Scott Adams, best known for creating the popular Dilbert comic strip, wrote a book several years ago called How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. In the book, Adams goes through his life story and lays out the strategies that he believes have brought him success. He fits a lot of interesting stuff into the book, from overcoming a major voice problem to effectively managing energy to making healthy food taste delicious, and breaks down how he does each one of these (and more) as he goes.
While many people talk about the importance of having goals, Adams considers systems to be much more useful. One problem he has with goals is that they involve working at something for a long time and being dissatisfied until that thing is completed. Even then, the satisfaction from completing it is short-lived, and the search for a new goal begins. Another problem is that a particular goal may seem like a good idea at the start but, with so many changing variables in this fast-moving world, it may turn out to be more trouble than it’s worth. Instead, Adams suggests doing things and learning skills that increase your chances of ending up in a good place. This way, you’re constantly working on something at which you can succeed every step of the way (such as doing some form of activity each day, even if it’s as simple as walking the dog, rather than trying to follow a specific exercise regimen) while simultaneously increasing your usefulness. Adams reasons that having good systems and routines in place makes you more likely to run into good opportunities and be able to make good use of them when you find them than pursuing specific goals.
One of Adams’ most interesting ideas to me is the “talent stack”. The talent stack consists of useful skills that mesh well with each other and provide more value together than they do separately. For example, Adams uses several related skills in creating comics, including drawing, writing, and humor. He says that there are plenty of people who are more talented than he is at each of those things, but he’s good enough at each of them to make comics that people want to read, and his comics wouldn’t work if he were seriously lacking in one or more of those abilities. Some of the skills he thinks everyone should know and would make you much more likely to be successful wherever you go in life include public speaking, accounting, business writing, conversation, persuasion, and a second language. Someone who is decent at each of those skills stands a better chance of being successful than someone who is excellent at only one of them, much like in the phrase “Jack of all trades, master of none, but oftentimes better than master of one.”
Adams adds just enough humor and Dilbert comics in places where the material might otherwise drag a bit to keep things fun; this, along with Adams’ ability to tell a good story (a skill he explains how to do in the book, by the way) makes How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big a real page-turner. I normally read just one chapter of a book each day but I ended up reading a few chapters daily of this book, partly because they’re so enjoyable and partly because many of them are quite short. The sheer amount of useful life hacks in the book as well as its great humor make this one of the more enjoyable and useful self-improvement books I’ve read, and I highly recommend you check it out.