How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

1. Energy
   • Selfish – Taking care of yourself before attending to your family, tribe, country or the world will allow you to be more generous in the long-term
   • Fitness – Be active everyday. Allow leakage in system, you can back out anytime.
   • Diet – You can retrain brain to like healthy food. Pay attention to energy levels after eating things. Eat as much healthy food as you want. Learn to season food.
   • Matching – Match your energy levels with your activity. Do creative work in morning, mechanical/mundane at night.
   • Follow Rules or Formulas – You can use rules that guide behavior even if they’re not 100% correct or even if you don’t understand how they work
     • In a resume, imagine you get $100 for each unnecessary word you remove
     • Each new skill doubles your odds of success
     • Think about how your project will change the world, how we see the world will impact how you act
     • All my affirmations worked out e.g. “I, Scott Clark, will become a famous cartoonist”
2. Success
   • Failures are the ingredients of success, make sure you learn from them
   • Don’t wish for success, figure out the price and pay it
   • Luck is a major factor. World is a slot machine that asks for focus, time, and energy. Keep pulling to increase your odds.
   • Best way to discern best path for success is trying a lot of stuff
   • Know when to quit, things that work usually start out well
   • See what people do with your product, not say
   • Patterns I noticed in successful people: Not fearing embarrassment, right kind of education and exercise.
3. Most Useful Skills
   • Public Speaking – Took Dale Carnegie course. Magical power of positive reinforecement.
   • Psychology
     • Embedded in everything we do
     • People are not rational
     • Anything you don’t understand can be used against you
     • List of Cognitive Biases from Wiki 
   • Business Writing – Simple and active voice. Makes you seem smarter and more persuasive.
   • Accounting – Basic understanding. Need to be able to check work in meaningful way.
   • Design – It is rules-based. Learn a few tricks.
   • Conversation
     • Ask questions and try to find point of mutual interest
     • Don’t talk about boring stuff
     • Don’t dominate conversation
     • Keep moving to other topics
     • Learn to tell a story: setup, previous pattern, foreshadow, characters, relatability, twist
   • Overcome Shyness – Understand most people feel awkward. Act like someone more confident.
   • Persuasion – Because, would you mind, I’m not interested, I don’t do that, I have a rule, let me clarify, is there anything you can do for me, this is just between you and me
   • Technology – Hobby level
   • Proper Voice
     • Serious voice should be deeper
     • Breathe from bottom of lungs
     • Higher pitch if a lot of background noise
     • Posture is important
   • Humor
     • Makes you more attractive and raises energy
     • Effort and attitude count a lot
     • Don’t complain, overdo self-deprecating, mock, puns
     • Tailor humor to crowd
     • Men prefer engineer humor (unlikely or surprising solutions)
4. Summary
   • Optimize personal energy
   • Learn multiple skills
   • Avoid career traps that trade time for money
   • We are programmable moist robots, control your inputs