How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big

What if you could fail at almost everything in life—your inventions, your investments, your jobs—and still come out ahead? In How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip Dilbert, argues that success isn’t about winning every battle, setting perfect goals, or having superhuman talent. Instead, it’s about developing a personal system—a repeatable way of working, learning, and staying energized so that luck is more likely to find you.

Adams contends that the world rewards persistence, optimism, and understanding your “energy engine” more than it rewards raw intelligence or passion. His core argument is both simple and subversive: systems beat goals, and the best way to win in life is to become a skill-stacking, failure-loving, energy-optimizing “moist robot.”

Over the course of the book—part memoir, part self-improvement manifesto—Adams shares his own string of humiliating and hilarious failures: the Velcro Rosin Bag invention, a failed restaurant venture, a burrito brand called the “Dilberito,” doomed software projects, and even a voice disorder that once left him mute. The fact that he managed to turn this endless reel of embarrassments into success is the mystery he sets out to unpack.

The Problem with Goals and the Beauty of Systems

Adams distinguishes between goal-oriented thinking, which focuses on achieving a specific outcome, and systems thinking, which focuses on repeated processes that increase your odds of success over time. Goal seekers constantly live in a state of “pre-success failure,” while systems thinkers win every day they perform their process. If your system is to exercise daily or learn new skills continually, you’re a success every time you act on it. (Jim Collins’ Good to Great and James Clear’s Atomic Habits echo this philosophy: consistent systems, not burning ambition, create greatness.)

Adams claims his own system—“keep trying things until something works”—is what made Dilbert possible. Every failure gave him new skills, contacts, and insights. The “losing” invention that went nowhere became the stepping stone to a new business idea, which improved his future odds. The punchline: if you fail ninety-nine percent of the time but stay in the game, you only need to be lucky once.

From Passion to Energy: A Different Success Metric

In one of the book’s most provocative ideas, Adams argues that “passion is bullshit.” The idea that all you need is passion, he says, is survivor bias in disguise—people get passionate about what works. What actually fuels performance and persistence isn’t passion but personal energy. If you optimize your diet, sleep, exercise, schedule, and mindset to keep your energy high, you’ll naturally perform better at everything.

Adams measures his decisions by one guiding question: “Does this choice raise or lower my personal energy?” When your energy is high, everything else improves—your work, creativity, relationships, and resilience. He calls this the “Energy Metric,” suggesting that you should organize your life around energy just as capitalism organizes businesses around profit. Energy management becomes the central “operating system” of all success systems.

The Moist Robot: Reprogramming Yourself for Success

Adams invites readers to think of themselves as “moist robots”—biological machines whose outputs depend on their inputs. Change the food, information, and people you surround yourself with, and you change who you are. He urges you to take control of the inputs by adjusting your physical environment, daily habits, and associations. This mechanical metaphor dismantles magical thinking: you aren’t “willed” into success; you’re programmed by repetition and environment.

This model leads directly to one of the book’s recurring themes—association programming. Humans unconsciously imitate the people around them. If you spend time with winners, strivers, or health-conscious peers, those traits seep into your “code.” (This aligns with concepts from Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit and Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code—environment shapes behavior far more than willpower does.)

Stacking Skills to Multiply Luck

Adams popularized the career strategy of “talent stacking”: being not the best at any one skill but moderately good at several complementary ones. He’s not a world-class artist, writer, or entrepreneur—but the combination of those skills made Dilbert unique and commercially unstoppable. Each skill you add doubles your odds of success, he says, because good + good > excellent.

To “stack your talents,” learn broadly useful, transferable skills—communication, public speaking, business writing, persuasion, psychology, basic design, and technology. The more loops you add to your system, the more places luck can find you. This concept parallels Cal Newport’s “career capital” in So Good They Can’t Ignore You: becoming valuable through skill accumulation beats chasing a single passion.

The Broader Payoff: Happiness, Health, and Controlled Luck

Ultimately, Adams extends his framework beyond career success into health, happiness, and meaning. Happiness, he argues, is chemistry—more a function of diet, sleep, imagination, and exercise than circumstances. Health and consistent exercise raise your physical “baseline happiness.” Systems and affirmations build optimism, which, in turn, makes you an easier target for luck. And while luck can’t be controlled directly, it can be invited through persistent action, practice, and preparation—what he calls “staying in the game.”

By presenting failure as the raw material of success, Adams challenges the culture of instant wins and passion-chasing. His message resonates because it’s fundamentally encouraging: you don’t have to be exceptional, perfect, or even disciplined all the time. You just need a system that keeps you energized, learning, and in motion. Luck will do the rest.

Scott Adams opens the central pillar of his philosophy with a provocation: “Goals are for losers.” Not because goals are inherently bad, but because the way most people use them guarantees chronic dissatisfaction. A goal defines success as a single future event (“lose ten pounds,” “get promoted”)—until you reach it, you’re living in pre-success failure. Systems, by contrast, are repeatable processes that create ongoing wins and position you for luck to strike.

The Prison of Goals

In Adams’s “goal” framework, you’re chasing an outcome that you may never reach. The process itself becomes a treadmill of disappointment. When you finally hit the goal, you lose the thing that gave your days structure and meaning, which forces you into the next cycle of failure. “You exist in a state of continuous pre-success failure,” he writes. That mindset drains energy.

By contrast, a system is something you do regularly that improves your odds of happiness and success, regardless of any particular result. For health, the goal might be “lose 10 pounds.” The system would be “eat healthy every day.” For work, the goal might be “get promoted.” The system is “produce one new value-creating idea each week.” You don’t win or lose—you just keep improving. (James Clear’s Atomic Habits later builds on this principle by emphasizing identity-driven systems over outcome-based goals.)

Systems Invite Luck

Adams’s story of becoming a cartoonist illustrates this perfectly. He didn’t decide “I will be a famous cartoonist and nothing else.” His system was to wake up at 4 a.m. every morning, practice drawing, study humor and business, and send samples to publishers. He failed over and over with restaurants, inventions, and gadgets. But each experiment built new skills—marketing, sales, technology, product design—that eventually combined into a system that could produce success once luck showed up in the form of a syndication deal.

Measuring Success Daily

The great advantage of systems is emotional: they let you feel successful right away. Every time you follow your system, you win. You’re no longer dependent on a single external victory—you live in a self-reinforcing success loop. Adams insists this mindset doesn’t just make you happier; it keeps you in motion long enough for luck to find you—something goal chasers rarely sustain.

Adams believes that success is rarely about being the best at one thing—it’s about being pretty good at several things that work well together. He calls this method “talent stacking.” The idea is mathematical: every new skill you acquire roughly doubles your odds of success because it opens up new combinations of abilities that few others share.

Good + Good > Excellent

Rather than becoming a world-class expert—a nearly impossible path for most people—Adams argues that being in the top 25% of multiple valuable skills gives you a competitive edge. For instance, being a good writer, decent artist, and competent businessperson made Adams uniquely suited to create Dilbert. His combination of skills was rare even though none were exceptional individually. (This echoes the idea from Range by David Epstein—that generalists thrive in complex environments where cross-domain thinking matters.)

The Success Formula

He simplifies it into an equation: Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success. This exaggeration is symbolic, not statistical, but it creates a useful mental model. Each new competency gives you more ways to combine, adapt, and spot opportunities others can’t see. Learn communication, business writing, psychology, persuasion, design basics, and technology at a hobby level, and you suddenly have a unique “stack” others don’t. Adams calls this “hacking the math of luck.”

Becoming Luck’s Favorite Target

Skill stacking doesn’t guarantee success, but it rigs the game in your favor. The broader your skill set, the more likely one combination will intersect with the right opportunity at the right time. Adams’s formula reframes life as a probability game rather than a quest for passion. His model also humanizes learning: you don’t need to be world-class—just interesting and useful in more than one way.

If you only tracked one measure of your life progress, Adams says it should be your personal energy. Like a business depends on profit, your life runs on energy. The more energy you have, the better decisions you make, the more likable and productive you become, and the more opportunities you notice and attract. Energy is the invisible link among fitness, happiness, and success.

Energy as a Guiding Metric

Adams’s decision rule for nearly every choice is: “If it increases my energy, I do it. If it drains me, I don’t.” This principle shapes everything from what he eats to what projects he takes on. For example, he quit soul-depleting corporate meetings at Pacific Bell to focus on the creative work that energized him—cartooning at 4 a.m. before work.

Selfishness That Serves Others

In what he calls the “selfishness illusion,” Adams argues that rational selfishness—taking care of your own health, career, and relationships first—is the most generous life strategy. When you’re stable, happy, and high-energy, you become a net positive to society. Think of it as putting your own oxygen mask on before helping others. Once your needs are met, generosity flows naturally. (This parallels Ayn Rand’s idea of “enlightened self-interest,” though Adams’s tone is more playful than ideological.)

Energy Habits

To sustain energy, Adams focuses on simple self-maintenance: sleep, nutrition, moderate daily exercise, laughter, optimism, and control over one’s schedule. Managing energy isn’t selfish—it’s systemic. When you run out of it, your work, relationships, and even generosity collapse. Therefore, maximizing energy is the foundation from which all other systems derive power.

Adams doesn’t glorify failure for its own sake—he treats it as a renewable resource. Every failure, he says, generates something valuable: knowledge, skills, connections, or resilience. The key is to extract and repurpose that value deliberately.

He lists his “favorite failures” with pride—dozens of flopped inventions, business ideas, patents, and ventures from Foldaroo folders to the fart-inducing “Dilberito.” Rather than conceal them, he autopsies each one to extract a principle. The Velcro Rosin Bag failure, for example, taught him that ideas are cheap; execution is what the market rewards. His restaurant collapse taught him about timing and overhead costs. His tech ventures failed because of premature environments. But every flop left him smarter and keener for the next experiment.

The Nietzsche Upgrade

Adams revises Nietzsche’s cliché “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Strength isn’t enough, he says—you should come out of each failure smarter, more connected, and more energized. If you find a cow’s mess on your doorstep, don’t just clean it up—use it as fertilizer. That’s failure-thinking reimagined as resource management.

Failing Forward and Managing Odds

Success hides inside large piles of failure. The way to win is to fail efficiently: learn fast, spend little, and pivot when things stagnate. “Success is accessible even if you’re a screw-up 95 percent of the time,” he jokes. The difference between losers and lifelong learners, according to Adams, is that one stops after defeat and the other harvests the data and keeps playing.

Adams argues humans are “moist robots” who absorb traits, energy, and habits from those around them through what he calls association programming. The people in your proximity quietly rewrite your internal code. It’s not mystical—it’s behavioral contagion.

He recalls once mocking a coworker for believing he could “get rich by living near rich people.” Years later, Adams changed his mind. People in thriving environments—whether corporate, social, or physical—transfer success-enabling attitudes by osmosis. Just like AA supports sobriety by surrounding members with abstainers, being near fit or optimistic people literally programs your behavior. (The same idea appears in Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich and modern network theory research on behavioral contagion.)

Programming Your Environment

Your environment is an editing tool for who you become. Want to exercise? Spend time in a gym or with active people. Want success? Move near industrious optimists. You can’t change your entire network overnight, but you can control small environmental cues—what you watch, read, and where you work—that constantly reprogram your habits. Adams’s humor for “avoid trespassing, kidnapping, or stalking” underlines how literal he wants you to take this advice: physical proximity matters.

By deliberately shaping who and what surrounds you, Adams says, you can manipulate your future self the same way a computer engineer rewrites code—input by input, contact by contact.

Adams’s stories of affirmations—writing statements like “I, Scott, will be a number-one bestselling author” daily—are among the book’s most controversial and entertaining parts. He insists he’s not promoting magic; affirmations are psychological tools, not spells. But through selective attention and sustained focus, they may still appear miraculous.

Affirmations as Mental Programming

Repeating a desire conditions your subconscious to notice relevant opportunities and stay optimistic long enough to seize them. Adams recounts writing affirmations before he became a bestselling author; shortly after, The Dilbert Principle hit #1 on The New York Times list. Skeptics call it coincidence or false memory, but Adams argues that any process that keeps you motivated and hopeful increases your odds of success anyway.

Optimism as Luck Magnet

Affirmations work partly because optimism amplifies your perception of opportunity. Studies show optimists spot chances pessimists overlook. Adams equates affirmations to “luck training.” When you expect good things, your brain subconsciously filters the world for supporting evidence. Even if affirmations are placebo effects, he says, they’re harmless and energy-boosting—unlike most psychological plumbing.

Science Meets Mystery

Adams playfully entertains deeper possibilities—false memory, simulation theory, or subconscious pattern recognition—but keeps his conclusion grounded: even if affirmations don’t shift the universe, they shift you. Repeated self-programming increases focus, courage, and endurance—qualities every system relies on.

Adams dismantles the notion that happiness is a mysterious, spiritual state. It’s chemistry—endocrine, metabolic, and neurological. He defines happiness as your brain experiencing the right biochemistry. That’s why lifestyle—sleep, diet, movement—affects happiness more than external success. It’s the 80/20 rule of joy.

Flexibility Over Riches

Adams argues that a flexible life schedule correlates more strongly with happiness than wealth. Parents of young children, despite abundance, are often miserable because they lose schedule control. A person with moderate income but daily autonomy scores higher on happiness. “Happiness has more to do with being able to do what you want when you want than having everything you want,” he writes.

The Five Levers of Happiness

• Flexible schedule
• Powerful imagination (optimism as visualization)
• Sleep
• Diet and exercise
• Continuous improvement (progress chemistry)

These create the body’s happiness “chemistry lab.” Neglect them, and even winning the lottery won’t fix your mood. Get them right, and you’ll feel fulfilled before any external validation.

Adams also embraces routine as a happiness amplifier. The fewer trivial decisions you make—like what to wear or when to work—the more mental energy remains for meaningful actions. Happiness, then, is engineered, not discovered.

Adams closes his life philosophy with a pragmatic view of luck: you can’t control it, but you can become a better target for it. Success is luck filtered through preparation, timing, and systems. He shows that many of his own wins were the right idea at the right time—Dilbert during the tech boom, online comics at the dawn of the Internet, even Wacom tablets arriving just as his hand injury threatened his career.

The Math of Luck

In his metaphor, life is like a slot machine that costs you time instead of money. Every time you pull the lever—start a project, meet people, test an idea—you increase the odds of winning eventually. Most people stop pulling too soon. Adams insists that if you “stay in the game” with energy and optimism, luck is statistically guaranteed to hit eventually.

Timing and Persistence

Timing, he admits, is the biggest invisible factor in success. Webvan failed at online grocery delivery not because the idea was wrong but because it was too early. YouTube won with perfect timing. Since timing is largely uncontrollable, the best strategy is to stay alive and keep testing until one of your timing bets aligns by chance.

Adams wraps with humility: even his voice recovery after neurosurgery, seemingly the product of luck, was made possible by persistence and preparation. His lesson: don’t chase luck—stack the odds, sustain energy, and survive long enough for luck to find you.