Quotes from Scott Adams

Lately...the Peter Principle has given way to the Dilbert Principle. The basic concept of the Dilbert Principle is that the most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management.

failure is your friend. It is the raw material of success.

Happiness has more to do with where you're heading than where you are.

The power of daydreaming is similar to the power of well-made movies that can make you cry or make you laugh.

Humans think they are rational, and they think they understand their reality. But they are wrong on both counts.

It's smarter to see your big-idea projects as part of a system to improve your energy, contacts, and skills.

If you can't imagine any other explanation for a set of facts, it might be because you are bad at imagining things.

You know you're in a bureaucracy when a hundred people who think 'A' get together and compromise on 'B.

The most effective way to stop people from trying to persuade me is to say, 'I'm not interested.' You should try it. Don't offer a reason why you aren't interested. No one can say why a thing holds interest for some and not for others. There's no argument against a lack of interest.

The elderly are spooky when they degenerate into reflections of their younger selves. They say things that make sense on some grammatical level, but it's not always connected to reality.

Just remember to keep your eye out for ways to maximize your schedule freedom in the long term.

The rest of the universe is like the coin. The events of the past appear to cause the present, but every time we pop back into existence we are subject to a new set of probabilities. Literally anything can happen.

Realistically, the last advice you want to hear when you are in a terrible mood isThink of something happy. If you're experiencing genuine misfortune, you probably just need time and distance to recover. For the truly bad moods, exercise, nutrition, sleep,and time are the smart buttons to push. Once you get back to your baseline level of happiness, you'll be in a better position to get the benefits of daydreaming.

Good ideas have no value because the world already has too many of them.

Inaccurate worldviews are the only kind there is.

Do you think we should put terrorists' opinions in the media? Yes, replied the Avatar. The most basic need of any human being is the need to communicate. If you shut down the nonviolent channels of communication, people will find alternate channels.Terrorism is communication disguised as warfare. If you treat it as war, you cannot stop it. When you treat it as communication, you have a chance to replace it with something less lethal.

The challenge was that the bad ideas sounded terrific to the uninformed person. You couldn't kill these particular bad ideas with logic because the arguments against them would be too complicated. You had to go in through the back door.

Confirmation bias isn't an occasional bug in our human operating system. It is the operating system. We are designed by evolution to see new information as supporting our existing opinions, so long as it doesn't stop us from procreating. Evolution doesn't care if you understand your reality. It only cares that you reproduce.

Every generation before us believed, like Snickers, that it had things figured out. We now know that every generation before us was wrong about a lot of it. Is it likely that you were born at the tipping point of history, in which humans know enough about reality to say we understand it? This is another case where humility is your friend.

The next ring—and your second-biggest priority—is economics. That includes your job, your investments, and even your house. You might wince at the fact that I put economics ahead of your family, your friends, and the rest of the world, but there's a reason. If you don't get your personal financial engine working right, you place a burden on everyone from your family to the country.

If eating a healthy diet feels unpleasant, you're doing it wrong. And you're wasting your limited stockpile of willpower.

This was about the time that my opinion of experts, and authority figures in general, began a steady descent that continues to this day.

I wouldn't be satisfied simply escaping from my prison of silence; I was planning to escape, free the other inmates, shoot the warden, and burn down the prison. Sometimes I get that way. It's a surprisingly useful frame of mind.

Persistence is useful, but there's no point in being an idiot about it.