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I also really liked the book. My review of it (on Amazon) Scott Adams tells the story of his life, and describes his philosophies for how to succeed. There were four ideas in the book that really stood out for me. 1). Use systems, not goals. A goal could be complete a marathon. However, once you reach the goal, there is nothing to keep you going (unless you immediately set a new goal). A better way is to have a system. For example, the system can be to always run four times a week. A system lets you feel good every time you follow it, whereas a goal only makes you feel good when you reach it (but then its motivating power also disappears).
Another example of goal versus system is on how to find your next job. If you are constantly on the lookout for a better job (even when you have one), you are much likelier to keep finding good ones than if you only look for another job when you have to. 2) Combination of skills. One way of becoming successful is to extremely good at one thing. But that is also extremely difficult. However, if you can be good (say top 20%) in more than one domain, then that combination of skills can be enough to make you very sought after. An example given in the book is for professionals in California. If you are good at your profession, and also speak Spanish fluently, you have a much better chance of succeeding. As Scott writes in the book, every skill you acquire doubles your chance of success. Put another way: good + good > excellent. 3) What all adults should know. On the subject of adding skills, Scott has a list of skills he thinks all adults should have. Some of those skills are: public speaking, psychology, business writing, accounting, design, and conversations. Chapter 21 goes through all of these (and more), and give advice on how to acquire them. 4) Learning from failures. This is a theme throughout the book. Each failure can teach you something. If you attempt something and fail, you at least gained experience. This experience will be useful for your next project. These were the main takeaways for me. But there is other good stuff as well. The six filters for truth in the introduction are also good. How can you know if an idea works – make sure at least two of these agree: personal experience, experience of people you know, experts, scientific studies, common sense, pattern recognition. I also like his advice on how to say no to something effectively - say “I am not interested”. And the powerful story of the importance of praise: after a really bad presentation by a very shy student, the instructor did not scold the student. Instead he said “Wow, that was brave”.
In summary, many good ideas worth discovering in here. https://www.amazon.com/gp/review/R3BWIBLLW7XJC7 |