(2013-10-15) Adams How To Be Successful

Scott Adams on HowTo Be Successful (Remarkable Life?).

You often hear them say that you should "follow your Passion"... When I was a commercial loan officer for a large bank, my boss taught us that you should never make a loan to someone who is following his passion. For example, you don't want to give money to a sports enthusiast who is starting a sports store to pursue his passion for all things sporty. That guy is a bad bet, passion and all. He's in business for the wrong reason... For most people, it's easy to be passionate about things that are working out, and that distorts our impression of the importance of passion... Dilbert started out as just one of many get-rich schemes I was willing to try. When it started to look as if it might be a success, my passion for cartooning increased because I realized it could be my golden ticket. In hindsight, it looks as if the projects that I was most passionate about were also the ones that worked. But objectively, my passion level moved with my success.

Forget about goals, too... To put it bluntly, goals are for losers... (No Goals)

My system of creating something the public wants and reproducing it in large quantities nearly guaranteed a string of failures. By design, all of my efforts were long shots... But being systems-oriented, I felt myself growing more capable every day, no matter the fate of the project that I happened to be working on... I've long seen failure as a tool, not an outcome (MindSet).