Assignment 21A Reading Reflection No. 2

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

1. The general theme or argument of this book is that there is no one size fits all advice guide for success that will work for everyone. You're better off taking away bits and pieces of advice from others and discovering which pieces make sense and work for you.

2. In my opinion, this book relates to the ENT 3003 idea napkin assignments. Scott Adams has failed at just about anything you can imagine. When coming up with your idea napkin, you get feedback from others about it. The negative feedback can be seen as a way of failing. Negative feedback can sometimes make people think they are a failure and they just give up on whatever it is they were attempting to do. Scott explains his technique on how to move on from one failure and use that experience to better yourself as you move forward in life.

3. If I had to design an exercise based on this book I would design something similar to the first assignment we had which was the Bug List. I would have the students create a list identifying 10 failures that they have experienced in their life. Maybe 10 is too many, but there are a lot of ways to experience failure. Next, I would ask them to identify why the failure happened. Was it because they just weren't good enough at something like sports or did they consider they failed because of feedback from others or might it have been a result of peer pressure? Then I would ask them how they dealt with the failures. Did they just give up or did they try a new strategy moving forward? The purpose of this exercise would be for the students to understand that life keeps going and just because you have experienced failure it doesn't mean it's the end of the world.

4. I think my biggest surprise was how Scott describes that goals are for losers and passion is BS. He claims systems are for winners. This differs from what I was always told about how to succeed in life. I don't know how many times I've been told that unless I set goals, I'll never get anywhere. I was also told passion is what drives you to succeed. According to Scott having a system will outdo goals and passion every time. I thought this was a good book and was very funny at times. It's hard to imagine that Scott being a great cartoonist as he is with Dilbert could have failed at all the things he's pretty much tried in the past.