We all know success is centrally about passion. Take your passion and make it happen! Follow your passion and success will follow!
No. Passion is bulls–t.
There’s an adage in the loan business: Never give money to someone who is following his passion. The guy who wants to work 90 hours a week running a dry-cleaning store because he thinks it’ll make him rich? He’s the one you to take a chance on, explains ex-loan officer (and ex-a lot of things) Scott Adams, who eventually turned everything he had learned about mediocrity, frustration and failure into the monster money machine that is Dilbert.
Was Dilbert Adams’ passion? No, it was just one of many get-rich schemes he tried. The passion came later, once he discovered it might be his golden ticket, he explains in his new book “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.”
“Success caused passion more than passion caused success,” he says, noting when famous people say their “passion” is what got them to the top, they’re just being nice.
Intelligence is not something everyone has. You can’t say, “I made it big because I’m smarter than you.” (Well, maybe Donald Trump says that.) No one wants to hear that. But passion is democratic. Passion is something anyone can have. Passion is a nice myth we tell ourselves, but after a couple of drinks the average billionaire will probably confess that success was a “combination of desire, luck, hard work, determination, brains and appetite for risk.”
Adams’ book — complete with endnotes citing scientific papers on such topics as humor, diet, exercise and even caffeine consumption — works as a kind of key to the pared-down wisdom of his Dilbert cartoons.
Don’t confuse passion with energy: “You already know when your energy is right you perform better at everything,” Adams explains. Learn to identify and avoid things that drain energy (for him, shopping is one) and maximize the hours when you’re at your best (he works in the morning: “at 6 a.m. I’m a creator, and by 2 p.m. I’m a copier”). Mindless tasks he reserves for the low-energy evening.
But keeping the mental energy flowing means exercise, which also increases your well-being in its own right. Success is strongly correlated with exercise, and simply getting in the habit of taking a break to be active at the same time every day is all you need. What will kill your plans is the ad hoc approach: “ I’ll get to the gym when I have some spare time.” Nobody has spare time except children.
Exercise is part of Adams’ system, an approach he contrasts with being goal-oriented. “Goals are for losers,” he says. Say your goal is to lose 10 pounds: Until you get there, you’ll be short of where you want to be. You’ll feel like a loser. And even if you do drop the poundage, your elation will be short-lived. Soon you’ll realize that the thing that was giving you direction and encouragement is gone. Now what? Better to implement a continuous system: eating better, for instance. Look around and you’ll notice all the system-oriented people. Warren Buffett buys undervalued stocks and holds them, forever. That’s not a goal, that’s a system.
Adams found shyness a major problem in his 20s. He used to go to parties, park his car, break into a sweat, then drive home without talking to anyone. He decided he needed a system, and that was: Being a huge phony. He started interacting with others in character — pretending to be someone who was gregarious. You can get people to like you by asking them to discourse on their favorite subject, which is usually themselves.
(Adams, who lives in the Bay Area and is surrounded by techies, adds a caveat: Learn the difference between things people, who love to talk about gadgets and processes, and people people, who love to talk about humans doing interesting things. Another trick: People automatically think of you as a friend if you share a secret — even if what you’re telling them isn’t exactly highly classified info. “Just between you and me? I only pretend to like Jane’s onion dip.”)
Ultimately, though, how do you define success but simply as being happy? Like a guy who spent a lot of time with spreadsheets in cubicles, Adams has a formula for that. To get to where you want to be, try this sequence: Eat right. Exercise. Get enough sleep. Imagine an incredible future (even if you don’t believe it). Work toward a flexible schedule. Do things you can steadily improve at. Help others (if you’ve already helped yourself). And reduce daily decisions to routine.
Thought of all that already? “Congratulations on being a person who studies the mechanics of success,” Adams writes. “It’s a bigger deal than you might realize.”