Skip to main content

Scott Adams

Build systems that ensure progress, by increasing adaptability, and resilience while increasing your odds of success over time.

Trump is a Master Hypnotist.

  • Systems over Goals: Focus on daily habits and processes that lead to improvement, not fixed endpoints.
  • Skill Stacking: Acquire diverse, complementary skills to increase adaptability and opportunities.
  • Energy Management: Prioritize tasks based on your energy levels (e.g., creative work when you're most alert).
  • Luck Optimization: Stay active in productive systems to increase exposure to serendipitous opportunities.
  • Iterative Improvement: Continuously refine your systems based on feedback and changing circumstances.
  • Psychological Resilience: Avoid the emotional toll of unmet goals by focusing on progress, not outcomes.

Practical Examples​

  • Build lifelong habits over one-time goals (Consistent Exercise over Losing Weight by Date)
  • Continuously seek better career opportunities rather than settling.
  • Focus on scalable processes in business, not just revenue targets.

Context​

  • Systems Thinking — Adams' core frame: systems over goals, processes over endpoints
  • Persuasion — Skill stacking rooted in Adams' persuasion work and the Trump analysis
  • Optimism — Luck engineering as a system, not a personality trait
  • Agency — The compound effect of skill stacking, energy management, and iterative improvement
  • Scoreboard — How you know a system is working when you've removed the goal

Questions​

Adams says systems beat goals because systems produce continuous progress without the psychological cost of failure — but how do you know when to abandon a system that isn't working?

  • Skill stacking assumes diverse skills combine multiplicatively, not additively — which skill combinations are genuinely rare enough to be worth the investment?
  • If luck optimization is about staying active in productive systems to increase exposure to serendipity, what makes a system "productive" before outcomes are visible?
  • Adams argues energy management is more valuable than time management — what does that mean for how roles and organisations should be structured?