<ul><li>As well a developing general skills, you must use introspection to identify your unique skills. Parents and teachers often pressure people to pursue specific careers. You are in the best position to notice your special skills and think about which career would suit those skills. </li><li>You should consider the areas in your life where you have always been comfortable taking risks.</li><li>Once you have found your skills, you have to find a career that matches this skill. This process requires sampling, which means trying many jobs or businesses until you find one that is enjoyable and uses your skills.</li></ul>

5. SPECIALIZE IN THE AREAS YOU ENJOY

<ul><li>We must understand our talents but we must also be willing to favour new skills over our talents to become a generalist. The business world was previously obsessed with specialization. Adams points out that general knowledge about several fields is more useful in the modern world. This does not make ypu mediocre or your average Joe.</li><li>Author explains that he has always been a generalist. When he started Dilbert, he was not a talented writer, artist or businessman. He was just relatively proficient at each skill. This general competence is what allowed Dilbert to become success.</li></ul>

4. THE BENEFITS OF BEING A GENERALIST

<ul><li>Affirmations should be used by all individuals with aspirations for their life. An affirmation is a positive statement about what you want to achieve. You can engage with an affirmation in whatever way you want. Still, the affirmation should be imagining what you want and repeating it several times.</li></ul>

10. USE AFFIEMATIONS

<ul><li>Firstly, there is the issue that the goals are placed in the future, but we have to work in the present to achieve them. This means you are unlikely to see any results from your actions until much further down the line. Most people would find this reality frustrating and discouraging. The specific nature of goals can also lead to similar frustrations. For example, people often feel like failures if they don't accomplish exactly what they set out to do. They may still be highly successful, but not meeting their goals leaves them feeling they haven't accomplished anything.</li></ul>

<ul><li>The six filters of truth are:</li></ul><ol><li>Personal experience: Because human perceptions are iffy and unreliable.</li><li>Experience of people you know: Because they are even more reliable</li><li>Experts: Because they work for money, not truth.</li><li>Scientific studies: Because correlation is not causation.</li><li>Common sense: Because it's an excellent way to be mistaken with complete confidence.</li><li>Pattern recognition: Because patterns, coincidences, and personal biases lookalike.</li></ol>

11. THE SIX FILTERS FOR TRUTH

You've likely experienced occasions where you have gone on a run when you have gone on a run when you have felt drained and unmotivated. These circumstances occur when you adhere to a schedule rather than listening to your bodily rhythms. This is an inferior approach and recommends using energy levels as a metric for allocating tasks. You will feel far more energized and become more efficient if you allocate the right tasks to the right time of  day.

6. ALLOCATE THE RIGHT TASKS TO THE RIGHT TIME OF DAY

Instead of worrying about which task to prioritize first, you should always make personal energy your priority. This is because personal energy allows you to achieve all your other priorities. Exercise, food and sleep are all essential for looking after your your energy levels. So, these should be the first buttons to push to elevate your attitude and raise your energy.

7. PRIORTIZE PERSONAL ENERGY

<ul><li>Society tells us that selfishness is something we should avoid at all costs, and you should make other people's desires your priority. Author challenges this view and points out that there are three kinds of people in this world: stupid, a burden on others, and selfish.</li><li>Stupid people are solely interested in satisfying others before themselves. The reason they are stupid is that it is impossible to please everyone. So, these individuals end up living an unsatisfactory life.</li><li>Those who are burden on others are not necessarily a burden because they want to be. </li></ul>

9. SELFISHNESS IS AN ILLUSION 

These individuals have often been dealt a difficult hand and left to struggle with an illness or something similar. In these situations, you might become a burden, but you should remain selfish to cure yourself.<ul><li>Finally, selfish people focus on what they want from life. This doesn't mean they neglect others. They are simply focused on doing what they want, succeeding in life, and then helping others once the first two are accomplished.</li></ul>

<ul><li>An exercise system would focus less on an end goal and more on day-by-day improvement. For example, committing to daily exercise. This shows one of the greatest strengths of systems, which is that it helps establish habits.</li><li>Author used systems as a young man to help him achieve the success he now has. He created a system around writing and drawing things people were receptive to rather than having a clear end goal. This meant he did not feel like a failure if it was not successful, which helped him keep going. This continual motivation meant he could create the hit comic strip Dilbert.</li></ul>

3. EXAMPLES OF SYSTEMS

<ul><li>Self-help gurus have a knack for encouraging people to create and stick to goals. But the author Adam believes goals are for losers. According to him, the reality is that even the clearest goals have two problems that will always persist:</li></ul><ol><li>Goals are future - oriented </li><li>Goals can become overly-specific.</li></ol>

1. GOALS HAVE TWO MAJOR PROBLEMS                           

<ul><li>Moods are infectious, so the moods of those around us heavily influence us. This is called associate energy and means we should always strive to associate ourselves with people we want to be like and people who give us energy. This idea was brought to author attention when one of his friends decided to live in an affluent neighbourhood, as he felt this would push him to become affluent himself.</li></ul>

8. USE ASSOCIATION PROGRAMMING

<ul><li>The author believes that systems are more effective than goals. Systems are firmly grounded in the present. This means they can be grounded in your life right now, and you will get daily pleasure from successfully operating them. Author describes the time he first learned of the power of systems. He sat on a flight next to a man who explained how systems had transformed him from an employee to a CEO. The CEO said he became successful by always looking for a better job. You see most people wait until they need a job to start looking for one. When they reach their goal of finding a job they stop</li></ul>

2. THE EFFECTIVENESS OF SYSTEMS

How to Fail at almost everything and still Win Big

'Everything you want out of life is in that bubbling vat of failure. The trick is to get the good stuff out.' Scott Adams has probably failed at more things than anyone you've ever met. So how did he go from hapless office worker and serial failure to the creator of Dilbert, one of the world's most famous comic strips, in just a few years? In this brilliant book, Adams shows us how to invite failure in, embrace it, then pick its pocket. What is the key to success? Hire the right employees! How do you know you hired the right ones? You know because the business is successful. So the key to success is circular reasoning? Yes, because circular reasoning is the key. No career guide can offer advice that works for everyone. Your best bet is to study the ways of others who made it big and try to glean some tricks that make sense for you. So here Scott Adams tells how he turned one failure after another - including a corporate career, inventions, investments and two restaurants - into something successful. Along the way he discovered some unlikely truths. Goals are for losers; systems are for winners. Forget 'passion'; what you need is personal energy. While you laugh at his failures, you'll discover some helpful ideas for your own path to personal victory. As he puts it- 'This is a story of one person's unlikely success within the context of scores of embarrassing failures. Was my eventual success primarily a result of talent, luck, hard work or an accidental just-right balance of each? All I know for sure is that I pursued a strategy of managing my opportunities in a way that would make it easier for luck to find me.'

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Blasting clichéd career advice, the contrarian pundit and creator of Dilbert recounts the humorous ups and downs of his career, revealing the outsized role of luck in our lives and how best to play the system. Scott Adams has likely failed at more things than anyone you’ve ever met or anyone you’ve even heard of. So how did he go from hapless office worker and serial failure to the creator of Dilbert, one of the world’s most famous syndicated comic strips, in just a few years? In How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, Adams shares the game plan he’s followed since he was a teen: invite failure in, embrace it, then pick its pocket. No career guide can offer advice that works for everyone. As Adams explains, your best bet is to study the ways of others who made it big and try to glean some tricks and strategies that make sense for you. Adams pulls back the covers on his own unusual life and shares how he turned one failure after another—including his corporate career, his inventions, his investments, and his two restaurants—into something good and lasting. There’s a lot to learn from his personal story, and a lot of entertainment along the way. Adams discovered some unlikely truths that helped to propel him forward. For instance: • Goals are for losers. Systems are for winners. • “Passion” is bull. What you need is personal energy. • A combination of mediocre skills can make you surprisingly valuable. • You can manage your odds in a way that makes you look lucky to others. Adams hopes you can laugh at his failures while discovering some unique and helpful ideas on your own path to personal victory. As he writes: “This is a story of one person’s unlikely success within the context of scores of embarrassing failures. Was my eventual success primarily a result of talent, luck, hard work, or an accidental just-right balance of each? All I know for sure is that I pursued a conscious strategy of managing my opportunities in a way that would make it easier for luck to find me.”

Adams was born in Windham, New York in 1957 and received his Bachelor's degree in Economics from Hartwick College in 1979.He also studied economics and management for his 1986 MBA from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.In recent years, Adams has been hurt with a series of debilitating health problems. Since late 2004, he has suffered from a reemergence of his focal dystonia which has affected his drawing. He can fool his brain by drawing using a graphics tablet. On December 12, 2005, Adams announced on his blog that he also suffers from spasmodic dysphonia.

7. PRIORTIZE PERSONAL ENERGY

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