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

skill set and chose a system that vastly increased his odds of getting “lucky.” In fact, his system is so solid that it could withstand quite a bit of bad luck without buckling. How much passion does this fellow have for his chosen field? Answer: zero. What he has is a spectacular system, and that beats passion every time.



CHAPTER SEVEN
My System
    When I was six years old, I got hooked on the comic strip
Peanuts.
The drawings fascinated me. They were so simple and yet so perfect in an indescribable way. As soon as I learned to read, I devoured every
Peanuts
book I could get my hands on. I declared to my parents that one day I would be a famous cartoonist like Charles Schulz. That was my goal, clear as can be. I spent countless hours with crayons, pencils, markers, and paper. I practiced and practiced. But I never became good. I wasn’t even the best artist in my class of forty kids. I didn’t give up, though.
    At the age of eleven I applied to the Famous Artists School Course for Talented Young People. It was a correspondence course. This was perfect for me because I wouldn’t need to leave home, which would have been problematic. I filled out the application, drew the assignments they requested, and answered the multiple-choice questions about design. Sadly, I was rejected by the Famous Artists School for Young People because their cutoff age was twelve. I was too young. I was crushed.
    My mother, in the style of the times, told me I could do anything I set my sights on. She said I could be the president, an astronaut, or the next Charles Schulz. I believed her because at that point in my life I hadn’t yet noticed the pattern of her deceptions. Her lies included Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and something about a whale eating a guy named Jonah.
    Intime I started to understand something called the odds. Some things were, by their very nature, likely, and some were not. I learned by observation that people who pursued extraordinarily unlikely goals were overly optimistic at best, delusional at worst, and just plain stupid most of the time. The smart people in my little Republican-dominated town made practical plans and stuck to them. Some joined the Marines to get experience and education. Some went into the family business. Some married and became homemakers and moms. A few superstars studied hard and pursued jobs in medicine and the law. At the time, if you had asked me to name twenty different types of jobs an adult could have, I would have tapped out after fifteen. The jobs I had heard of were the ones I saw around me in my little town plus whatever I saw on television. And by television I mean the one channel we received (via rabbit ears) that had both a picture and sound.
    My father worked at the local post office and painted houses at night when the weather allowed. His advice to my brother and me was to pursue a career in the postal profession. The United States Postal Service was steady work, it was mostly indoors, and it had excellent benefits. Sometimes when my mother was busy, my siblings and I would hang out at the post office with my dad. We were fascinated by the loaded handgun that was always within easy reach. Apparently the government expected its employees to resist armed robberies by reaching for their pieces and blazing away. Those were different times.
    My mother decided to try her hand at selling real estate once her three kids were old enough to stay alive on their own. She became an agent and did well enough to build up some savings that would go toward our college educations. My mother told us from the time we could understand language that all three of us were college bound, like it or not. In my family, only an aunt had ever attended college. My mother decided to change that. Later, when the real-estate market got saturated with brokers and agents, she took a job for minimum wage on an assembly line, winding copper wires around speaker magnets for eight hours a day. That