work-at-home cartoonists, but you can certainly find a boss who values your productivity over your attendance.

The directional nature of happiness is one reason it’s a good idea to have a sport or hobby that leaves you plenty of room to improve every year. Tennis and golf are two perfect examples. With either sport, an average player can continue improving well past the age of sixty. Slow and steady improvement at anything makes you feel that you are on the right track. The feeling of progress stimulates your body to create the chemicals that make you feel happy.

Happiness is the natural state for most people whenever they feel healthy, have flexible schedules, and expect the future to be good.

primary culprit in your bad moods is a deficit in one of the big five: flexible schedule, imagination, sleep, diet, and exercise.

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.