How to Fail at Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life, by Scott Adams
The general theme of this book was definitely about failure. Adams has failed at so many things in his life, but no matter what it was he kept fighting and eventually made it work. The message is to just keep trying and pursuit whatever you want too, and what you believe in.
I think this connects completely with what I've learned in Ent3003. One of the major messages throughout this course has been that failure is necessary in order to succeed in the long term. If one never fails, they likely aren't challenging themselves and truly trying to accomplish success. Entrepreneurs describe this mantra perfectly. So many successful business owners started by failing at creating their own business, and lost money. After learning from this mistakes however, they become more successful, showing that learning from mistakes is critical.
I'd say this exercise would involve a month long project where a student must start a project/business, try their hardest to make it work, and then analyze the mistakes made at the end of the project. The objective wouldn't be to start a successful business, since doing so in a month is impossible. This project would however show what it takes to start a business and give students a much better perspective on entrepreneurship than simply reading a book would.
One aha moment when reading this book was when Adams discussed passion. Adams alludes to a concept called personal energy. He claims that passion is something fake, and has a certain mystique too it. Personal energy however is what gets a person excited and feeling energized. He goes on to say one should do what gives them personal energy, which is a concept I completely agree with.
Hi Nick,
ReplyDeleteI think it's interesting that the book you chose to read for this reflection was loosely related to your previous post about failure. It seems like you were able to effectively learn from your previous failures as a result of reading this book. I agree that an interesting 'aha' moment would've been when Adams was discussing passion. Thanks for sharing.
Hey Nick,
ReplyDeleteI like how you connected the story of Scott Adams to the fact that failure happens to everybody and we all learn from it. It is unbelievable how many entrepreneurs start off failing; it seems like almost every single one has failed before. In every aspect of life, we must try to take something positive away from it.