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

For example, scientists know that your brain triggers the hunger sensation and hunger hormones like leptin and ghrelin when you don’t get enough sleep.

Eat right, exercise, think positively, learn as much as possible, and stay out of jail, and good things can happen.

My challenge in this chapter is to convince you that if you get one simple thing right—being active every day—all of the other elements of fitness will come together naturally without the need to use up your limited supply of willpower. That last part is the key. In my experience, any form of exercise that requires willpower is unsustainable. To st

My boss’s boss’s boss called me into his office and explained that the order had come down to stop promoting white males.

Your story isn’t a story unless something unexpected or unusual happens. That’s the plot twist.

Simplifying is generally the strategy of people who view the world in terms of systems. The best systems are simple, and for good reason. Complicated systems have more opportunities for failure.

But remember, goals are for losers anyway. It’s smarter to see your big-idea projects as part of a system to improve your energy, contacts, and skills. From that viewpoint, if you have a big, interesting project in the works, you’re a winner every time you wake up.

Back to my point, the enthusiasm model, if I may call it that, is a bit like the x factor. It’s the elusive and hard-to-predict quality of a thing that makes some percentage of the public nuts about it. When the x factor is present, the public—or some subset of the public—picks up on it right away. For the excited few, the normal notions of what co

Free yourself from the shackles of an oppressive reality. What’s real to you is what you imagine and what you feel. If you manage your illusions wisely, you might get what you want, but you won’t necessarily understand why it worked.