The Scott Adams happiness formula, or life lessons from the Dilbert guy

dilbert-career-adviceI’m a big fan of Scott Adams and his irreverent, honest, quirky advice. I read his book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big [Kindle] and wanted to share his happiness formula (in the fulfilling and deep sense of the word and not the light happiness crap peddled by self-help gurus):

  1. Eat right
  2. Exercise
  3. Get enough sleep
  4. Imagine an incredible future (even if you don’t believe it)
  5. Work toward a flexible schedule
  6. Do things you can steadily improve at
  7. Help others (if you’ve already helped yourself)
  8. Reduce daily decisions to routine

Each item is — by itself — a life’s worth of challenges but taken together it’s practical and dare I say MECE? From personal experience #1, 2, 3, 5 and 6 work for me. I need to improve at #4, 7 and 8.

Enjoy!

PS Here are past items I wrote about Scott: on systems and on success

Bertrand Russell on the career treadmill

It’s a shame this book The Conquest of Happiness isn’t more popular. When I finish, I plan to re-read a few pages a day, like I did with Daily Rituals. Keeps it fresh.

Here’s the PDF and other versions.

Here’s Russell in his chapter on competition:

“It is very singular how little men seem to realize that they are not caught in the grip of a mechanism from which there is no escape, but that the treadmill is one upon which they remain merely because they have not noticed that it fails to take them up to a higher level. I am thinking, of course, of men in higher walks of business, men who already have a good income and could, if they chose, live on what they have. To do so would seem to them shameful, like deserting from the army in the face of the enemy, though if you ask them what public cause they are serving by their work, they will be at a loss to reply as soon as they have run through the platitudes to be found in the advertisements of the strenuous life.”

David Brooks on the importance of character and the Greek versus Biblical moral codes

David Brooks is one of my favorite living nonfiction writers. His writing is a rare mix of humility, simplicity and breadth. He thinks deeply about what makes a good person and a good life, questions that are impossible to answer and invaluable to understand yet commonly ignored.

His op-ed The Service Patch is a particular favorite. To quote:

Many of these students seem to have a blinkered view of their options. There’s crass but affluent investment banking. There’s the poor but noble nonprofit world. And then there is the world of high-tech start-ups, which magically provides money and coolness simultaneously. […] In whatever field you go into, you will face greed, frustration and failure. You may find your life challenged by depression, alcoholism, infidelity, your own stupidity and self-indulgence. So how should you structure your soul to prepare for this? Simply working at Amnesty International instead of McKinsey is not necessarily going to help you with these primal character tests. […] It’s worth noting that you can devote your life to community service and be a total schmuck. You can spend your life on Wall Street and be a hero. Understanding heroism and schmuckdom requires fewer Excel spreadsheets, more Dostoyevsky and the Book of Job.

It resonates with the deepest-felt dilemmas of my 20s, which themselves were the result of questions I ignored in my teens, in the pursuit of Ivy League acceptance letters and resume-varnishing job offers.

David Brooks gave the below talk on character at the Aspen Ideas Fest. I took extensive notes with a reminder to review them often. I wanted to share them with you.

Here is how I’d summarize the below

  1. we are mostly good people who aren’t taught about character and its importance in our lives
  2. the Greek character code is based on honor and strength and excellence
  3. the Biblical code is based on humility and love and kindness
  4. it’s the struggle with this duality that makes us who we are
  5. to build character, focus on the right habits, surround yourself with the right people and be organized
  6. religion plays an important role, giving us “awareness of something bigger than yourself”

And here are the full notes:

David Brooks — The Character Code @ Aspen Ideas Fest — REVIEW OFTEN

  • David grew up in Greenwich Village to liberal Jewish parents who hung out with hippies
  • he went to UChicago — “the school where fun goes to die”, a “Baptist school where atheist professors teach Jewish students St. Thomas Aquinas”
  • “world full of good people who don’t have a good vocabulary for character”
  • imagine a world where you have the neutron, gravity, neutrino, but no system to fit them together
  • study asked college students to name a moral dilemma, most couldn’t; when pushed, fell back on a “motive-ism” — what feels right for me is right for me, what feels right for you is right for you
  • existence of uber moms — weigh less than their children; kids raised in this atmosphere are trained in everything, but the most important — character — they’re on their own
  • there’s a character code from history, that we’ve forgotten
    • (a lot of warfare history that I left out)
    • what motivated Athenian decisions?
      • grew up with ideology, inspired by Homer (they quoted him like Christians quote Bible today)
      • an Honor Code based on how transitory/fleeting life is, how deeply insignificant an individual life can be
      • you should fight against that insignificance, behave courageously to achieve eternal fame and glory
    • THE GREEK CODE — “Homeric man risks life to win honor”
      1. extremely competitive; if won Olympic medal, free meals for life
      2. asserts self, brags and shows off
      3. prowess, be excellent at something and display it to the world
      4. lack of self-doubt, very proud
    • the Homeric code, inspired many: Alexander the Great, Napoleon, American founders; Alexander Hamilton called desire for glory “the ruling passion of the noblest minds”
    • seen in sports heroism, all politicians, action movies — brave, strong, never self-doubt
  • there is another code — Moses and the Bible, Jesus
    • Moses is meekest man on Earth
    • bad public speaker, quiet shepherd
    • when anointed by God, he said “you’ve got the wrong guy”
    • Jesus, sermon on the Mount, turns every Greek virtue on its head
    • loftiness of spirit by caring for downtrodden
    • achieve greatness by demonstrating meekness
    • power through dependence on God
    • strength through vulnerability
    • wisdom by accepting ignorance
  • GREEK versus BIBLICAL model
  • Western Civilization tries to fuse the two
    • chivalry — Greek emphasis on honor with Christian emphasis on love
    • Abraham Lincoln personifies — ambition with submission
    • George H.W. Bush — ran for President, but raised not to talk about himself, when he did so in campaigning, his Mom would call him and say, “George, you’re talking about yourself”
  • Joseph Soleveitchik and the two Adams (for more, see Wikipedia), the majestic versus the covenantal; both willed by God, competitive versus cooperative
  • in merging these two strains, we’ve lost them both
    • first, we don’t teach Western Civ anymore
    • lost touch with Heroic code because it’s elitist
    • lost touch with Biblical code because we’re uncomfortable with sin, assumption “that we have it baked into us”
  • “good people who are a little formless”
  • people living this duality
    • Atul Gawande in a famously self-confident profession (surgery), but incredible motivation/modesty to see unpleasant facts; does something daring but starting from feeling of weakness
    • Jim Collins — sort of a moral philosopher, “always celebrating a certain sort of hero”
      • celebrates the quiet unassuming CEO — boring, anal types
      • promotes a sort of moral code — diligent, prepared, Level 5 leaders “extreme personal humility with extreme personal will”
    • Clayton Christensen — spent an hour each day asking, “what is my life about”
  • humility is: not thinking too highly OR too much about yourself, understanding your own weakness and that life is about struggle
  • how do we instill these qualities?
    • “you can’t change your mind and then your behavior, if we did that, New Years resolutions would work”
    • get the little habits right; when they asked Greg Maddux “how’d your day go”, he responded “67 of 73” (as in, 67 pitches left his hand how he wanted, had no control after that)
    • being organized, neat
    • being around exemplars; we are mimic machines — baby at 43 minutes old wagged her tongue in response to a wagging tongue
    • we’re formed by institutions
  • religion has an important role to play
    • grace, gratitude, awareness of something bigger than yourself
    • St Augustine in Confessions said he spent 4 years beating himself up for stealing an apple when he was 14
    • generally most impressive characters he knew were either deeply religious or grew up in religious atmosphere

Quotes: Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Here are 10 recent good ones:

The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile. — Bertrand Russell

Currently reading Russell’s Conquest of Happiness. Highly recommended.

And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. — Ecclesiastes

If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it. — Scott Adams

Scott Adams’s new book How To Fail At Almost Everything is also great.

Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
–Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

…a great poem.

If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all. — John Cage

…if only this were easier to internalize.

It’s been a tough day. No sense making it worse with a salad. — quote from some movie

Yup, salads suck.

It is a most wonderful comfort to sit alone beneath a lamp, book spread before you, and commune with someone from the past whom you have never met. — Yoshida Kenko from Essays in Idleness

Recently finished the above book, will have notes soon.

I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I wish I remembered the books…at least better than the meals.

One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear. — Nietzsche

And a bonus…

True love is the soul’s recognition of its counterpoint in another. I read that on a bumper sticker. — Owen Wilson in Wedding Crashers

Here are a shit-ton of quotes.

Much books

Jose Arcadio BuendiaMy last books review was in July. Just like that, wha-bam, and half a year’s gone!

The bitcoin posts were getting monotonous…hope this helps :)

If you’re going to pick one from the bunch, make it 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marques [Kindle]. Unfortunately there is no ebook version, but I can lend you my paperback.

100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marques — AWESOME!! his genre-birthing style (dubbed ‘magical realism’) is worth experiencing…certain sections left a tingling sensation in my brain, like I’m stuck in a maze and suddenly the walls start to undulate and I can see around corners and through dead-ends…

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway — essays written during his Europe years. When I think of Hemingway, I think of this Murakami quote:

I stop every day right at the point where I feel I can write more. Do that, and the next day’s work goes surprisingly smoothly. I think Ernest Hemingway did something like that. – Murakami

It’s interesting what time and success do to peoples’ reputations. dead-Noble-Prize-winning-Hemingway is untouchable, but while alive he cheated on his wife, wrote anti-Semitic personal letters, was an extreme narcissist…

Essays in Idleness by Yoshida Kenko — some are good, some are wacky

Good: It is a most wonderful comfort to sit alone beneath a lamp, book spread before you, and commune with someone from the past whom you have never met.

Wacky: The one thing a man should not have is a wife. No matter who the woman may be, you would grow to hate her if you lived with her and saw her day in day out, and the woman must become dissatisfied too.

Hyperion by Dan Simmons — the In N’ Out burger of sci-fi…maximum enjoyment:guilt ratio for eating a cheeseburger/reading a sci-fi book

My Struggle by Karl Ove Knaussgard — a literary sensation in his native Norway; something like 1 in 10 Norwegians bought a copy! If you read it, you’ll understand what a masochistic writing process he went through…like dragging yourself naked across a dirty wet floor with your family watching

Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro — my first Ishiguro book; looking forward to more; the butler’s refined sensibilities and attention to detail and respect for tradition…the restrained and complex relationship with Miss Kenton…it’s the Japanese version of Downton Abbey. The ending was pitch-perfect

Waking Up by Sam Harris — began as a sprint, but finished as a slog; he asks an important question: how can we toss the religious bathwater while keeping the spiritual baby? Alain de Botton asks the same question, but where Sam Harris appeals to the left brain (the rational, systematic), ADB appeals to the right (the emotional, empathetic)

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly — here’s the cheatsheet

Wind, Sand, Stars by Antoine de St. Exupery — (nerding out in 3…2…1…) what Lord Elrond did to forge the great sword Anduril, which he gave to Aragorn in LOTR, is what St. Exupery does to the written word…he’s a pure craftsman, every sentence is like a song lyric

Tragic yet fitting that he disappeared flying his beloved plane on a postal mission. This book is a travelogue of those adventures.

Technology Matters by Dan Nye — here’s the cheatsheet

I also re-read some favorites, for the same reason devout Christians read the Bible daily. I’m a devout book-nut.

22 Immutable Laws of Marketing — best of its kind for business psychology and marketing practices

Daily Rituals by Mason Currey — here’s the cheatsheet

So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport — here’s the cheatsheet

The Book of Tao — like static stretching for the brain…pleasant and painful at the same time