Quotes from Scott Adams

When I speak of priorities I don't mean that in terms of what you love the most. You can love your family more than you love your job and still spend all day working so your family has food and opportunities. Priorities are the things you need to get right so the things you love can thrive.

That was the tipping point for me. I called a meeting with my mother and announced that I was discontinuing my religious education. I explained my new hypothesis that she and all other believers were being duped for reasons I couldn't understand, but I planned to get to the bottom of it. My mother listened to my reasoning, acknowledged that I was making a well-informed decision, and never asked me to attend church again. My mom was awesome that way.

My optimism is like an old cat that likes to disappear for days, but I always expect it to return.

The grand illusion of life is that our minds have the capacity to understand reality. But human minds didn't evolve to understand reality. We didn't need that capability. A clear view of reality wasn't necessary for our survival. Evolution cares only that you survive long enough to procreate. And that's a low bar. The result is that each of us is, in effect, living in our own little movie that our brain has cooked up for us to explain our experiences.

In most groups the craziest person is in control. It starts because no one wants the problems that come from pissing off a crazy person.

If all you know is how many times someone hit a target, it is loserthink to judge how accurate they are. You also need to know how many times they missed.

Generous people take care of their own needs first. In fact, doing so is a moral necessity. The world needs you at your best.

If your view of the world is that people use reason for their important decisions, you are setting yourself up for a life of frustration and confusion. You'll find yourself continually debating people and never winning except in your own mind. Few things are as destructive and limiting as a worldview that assumes people are mostly rational. On

Trump's talent stack is so strong that I believe he could make almost any basket of policies sound good to the public. I will go so far as to say that Trump could have run as a Democrat, embraced Bernie Sanders's entire platform, and won the election that way.

The popular interpretation of how Trump won is that he understood the American people and devised policies that they wanted. My filter says the opposite. It says Trump convinced the public that his policies were the ones they should care about the most. And so they did. Obviously every voter is different, and one variable doesn't explain an election. But my point is that persuasion was more important to the outcome than policies; we just perceive it to be the other way around.

nutrition science wasn't science at all. It was some unholy marriage of industry influence, junk science, and government.

If you think Trump's policies got him elected, you have to explain why his positions substantially changed during the campaign and he still won. My filter explains it perfectly: Trump is so persuasive that policies didn't matter. People voted for him even as his policies were murky and changing.

The business model of the press manipulated our brains until our emotions overwhelmed whatever traces of rationality we started with.

Quality is not an independent force in the universe; it depends on what you choose as your frame of reference.

Public speaking Psychology Business writing Accounting Design (the basics) Conversation Overcoming shyness Second language Golf Proper grammar Persuasion Technology (hobby level) Proper voice technique

Trump knew his Republican base has a strong negative reaction to O'Donnell, so he bonded with them on that point. This is the persuasion method known as pacing and leading. First you match your audience's emotional condition to gain trust, and later you are in a position to lead them.

Good ideas have no value because the world already has too many of them. The market rewards execution, not ideas.

Do you know what the unemployment rate is for engineers? It is nearly zero. Do you know how many engineers like their jobs? Most of them do, despite what you read in Dilbert comics. And the ones who are unhappy with work can change jobs fairly easily. Generally speaking, the people who have the right kind of education have almost no risk of unemployment.

Success isn't magic; it's generally the product of picking a good system and following it until luck finds you.

My failure taught me to seek opportunities in which I had an advantage.

goal is a specific objective that you either achieve or don't sometime in the future. A system is something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run.

What are the odds that you are the first generation of humans who will understand reality?

Good health is a baseline requirement for success.

On August 13, 2015, I predicted in my blog that Donald Trump had a 98 percent chance of winning the presidency based on his persuasion skills. A week earlier, the most respected political forecaster in the United States—Nate Silver—had put Trump's odds of winning the Republican nomination at 2 percent in his FiveThirtyEight.com blog.