How to Fail Your Way to Success

Scott Adams, in new book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, gives us some tips for success that seem contradictory to what we have always thought. Instead of finding your passion and setting goals, he suggests that the path to success is based on suffering defeats, Lot and lots of defeats. Here are his Ten Tips for Failing Your Way to Success.

1. Success is entirely accessible even if you happen to be a huge screw-up 95% of the time
2. Commercial lenders don't want to loan money to someone following their passion because they are in business for the wrong reason and tend to quit when things do not work out. Business success generally goes to someone who has no passion, just a desire to work hard at something that looks good on a spreadsheet.
3. Success causes passion more than passion causes success
4. It's better to have a system instead of a goal. The system is to continuously look for better options.
5. Goal seekers are always short of their goals. They exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary.
6. You can't control luck, but you can move from a game with bad odds to one with better odds. Identify your skill set and choose a system using those skills to vastly improve your likelihood of getting "lucky." There is plenty of luck to go around. Keep your hand raised until it is your turn.
7. If your get-rich-quick project fails, take what you learned and try something else.
8. Have an entrepreneurial plan. Create something the public wants that has value, something that is easy to reproduce in unlimited quantities. Do not try to sell your time because that has upward limits.
9. Good ideas have no value because the world already has too many of them. The market rewards execution, not ideas.
10. You do not try to fail, but failure happens when you try new things. You want your failures to make you stronger. But you also should want your failures to make you smarter, more talented, better networked, healthier and more energized.