Reading Review 2

I read “how to fail at pretty much everything and still win big” by Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comics.  The main idea of the book was how he has dealt with his failures and learned from them and stayed motivated which eventually led to his success.  The material in the book connects to the material we’ve learned in class because we’ve learned about how entrepreneurship can be failure after failure but can also lead to great success if the work is out in and the person is dedicated. If I were to design an assignment for this class based on this book it would be a discussion of some of our biggest failures in life and how they actually taught us and shaped us into the people we are today.  One part of this book that really stood out to me was building our lives around systems and not goals.  I never really thought about the inherent issues with setting goals and how actually demotivising they can be if we slip even a little bit off of reaching our exact goal on the exact time frame we had planned, versus having systems that we follow that keep us motivated. The example described is that you can either set a goal of writing 365 new comics every year, or you can say that you’re going to write a comic every day, If you don’t reach the 365 number your whole year was a “failure” where ass if you just don’t happen to write a new comic one day it can easily be seen as a break day.  This is an extremely smart way to look at life, especially when you’re doing something for yourself where there are less strict deadlines the systems will help you remain motivated.