Quotes from Scott Adams

One of the best pieces of advice I've ever heard goes something like this: If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it.

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. It's just smarter and easier sometimes to let the crazy person have his or her way. Crazy

Most people think they have perfectly good bullshit detectors. But if that were the case, trial juries would always be unanimous, and we'd all have the same religious beliefs.

When it comes to skills, quantity often beats quality.

It could be said that the dishes used human beings in a symbiotic relationship, convincing us through their usefulness to make new dishes.

Focusing on the past when the present offers sufficient paths to success is loserthink. It is better to focus on your own systems for success, and when you succeed, watch how winning fixes most problems.

Assuming scientists are human, you would expect lots of peer-reviewed studies to be flawed.

As a trained persuader, I prefer not to join any kind of tribe. Doing so triggers an automatic bias toward tribe opinion and blinds one to better thinking. It also marks you as an enemy to competing tribes.

If you believe people use reason for the important decision in life, you will go through life feeling confused and frustrated that others seem to have bad reasoning skills. The reality is that reason is just one of the drivers of our decisions, and often the smallest one. People who study hypnosis see others as moist machines that are simply responding to inputs with programmed outputs. No reasoning is involved beyond eliminating the most absurd options.

that people are more influenced by visual persuasion, emotion, repetition, and simplicity than they are by details and facts.

When you identify as part of a group, your opinions tend to be biased toward the group consensus.

From the moment technology allowed us to know which kinds of content influenced viewership the most, the old business model of the news industry was dead media walking. From that point through today, the business model of the press changed from presenting information to manipulating brains.

Decisiveness Decisiveness looks like leadership. Keep in mind that most normal people are at least a little bit uncertain when facing unfamiliar and complicated situation. What people crave in that sort of environment is anything that looks like certainty. If you can deliver an image of decisiveness, no matter how disingenuous, others will see it as leadership.

Asshole behaviors: Changing the subject to him/herself Dominating conversation Bragging Cheating, lying Disagreeing with any suggestion, no matter how trivial Using honesty as a justification for cruelty Withholding simple favors out of some warped sense of social justice Abandoning the rules of civil behavior, such as saying hello or making eye contact

Mental prison: The illusions and unproductive thinking that limit our ability to see the world clearly and act upon it rationally.

People are more influenced by the direction of things than the current state.

keep in mind that California schools still teach French for some ridiculous reason, so clearly someone hasn't gotten the commonsense memo. Golf

Humans are hardwired to reciprocate favors. If you want someone's cooperation in the future, do something for that person today.

You already know that when your energy is right you perform better at everything you do, including school, work, sports, and even your personal life. Energy is good. Passion is bullshit.

Persuasion is effective even when the subject recognizes the technique. Everyone knows that stores list prices at $9.99 because $10.00 sounds like too much. It still works.

expongo algunas formas nuevas de pensar en el proceso para alcanzar la felicidad y el éxito. Compárelas con lo que ya sabe, lo que hace y lo que le sugieren otros. Cada persona encuentra su propia fórmula especial.

The things that you think about the most will irrationally rise in importance in your mind.

The secret to thwarting couch lock of any sort is to stop imagining everything you need to do, and start imagining the smallest step that you can do without much real effort.

My main job for the past few decades has been creating Dilbert. Making comics is a process by which you strip out the unnecessary noise from a situation until all that is left is the absurd-yet-true core.