How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big

Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, structures this second edition of his 2013 book as part memoir, part self-help manual. He weaves together decades of personal failures and hard-won insights into a unified argument: that systematic thinking, personal energy management, and a willingness to fail repeatedly are more reliable paths to success than talent, passion, or goal-setting. A recurring narrative thread, his years-long battle with a rare voice disorder, runs throughout the book and serves as a case study for his methods.

Adams opens by noting the first edition's wide influence and revealing he originally wrote the book for his then-young stepson Justin, who was later killed by fentanyl. He positions himself as a deliberately unreliable narrator, a cartoonist and prankster rather than an expert, and previews the book's key ideas: goals are for losers, the mind is a programmable "moist computer" (4), personal energy is the most important metric, and every skill acquired doubles one's odds of success. He introduces his "Six Filters for Truth," including personal experience, expert opinion, scientific studies, common sense, and pattern recognition, arguing that each is deeply flawed on its own and that the closest anyone can get to truth is consistency across multiple filters.

The book's central narrative thread begins in 2005, when Adams suddenly lost his ability to speak to other humans, even though he could speak normally when alone, recite memorized material, and sing. After doctors at Kaiser Permanente, his healthcare organization, ruled out physical causes, they suggested the problem was psychological. Adams declined medication because the diagnosis did not match how he felt. The loss of speech created severe loneliness. Weeks later, he delivered a scheduled forty-five-minute memorized speaking routine in a raspy but functional voice, only to lose his ability to speak again the moment he returned to normal conversation backstage. The pattern confirmed that the problem originated in his brain, since the context of speech determined whether his vocal cords cooperated.

Adams then challenges the popular advice to follow one's passion. He contends that passion is more often a byproduct of success than its cause, citing a former boss who observed that the best loan customers are dispassionate operators pursuing opportunities that look good on a spreadsheet. His own passion for a restaurant investment evaporated as the business failed, while his initially modest interest in Dilbert grew into passion only after the strip started succeeding.

He catalogs a long series of personal failures: a rejected invention, a disastrous first job interview, obsolete computer games, a large investment in the grocery delivery company Webvan that went to zero, the Dilberito fortified burrito that failed due to poor shelf placement and unpleasant mineral-fortified taste, two failed restaurants, and many other ventures. Each failure, he argues, taught him skills or contacts that proved useful later. His "favorite spectacular failure," a botched accounting firm interview that left him stranded on a freezing highway in the Catskill Mountains, drove him to move to Northern California, which he calls the smartest decision of his life.

Adams introduces his central framework: systems are superior to goals. A goal is a specific objective you either achieve or don't, while a system is something you do regularly that increases your odds of happiness over time. He describes his own system, conceived upon graduating from Hartwick College: learn as much about business as possible through corporate jobs and an MBA, then create something widely desired that could be reproduced in unlimited quantities. His corporate career at Crocker National Bank and Pacific Bell followed this pattern. He rotated through numerous roles without developing deep competence at any of them. When his upward mobility stalled, he began practicing drawing each morning and writing the affirmation "I, Scott Adams, will be a famous cartoonist" (55) fifteen times a day.

He presents personal energy as the most important metric for organizing one's life, advocating for maximizing energy through diet, exercise, sleep, and exciting projects. He arranges life priorities in concentric circles: health at the center, then economics, then family, then community. He argues for "enlightened selfishness," the idea that prioritizing one's own health and energy first is the most socially beneficial choice because it prevents one from becoming a burden and positions one to help others later.

Adams introduces his "Success Formula": every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success. He describes himself as a combination of mediocre skills, including poor art, decent writing, an MBA, early Internet knowledge, and a good sense of humor, that together created a powerful market force. He calls this concept "talent stacking," or combining complementary skills that are individually unremarkable but collectively potent. He recommends acquiring working-level competence in public speaking, psychology, business writing, accounting, design, conversation, persuasion, proper grammar, and voice technique.

A parallel narrative tracks his focal dystonia, a neurological condition that caused his drawing hand to spasm whenever he touched pen to paper. A specialist told him there was no treatment. Through self-directed retraining during meetings at his day job, tapping his pen to paper and gradually extending the duration before spasms, Adams rewired his brain and the condition vanished. When it returned years later, he switched to drawing on a Wacom Cintiq digital monitor, which felt different enough to prevent the trigger.

Six months after losing his voice, Adams connected his voice problem to his earlier hand dystonia and identified his condition as spasmodic dysphonia, a disorder in which the vocal cords clench involuntarily during speech. A specialist confirmed the diagnosis and told him there was no cure. He tried Botox injections, alternative remedies, and detailed tracking spreadsheets, but nothing worked. He continued his affirmation: "I, Scott, will speak perfectly" (186).

Throughout, Adams discusses affirmations and the role of luck. He describes instances in which affirmations appeared to produce improbable results, including scoring exactly the percentile he visualized on the GMAT (a graduate business school entrance exam) and the success of both Dilbert and his bestselling book The Dilbert Principle. He catalogs the extraordinary lucky timing behind Dilbert's rise: a key salesman's replacement, the mid-nineties media focus on corporate downsizing, and the retirements of rival cartoonists that opened unprecedented newspaper space.

Adams devotes substantial attention to diet and fitness, framing both as systems that bypass willpower. His diet approach allows eating as much as desired of anything that is not a simple carbohydrate, freeing willpower for the task of avoiding addictive foods. His fitness philosophy reduces to one rule: be active every day, at a level that does not make you dread exercising the next day.

The voice narrative resolved when a Google Alert led Adams to Dr. Gerald Berke at UCLA Medical Center, who performed a surgery rerouting nerve pathways in the neck to bypass the brain's faulty signals to the vocal cords. Despite a 15 percent chance of no improvement, Adams underwent the procedure. Exactly three and a half months later, his wife Shelly observed him spontaneously produce speech. The syllable-dropping characteristic of spasmodic dysphonia was gone. In a second-edition update, he notes that his voice has continued to improve through daily use, including nearly two hours of livestreaming per day.

Adams closes by summarizing his integrated model: get diet right to fuel exercise, which boosts energy and productivity. Manage luck through talent stacking. Pursue happiness through health, resources, and schedule flexibility. Use systems instead of goals, seek patterns, simplify wherever possible, and treat failure as raw material for success.