Notes on success from 2 Scotts — Adams and Fitzgerald — and one Bob.

"In hindsight, it looks as if the projects that I was most passionate about were also the ones that worked. But objectively, my passion level moved with my success. Success caused passion more than passion caused success."

Writes Scott Adams, who followed his passion and invested in a restaurant that failed, then started drawing a comic strip — "Dilbert" — as "just one of many get-rich schemes I was willing to try" and became passionate about cartooning as it began to make him rich.

So Adams advises us not to take the advice "Follow your passion." Then he moves on to rejecting the advice that one ought to have goals. What you need is a system.

That's a pretty amusing column at the link, and I see it's adapted from a book that's coming out next week — "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big."

***

There are only 2 Bob Dylan songs that use the word "success" and they are both on the same album which is probably the album that made the deepest impression on my mind when I was a malleable teenager, "Bringing It All Back Home":

1. "She knows there’s no success like failure/And that failure’s no success at all."

2. "Get dressed, get blessed/Try to be a success/Please her, please him, buy gifts/Don’t steal, don’t lift/Twenty years of schoolin’/And they put you on the day shift...."

Naturally, after 12 years of schoolin', I went to art school. After 16 years of schoolin' and 5 years unschooling, I went to law school. There's a "Bringing It All Back Home" "Highway 61" song with the word "lawyers":

You’ve been with the professors
And they’ve all liked your looks
With great lawyers you have
Discussed lepers and crooks
You’ve been through all of
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books
You’re very well read
It’s well known...

After 19 years of schoolin', it took 20 years of professing — looks liked or not — to get to blogging, which included, inter alia, The Gatsby Project, which never officially ended, so here's another sentence:

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.