Mark: Follow your passion. It's the most common career advice you'll ever get. But what if it's also the most destructive? What if the creator of one of the world's most successful comics thinks passion is, and I'm quoting here, 'bullshit'? Michelle: Whoa, okay. 'Passion is bullshit' is a strong opening. That's fighting words for the entire self-help industry. Who is this cynical genius? Mark: This comes from Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, in his book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. And what's fascinating is that Adams wasn't some artist who just followed his muse. He was a full-time corporate employee at Pacific Bell for years, even after Dilbert launched. He literally built his creative empire from a cubicle, which gives his advice a very unique, real-world grit. Michelle: I love that. It’s not advice from a mountaintop, it’s from the trenches of corporate America. That already makes me trust him more. But his contrarian thinking doesn't stop with passion, does it? Mark: Not even close. His first big rule for success is even more shocking: Goals are for losers.

Michelle: Hold on. 'Goals are for losers'? That sounds like something a loser would say to feel better about not achieving their goals. Come on, Mark, defend this! Mark: I know, it feels like a personal attack on every New Year's resolution ever made. But his logic is surprisingly sound. He tells this great story from when he was a young man on his first flight to California. He’s sitting next to a CEO of a manufacturing company, a guy in his sixties who’s clearly made it. Michelle: Okay, a classic mentor-on-a-plane moment. Mark: Exactly. And the CEO gives him this piece of advice that Adams says changed his life. The CEO said, "Your job is not your job; your job is to find a better job." It wasn't about a specific goal, like 'become a vice president.' It was a continuous system of always looking, always learning, always being ready for the next opportunity. Michelle: That’s a subtle but powerful shift. It’s a process, not a destination. Mark: Precisely. And that’s the core of his argument. Adams says goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous pre-success failure. If your goal is to lose 20 pounds, you are a failure every single day until you hit that exact number. It's psychologically punishing. You're constantly falling short. Michelle: And if you never hit it, you're in a state of permanent failure. I know that feeling. It’s draining. Mark: Right. But a systems-oriented person succeeds every single time they apply their system. If your system is to "eat right every day," then every day you do that, you get a little jolt of success. You win. It builds momentum and energy, rather than draining it. Michelle: So a goal is 'run a marathon,' but a system is 'run three times a week.' The system gives you constant positive feedback, while the goal just makes you feel like a failure until the very end, if you even make it. Mark: You've got it. The marathon runner feels like a failure for months. The systems-runner feels like a success every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Which person do you think has more energy to keep going? It reframes your entire relationship with progress. Michelle: Wow. Okay, I'm sold. That actually makes perfect sense. It’s about winning the day, not just the war. Mark: And it’s a pattern you see with incredibly successful people. Warren Buffett doesn't have a goal to 'make a billion dollars this year.' He has a system: buy undervalued companies and hold them for the long term. He applies the system, and the success is a byproduct. Michelle: It’s less about willpower and more about designing a better game to play. A game where you can win every day.

Michelle: Okay, I'm starting to see the logic. If you're not chasing a big, shiny goal, you can't be guided by a big, shiny passion either. It all kind of falls apart. So what do you follow? Mark: You follow your energy. Adams argues that passion is a terrible compass. He says, and this is another one of his brilliant, provocative lines, "Success caused passion more than passion caused success." Michelle: That flips everything on its head. We’re told to find our passion and it will lead us to success. He’s saying find success, and it will lead you to your passion. Mark: Exactly. He tells this story about investing in a restaurant with a partner. On opening day, there was a line out the door, and his passion was at a 10/10. He was a restaurateur! He loved it! A few months later, when the business was struggling, his passion was at zero. He just found it annoying. The passion was a direct result of the success, or lack thereof. Michelle: I can definitely relate to that. I’m passionate about hobbies I’m good at. The ones I’m terrible at? Not so much. Mark: And he contrasts that with Dilbert. He says he started drawing Dilbert as just one of a dozen get-rich-quick schemes he was trying. He wasn't particularly passionate about cartooning over, say, his idea for a new computer game. But as Dilbert started showing tiny signs of life, getting a few positive letters, getting picked up by a few papers, his passion for it grew. Michelle: The success fed the passion. Mark: Yes. So his advice is to stop looking for passion and start managing your personal energy. Think of your life as an energy-maximization problem. What gives you energy? What drains it? Make choices that increase your energy, because that’s the fuel for everything else—your work, your relationships, your health. Michelle: That feels so much more practical. Passion is this big, vague, mystical thing. Energy is something you can actually feel and influence day-to-day. Did I exercise? Did I eat well? Did I talk to someone who inspires me? Mark: Right. He says a simple walk can do more for your success than a dozen passion-fueled all-nighters, because the walk boosts your energy for the next day, while the all-nighter creates an energy debt. Michelle: This is a tough pill to swallow for a lot of people. It feels so... unromantic. But it's also incredibly liberating. It means you don't have to wait for some mythical 'calling' to start building something. You can just start with what gives you energy today. Mark: It’s not about romance; it’s about math. And Adams has a simple, powerful formula for it.

Michelle: The math of success? Now you've got my attention. I'm picturing a blackboard with complex equations. Mark: It's much simpler, and more powerful. His formula is this: Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success. Michelle: Doubles? That sounds a little too good to be true. Mark: He admits it's a simplification, but it's a useful one. The core idea is what he calls "skill stacking." The world is full of people trying to be in the top 1% of one specific field—the best basketball player, the best singer, the best coder. The odds of achieving that are astronomical. Michelle: Right, that's the traditional path to success. Be the best. Mark: Adams offers an alternative. He says it's much easier and more effective to become pretty good—say, top 25%—at several different things. He uses himself as the prime example. He says, "I'm a poor artist. I'm not a trained writer. My business knowledge is from an MBA, which is useful but not genius-level. I'm only passably funny." None of his individual skills are world-class. Michelle: That’s a pretty humble assessment from the guy who created Dilbert. Mark: But here's the magic. He stacked those mediocre skills. Bad art + decent business writing + a sense of humor + early knowledge of the internet from his day job. That specific combination was incredibly rare and incredibly valuable. No world-class artist had his corporate insights. No MBA had his cartooning hobby. The stack was his superpower. Michelle: So it's not about being a 10/10 artist. It's about being a 6/10 artist, a 7/10 writer, and a 7/10 business person, and that combination is rarer and more valuable than a 10/10 in just one thing. That's a game-changer for anyone who feels like they're not 'the best' at anything. Mark: It is! And failure is the price you pay to acquire those skills. He lists his failures with pride. He tried to invent a Velcro rosin bag for tennis. Failure. But he learned about patents and manufacturing. He tried to create computer games. Failure. But he learned programming. He started a food company called the "Dilberito." A spectacular, multi-million dollar failure. But he learned about food distribution, marketing, and retail. Michelle: So every failure wasn't just a failure; it was the acquisition of a new skill for his stack. Mark: Exactly. He says, "Failure always brings something valuable with it. I don’t let it leave until I extract that value." He was building his skill stack one failure at a time, preparing for the moment when luck would find him.

Michelle: When you put all three of those ideas together—systems over goals, energy over passion, and skill stacking over mastery—it paints a completely different picture of what it takes to succeed. Mark: It really does. Adams is giving us a blueprint for engineering luck. You stop chasing singular, high-stakes goals that set you up for failure. You focus on a daily system that builds your energy and stacks your skills. You embrace small failures as the price of acquiring those skills. Michelle: You're not waiting for a lightning strike of passion or genius; you're just consistently pulling the handle on the slot machine, knowing that your system has loaded the odds in your favor. Mark: That's the perfect analogy. He sees the world as a slot machine that doesn't ask for money, only your time, focus, and energy to keep pulling the handle. A system ensures you have the energy to pull it every day. Skill stacking ensures that each pull has a slightly better chance of hitting the jackpot. Michelle: And it all comes back to his personal story. He was a guy with a day job, a mortgage, and a string of failed projects. His success wasn't preordained. It was built. It feels so much more attainable than the stories we usually hear about prodigies and visionaries. Mark: It’s a deeply pragmatic and, in its own way, optimistic worldview. It says that success isn't a lottery ticket you find, but a machine you can build. Michelle: It's about playing the long game. So maybe the one thing our listeners can do this week is identify one simple system they can start. Not a goal, but a daily practice. Maybe it's writing for 15 minutes, or learning one new thing about psychology, or just going for a walk to boost your energy. Mark: I love that. What's one system you're building? Let us know. We'd love to hear about it. Michelle: It’s a powerful way to reframe the journey. Thanks, Mark. This was fantastic. Mark: This is Aibrary, signing off.