Assignment 21A - Reading Reflection No. 2

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

1)    The overall theme of this book is to put yourself first and figure out a reason to get up every morning. The corporate 9-5 lifestyle is no way to live and unless you truly love what you do you are not going to be happy. That is why he puts so much emphasis on finding small things in life that make getting up and grinding worth doing. He also stresses the idea of taking care of yourself, your finances, and your family/community so you don’t become a burden to your family. The whole book is pretty much a guideline for how to live.

2)    I think the book relates to class as it pushes self-development. One of the points that stuck out to me was the success formula. It’s all about how every skill you obtain you double your chances of success. I think that this relates heavily to class as this class pushes you out of your comfort zone in order to acquire new skills and that ultimately leads to better chance of success.

3)    The exercise that I would create would be to first figure out how to create a healthy schedule for yourself that allows you to stay fit and healthy while having plenty of time to get out in the world and work on new things. I think combining this schedule creation with the assignments that have you go out and interview real people would be perfect as it pushes students out of their comfort zones and helps foster that social skill.

4)    The biggest surprise to me while reading this book is his belief that passion doesn’t cause success. I’ve always heard find something you’re passionate about and work at that and you’ll find happiness, which I still think is true, but I guess it depends on what you define success as. Adams beliefs that success causes passion and that is an idea that I haven’t heard before.