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

There have been times I stuck with bad ideas for far too long out of a misguided sense that persistence is a virtue. The pattern I noticed was this: Things that will someday work out well start out well. Things that will never work start out bad and stay that way. What you rarely see is a stillborn failure that transmogrifies into a stellar success

A more practical view is that food is the fuel that makes exercise possible.

I’m here to tell you that the primary culprit in your bad moods is a deficit in one of the big five: flexible schedule, imagination, sleep, diet, and exercise.

You simply need to pick a life strategy that rewards novelty seeking more than mindless repetition. For example, you might want to be an architect, designer, home builder, computer programmer, entrepreneur, Web site designer, or even doctor.

you need to tell yourself you’re acting. Simply speak the way you imagine a confident person would speak and you’ll nail it on the first try.

Once you know whether you are dealing with a thing person or a people person, you can craft your conversation to his or her sweet spot.

If you’re interested in creating written humor, check out The Joy of Work, Dilbert 2.0, and Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain! In those books I talk about the tricks and mechanics of writing humor.

when I hear another language spoken, it all sounds like a clothes drier full of mumbling clowns.

Best of all, and central to the theme of this book, humor raises your energy, and that can reverberate into everything you do at school, at work, or in your personal life. The boost of energy will even make you more willing to exercise, and that will raise your overall energy even more.