Reading Reflection No. 2

1. Scott Adam’s biggest argument of the book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big was that systems are more important than goals. He believes that if you are able to create amazing systems, and do them over and over again, you are going to end up getting lucky and being very successful. In order to be successful, you should study those that have found success in the past. While not everything they do will translate to exactly the business you are trying to start, bits and pieces of it can be. He claims goals are for losers.

2. Scott Adams emphasizes that he failed at many of the ventures he tried to start. For our assignments, we had to find an opportunity in the world that can use a solution. We had to come up with a product or service to be this solution. Through our many assignments, I found out that my service would most likely not be successful. If I actually started it, it would probably never amount to anything. When Adams failed, he did not give up though. We looked for different opportunities in the world that he could capitalize on and did not give up until he was able to reach success. This tells me I should continue looking for opportunities and to do the same.

3. While one can argue that all the assignments we do in this class together can be a system, for an assignment, I would have students try to develop their own system in the beginning of the course. After they decide what opportunity they want to exploit, I would have the students make their own system for getting there. If they do it too late, they may not have the opportunity of trying to come up with one on their own. If they make their own and they go through the one for this class, they will realize what they missed and how they could better their own.

4. The biggest surprise I had when reading this book was that it is bad to be goal-oriented. All my life I was told to make goals. People always tell you how much more likely you are to do something if you make goals and write them down. The author does not support this. While he most likely does not think goals are stupid, he does not find it to be an important piece to achieve success.