Blasting clichéd career advice, the contrarian pundit and creator of Dilbert recounts the humorous fluctuations of his career, exposing the outsized role of luck in our lives and exactly how best to perform the system.

Scott Adams offers likely failed at more items than anyone you’ve ever met or anyone you’ve even heard of. Just how do he go from hapless workplace employee and serial failing to the creator of Dilbert, one of the world’s most famous syndicated comic whitening strips, in just a couple of years? In about How to Fail at ALMOST ANYTHING and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life How exactly to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, Adams stocks the game program he’s implemented since he was a teen: invite failing in, embrace it, then go with its pocket.

No career guidebook can offer tips that works for everybody. As Adams clarifies, your best bet is to study the means of others who managed to get big and make an effort to glean some techniques and strategies that make sense for you personally. Adams pulls back the covers on his own unusual existence and stocks how he switched one failing after another-including his commercial career, his inventions, his investments, and his two restaurants-into something great and lasting. There’s too much to learn from his personal story, and a lot of entertainment on the way. Adams found out some unlikely truths that helped to propel him forward. For instance:

• Goals are for losers. Systems are for winners.

• “Interest” can be bull. The thing you need is personal energy.

• A combined mix of mediocre abilities can make you surprisingly valuable.

• You can manage your chances in a way that makes you look lucky to others.

Adams hopes you are able to chuckle at his failures while discovering some unique and helpful ideas by yourself path to personal victory. As he writes: “This is a story of one person’s unlikely achievement within the framework of scores of disturbing failures. Was my eventual achievement primarily a result of talent, luck, hard work, or an accidental just-right balance of every? All I know for sure is certainly that I pursued a conscious strategy of controlling my opportunities in a manner that would make it less difficult for good luck to find me.”