How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life by Scott Adams Page A

to be ready when the time was right.
    Thisbrings me to my system. I still have the diary I wrote when I graduated from Hartwick, in which I outlined my entrepreneurial plan. The idea was to create something that had value and—this next part is the key—I wanted the product to be something that was
easy to reproduce in unlimited quantities.
I didn’t want to sell my time, at least not directly, because that model has an upward limit. And I didn’t want to build my own automobile factory, for example, because cars are not easy to reproduce. I didn’t want to do any sort of custom work, such as building homes, because each one requires the same amount of work. I wanted to create, invent, write, or otherwise concoct something widely desired that would be easy to reproduce.
    My plan wasn’t the one and only practical path to success. Another perfectly good plan might involve becoming a salesperson who works on commission in an industry that handles extraordinarily expensive items such as rare art, airplanes, or office buildings. It might take years to get into one of those positions, but no one said success would be fast or easy. I don’t have the salesperson gene, so selling expensive items wasn’t a good plan for me. I figured my competitive edge was creativity. I would try one thing after another until something creative struck a chord with the public. Then I would reproduce it like crazy. In the near term it would mean one failure after another. In the long term I was creating a situation that would allow luck to find me.
    It helps a great deal to have at least a general strategy and some degree of focus. 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.
    My system of creating something the public wants and reproducing it in large quantities nearly guaranteed a string of failures. By design, all of my efforts were long shots. Had I been goal oriented instead of system oriented, I imagine I would have given up after the first several failures. It would have felt like banging my head against a brick wall. But being systems oriented, I felt myself growing more capable every day, no matter the fate of the project I happened to be working on. And every day during those years I woke up with the same thought, literally, as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and slapped the alarm clock off.
    Today’s the day.



CHAPTER EIGHT
My Corporate Career Fizzled
    In the spring of 1979, adorned in the same cheap suit I’d worn on the flight to California, I walked into a San Francisco branch of Crocker National Bank and asked for a job as a teller. The manager hired me on the spot. I needed a job right away because all I owned was my ill-fitting clothes, a plastic alarm clock, a watch that worked occasionally, a toiletry bag, and two thousand dollars that my parents had scraped together as a college graduation present. My plan was to start at the bottom and claw my way to the top.
    My degree in economics made me somewhat overqualified for the teller job, and yet I still managed to be dreadful at it. My people skills were good enough, but I somehow found a different way to misplace money or transpose numbers nearly every shift. I’m not good at any sort of task that has to be done right the first time. I’m more of a do-it-wrong-then-fix-it personality.
    My supervisor liked me, but my sloppiness at keeping track of people’s transactions—which in those days involved writing down numbers with a pen and paper—made me unfit for the job. My supervisor warned me that unless I improved quickly, she would be forced to let me go. I knew I wasn’t likely to get better at handling details. I was a failure at my first job.
    I figured I had two ways to leave my job. I could get fired or—and here’s the optimist emerging—I could get promoted. I wrote a letter to the senior vice president for the branch system, who was