Courage is the art of being the only one who knows you're scared to death.
Harold Wilson
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Passionate people who fail don't get a chance to offer their advice to the rest of us.
Scott Adams
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Everything you want out of life is in that huge, bubbling vat of failure. The trick is to get the good stuff out.
Scott Adams
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[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.
Scott Adams
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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.
Scott Adams
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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.
Scott Adams
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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.
Scott Adams
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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.
Scott Adams
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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.
Scott Adams
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[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.
Scott Adams
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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.
Scott Adams
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[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.
Scott Adams
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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.
Scott Adams
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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.
Scott Adams
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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.
Scott Adams
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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.
Scott Adams
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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.
Scott Adams
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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.
Scott Adams
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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.
Scott Adams
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.
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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.
Scott Adams
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There's no denying the importance of practice. The hard part is figuring out what to practice.
Scott Adams
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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.
Scott Adams
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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.
Scott Adams
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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.
Scott Adams
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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.
Scott Adams
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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.
Scott Adams
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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.
Scott Adams
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No matter how smart you are, educated people will think you're a moron if your grammar is lacking.
Scott Adams
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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.
Scott Adams
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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.
Scott Adams
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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.
Scott Adams
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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.
Scott Adams
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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.
Scott Adams
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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.
Scott Adams
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Happiness has more to do with where you're heading than where you are.
Scott Adams
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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.
Scott Adams
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Happiness is the natural state for most people whenever they feel healthy, have flexible schedules, and expect the future to be good.
Scott Adams
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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.
Scott Adams
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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.
Scott Adams
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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.
Scott Adams
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[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.
Scott Adams
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Happiness is not the whole aim of education. A man must be independent in his powers and character; able to work and assert his mastery over all that depends on him.
Maria Montessori
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