Reading Reflection No. 3

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big – Scott Adams

1. The general theme of the book is about the life story of Scott Adams and the lessons that he has learned from his entrepreneurial endeavors in the world. Not only does he talk about the lessons that he has learned, but also all of the failures that he has encountered that led to eventual success and winning big.
2. I believe the biggest lesson that I learned from this book that enhanced what I have been learning from this class is that failure is inevitable in life and you will always end up failing at something. However, how you react to that failure is up to you and will have an impact on how successful you will be in the future after that failure. I think that was an important lesson for me because we are all taught that failing is bad, and we should avoid failing at all costs, but the lessons that we learn from failing are just as important because it teaches us the post-failure thought process and how we respond to that failure in the future.
3. An assignment that I would design for this class would be like one we already have is the “Celebrating Failure” assignment. However, I would adjust the assignment from something that we have already failed at and how we felt about it afterward to trying something that we haven’t experienced or done before, failing at it, and what our thought process is after we have failed at it. I think the task of doing something that we have never done before, failing at it, and seeing how we reacted to it is important for us to learn that not everything we are going to immediately good at and failure is to be expected in certain situations.
4. For this book, the ‘aha’ moment for me was the lesson from Scott Adams that instead of building goals for our lives that we should build systems. This stood out to me because everyone has goals they want to accomplish and hope to do so in the future. Scott Adams talked about goals having two inherent flaws in them as one, they are in the future, and two, they are specific. When it comes to the future portion, goals are set at an unknown date for us and without having that ‘system’ of having it done on this certain day can be depressing. For the specific portion, when we set goals, they are clearly defined by us and if we don’t reach that exact definition for the goal, it can be disappointing for us. Adams states that with systems, we are able to adjust the plans within them and that each day of accomplishing a part of the system is a success for you.