How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life (30 page)

For the seekers

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To be fair to Nietzsche, he probably meant the word “stronger” to include anything that makes you more capable. I’d ask him to clarify, but ironically he ran out of things that didn’t kill him.

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I should warn you that 75 percent of my analogies involve feces, babies, or Steve Jobs. I do not apologize for that.

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I’m including in my estimate babies, coma patients, and people who have never heard of those games.

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I’m assuming there is such a thing as a dog-brained version of imagination. If not, don’t let the analogy derail the point.

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In my twenties, I took a class to learn hypnosis.

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Yes, I do realize that mentioning the tennis court at my house makes me sound like a gigantic douche bag, but I couldn’t figure out how to tell the story in a less douchey way.

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Changing art to satisfy customers probably makes real artists ill just to think about. I considered myself an entrepreneur, not an artist, so I had no trouble being flexible with my so-called art.

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Simply put, a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow because the dollar you have today can be invested. The math of it is more complicated.

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I’m paraphrasing Arthur C. Clarke’s observation that any sufficiently complex technology is indistinguishable from magic.

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The detailed story of how
Dilbert
grew from a doodle to one of the biggest comic strips in the world is detailed in my twentieth-anniversary book,
Dilbert 2.0: 20 Years of Dilbert.

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The Alexander Technique is a method of moving in a conscious way with the goal of removing tension from your body.

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In the fitness chapter that follows, I’ll talk about exercise and how it influences mood. Diet affects mood by influencing your energy levels and by both directly and indirectly affecting your brain’s chemistry. Exercise does something similar. You need to get both of those things right.
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