27A Reading Reflection 3

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big By Scott Adams

1) The Theme of this book is that you can face a lot of failure in life and find a way to learn from it and be successful. This is a book that is about the life of Scott Adams who tried the entrepreneurship route multiple times and failed. Scott Adams tried inventing, investing, a corporate job, and even tried to open two restaurants. All of which failed. He then became the creator of the very popular and successful “Dilbert” comic strip.

2) I believe this relates to our course because it is a constant goal of ours to get better at what we are doing. Not only does Adams speak write about goals but also about improvement. His improvements for the most part are life improvements while ours are based on our business idea but they are very relatable. In this class we have always been taught to embrace our failures and learn from them and to give maximum effort. Adams writes about how his entire life he has tried to embrace his failures and that has been a huge part of his eventual success.

3) If I was to create an assignment for this course, related to the book it would be similar to our celebrating failure assignment from this week. I would put it at the beginning of the semester to help students understand that failure is part of this process. I would ask the students to think about a sometimes in which they tried something new and failed. This will be a great intro to this class since it is unlike any class most students have ever taken.

4) My “aha” moment of this book was how relatable it was for me. I have faced struggles and failures but I have always found a way to keep going. In the span of 18 months, both of my grandmother’s passed away, my childhood dog passed away, my brother moved away to Georgia for school, I was cut from my college baseball team, and I lost one of my closest friends because he was drunk driving. All of these things caused me to struggle in school and lose all of my motivation. I struggled to finish my AA degree in medical sciences only to realize I didn’t want to study that anymore. I was lost in my failures but found a way to get a two year business degree in one year and get in to my dream school that I failed to get in out of high school and here I am today a semester away from graduation. My aha moment has also allowed me to be proud of myself for being able to relate to someone who has struggled and succeeded.