How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams
The main idea of this book is not only to accept failure, but to embrace it and actually welcome failure because there are a lot of benefits and lessons learned from failing.
This closely relates to the course in many way. The rate of failure among new ventures is extremely high. A hopeful entrepreneur needs to not only accept that many of their efforts will fail, but welcome the failure and take what they learned and apply it to their next concept.
The exercise I would design would be very similar to our recent "Celebrating Failures" exercise, however, in the grand scheme of things it would be beneficial to look at multiple failures to see if there is a common theme or pattern causing the failure versus focusing on one incident.
I was surprised by Adams' statement about people's use of reason. He insists that expecting people to make rational decisions or base their decisions in reason will only set you up for frustration. I often think in the back of my mind that people do not use basic reason when making decisions, but I have never really considered that my assumption that everyone should be reasonable all the time was a high expectation and that I should accept that people are not going to be reasonable often, if at all.
Hi Victoria!
ReplyDeleteI actually read the same book this week and I really like the overall message of the book. Throughout our lives, we fail countless times. But, we shouldn't be discouraged by our failures. Like you said, we should embrace our failures because they give us life long lessons to learn from. There is always room for improvement and a failure is just the world telling you that there are some things you could improve on. I agree with you where this class relates a lot to this book. The whole semester, we looked at problems within our own lives and created an opportunity. We could do the same things with failure and create an opportunity out of them.
I read the same book which makes me figure that most people wrote a reading reflection about the book. It makes though when you think about it. The assignment before the third reading reflection deals with failure which makes sense for people to read a book about for itself. The theme you wrote about is a summary of what I agreed and wrote as well.
ReplyDeleteVictoria, I like your reflection of the book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams. That is the same book that I read for this assignment. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading these books and think that they have a lot of real-life advice. I like the assignment that you suggested based on this book. I think that would be a very helpful assignment.
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