Scott Adams book is the only self-help book I need

You are missing out a lot if you don’t know about this book, and I think you really should read it. It provides a lot of advice that might seem contradictory at first if you’ve never been in the indie creator community before, but to me, it nicely organizes all my findings and readings about knowledge in this realm into one single place that I can consume and recall anytime.

If you don’t have time to read the entire book, I’ve saved you the time and put the summarized actionable items below for you to grab. I could have even included an affiliate link here to make a quick buck, but I’m just too lazy, so here we are.

The model for success I described herein looks roughly like this: Focus on your diet first and get that right so you have enough energy to want to exercise. Exercise will further improve your energy, and that in turn will make you more productive, more creative, more positive, more socially desirable, and more able to handle life’s little bumps.

Once you optimize your personal energy, all you need for success is luck. You can’t directly control luck, but you can move from strategies with bad odds to strategies with good odds. For example, learning multiple skills—talent-stacking—raises your odds of success dramatically compared to learning just one or two skills. If you learn to control your ego, you can pick strategies that scare off the people who fear embarrassment, thus competing against a smaller field. And if you stay in the game long enough, luck has a better chance of finding you. Avoid career traps such as pursuing jobs that require you to sell your limited supply of time while preparing you for nothing better.

Happiness is the only useful goal in life. Unless you are a sociopath, your own happiness will depend on being good to others. And happiness tends to happen naturally whenever you have good health, resources, and a flexible schedule. Get your health right first, acquire resources and new skills through hard work, and look for opportunities that will give you a flexible schedule.

Some skills are more important than others, and you should acquire as many of those key skills as possible, including public speaking, business writing, a working understanding of the psychology of persuasion, basic technology concepts, social skills, proper voice technique, good grammar, and the fundamentals of accounting. Develop a habit of simplifying. Learn how to make small talk with strangers and avoid being an asshole. If you get that stuff right—and almost anyone can—you will be hard to stop.

It might help you to think of yourself as a moist robot, not a skin-bag full of magic and mystery. If you control the inputs, you can determine the outcomes, give or take some luck. Eat right, exercise, think positively, learn as much as possible, stay out of jail, and good things can happen.

Look for patterns in every part of life, from diet to exercise. Try to find scientific backing for your observed patterns and use yourself as a laboratory to see if the patterns hold for you.

Most important, understand that goals are for losers and systems are for winners. People who seem to have good luck are often the people who have a system that allows luck to find them. I’ve laid out some systems in this book that seem to work for me. Your experience will differ, but it always helps to be thinking in terms of systems and not goals.

And always remember that failure is your friend. It’s the raw material of success. Invite it in. Learn from it. And don’t let it leave until you pick its pocket. That’s a system.

The End