27A - Reading Reflection No.3

For this reading review, I decided to read the book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams. I'd seen the book in other reviews when I was doing peer reviews for the second review and decided to pick it up for myself. I found it rather comical as it depicted key moments in Scott's life and how he ended up succeeding from his failures.
The biggest theme of the book is focusing on the now. This means that while you can have dreams of the future and grand goals, these all pale in comparison to the weight of your current plans. If you keep your head in the clouds, you'll never get the rest of yourself up there. In short, the author is telling the reader to evaluate what is important in their journey, and commit to their journey without their end goal in mind. Focusing on the end goal will lead you off track.
This book has very similar themes to that of this week's assignment about failure, although that isn't hard to find out given the title of the book. Regardless, this book helped to explain the deeper meaning of failure a bit better to me. Failure isn't just a setback, nor is it just finding another way of doing things. In reality, failure is an incentive to get it right the next time. It's a learning experience that shows you the outcome of what you've done in order for you to learn how to do it better the next time.
The exercise I'd design for this class based around this book would be as follows. I'd have the class recount three different failures in their lives. The first being one when they were a child, the second as a teen in high school, and the last being one that happened extremely recently, as in a week from the assignment the latest. I'd make them recount what the failure was, why they failed, and how they solved their issue for the first two. But for the last failure, the one they currently have, I'd make it so they have to describe the process in which they will seek amends for this failure. For example, failing an exam so you go through a different process of studying, like getting a tutor or Study Edge. Lastly, I'd have the students connect how this process was similar to their past failures, letting them see that getting out of failure is as simple as finding a new process of doing things.
My biggest aha moment of the book was when I finally understood what he meant by focus on the path, not the goal. I'd always envisioned focusing on the goal as being a motivator, so when he kept describing situations in which focusing on the goal led to more failure, it really didn't click at first. Once I understood this central concept, the rest of the book became much more insightful than I'd previously expected. I got more out of the book than what I went in anticipating.