????“我不是任何方面的專家，包括我自己的本職工作，”斯科特?亞當斯在《我的人生：樣樣稀松照樣贏》（How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life）的引言中說。“我畫畫時就像一只喝醉酒的吼猴，我的寫作風格介于莫名其妙和一知半解之間。我為什么還能夠不斷得到報酬，這對我來說一直是個未解之謎。”他還提前指出：“這不是一本建議指南，如果你聽遵循一位漫畫家的建議，很有可能沒什么好下場。”

????隨后亞當斯談笑風生地忽略掉了自己的免責聲明，在這本書的后面提供了229頁的反向職業建議，他的根據是自己工作和生活上好壞參半的經歷。雖然亞當斯早在8歲的時候就告訴媽媽，他想成為下一個查爾斯?舒爾茨（美國史努比系列漫畫作者——譯注），但當他在1979年開始自己的職業生涯時，他卻進了舊金山一家銀行擔任出納員。在那里，“我獲得的經濟學學位讓我多少有些大材小用，不過我還是成功把工作做的很糟糕。”總的算來，亞當斯在美國公司工作了16年時間，大多數是太平洋貝爾公司（Pacific Bell）財務管理的中低端職位，他還從加州大學伯克利分校（Berkeley）的哈斯商學院（the Haas School）獲得了MBA學位。

????這些經歷聽起來很老套，但亞當斯是一個貪婪的自學者。“我是一個學習機器，”他寫道。“如果我覺得某件東西將來可能有用，我就試著掌握至少是最基礎的知識。”亞當斯書中的很多觀察成果來自于他對很多看似隨意的學科組合的鉆研，其中包括冥想、催眠、心理學、計算機編程以及電子游戲設計開發。

????亞當斯白天工作，夜里創作《呆伯特》（Dilbert）系列連環畫。除此之外，他獲得了一項讓舊式手機發短信更容易的技術專利（智能手機的出現淘汰了這項技術）；推出了被稱為Dilberitos的蔬菜卷餅，成功在數家全國性連鎖店內銷售，一直到被競爭對手打敗；發明了一些命運多舛的電腦游戲；還上線了幾家不了了之的網站。

????亞當斯在書中名為“我的滑鐵盧精選總結報表”的章節中對這一切連同一些重大的糟糕投資進行了描寫，后者包括一家在YouTube之前的視頻網站，它失敗的原因在于那時的網速還沒有快到能夠支持在線視頻分享。“我就是在這時候開始明白，時機往往是成功最重要的組成部分，”他寫道。“而且，由于時機很難準確把握——除非你能通靈——這樣嘗試不同的事物，直到靠運氣獲得合適的時機就順理成章了。”

????亞當斯嘗試了很多不同的事物，同時不放棄自己的日常工作，這使他得出了一則公式：你獲得的每一種技能可以讓你成功的機會增加一倍。他寫道，大多數人“最好還是擅長兩種互補的技能、而不是專精一種……當我將自己貧乏的業務技能和糟糕的藝術技巧以及相當普通的寫作才能結合在一起時，最終的效果相當強大。”

????《樣樣稀松照樣贏》是一本不落俗套的名流富豪自傳，它諷刺了關于成功要素的陳詞濫調。僅舉一例，想一想激情。亞當斯表示，成功者經常把激情說成自己成功的一個原因，因為“所有人都可以對一些東西或其他東西有激情……激情讓人感覺相當大眾化，這是人的天性，人人皆可擁有。同時那大多都是胡說八道。”

????在他看來，激情是成功的副產品，而不是它的先決條件。回顧自己創辦的數十家公司或者試圖創辦的公司，亞當斯寫道他對每一個都充滿激情，直至它以失敗告終。“那些沒有成功的努力——失敗案例占到大多數——慢慢榨干了我的激情，因為它們失敗了。”他這樣寫道。繪制連環畫“起初只是我愿意嘗試的很多致富計劃之一，但是當它開始看起來有戲的時候，我對畫畫的激情增加了。”——這對《呆伯特》的粉絲來說真是一件幸事。（財富中文網）

????譯者：王燦均??

????"I'm not an expert at anything, including my own job," Scott Adams writes in the introduction to How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life. "I draw like an inebriated howler monkey and my writing style falls somewhere between baffling and sophomoric. It's an ongoing mystery to me why I keep getting paid." He also notes upfront that "this is not an advice book. If you've ever taken advice from a cartoonist, chances are it didn't end well."

????Breezily ignoring his own disclaimer, Adams goes on to pack the next 229 pages with contrarian career advice, based on the author's mixed bag of experience in work and life. Although he told his mother when he was eight years old that he wanted to be the next Charles Schulz, Adams started his career in 1979 as a teller at a bank in San Francisco, where "my degree in economics made me somewhat overqualified for the job, and yet I still managed to be dreadful at it." Altogether, he spent 16 years in corporate America, many of them in the middle rungs of financial management at Pacific Bell, and got an MBA from the Haas School at Berkeley.

????Sounds pretty conventional, but Adams was a voracious autodidact. "I was a learning machine," he writes. "If I thought something might someday be useful, I tried to grasp at least the basics." Many of the observations in his book come from his delving deep into a seemingly random collection of subjects, from meditation and hypnosis to psychology, computer programming, and electronic game design.

????Without letting go of his day job, and while drawing Dilbert strips at night, Adams patented an invention to make texting easier on old-style cell phones (smartphones made it obsolete), launched a line of veggie burritos called Dilberitos that sold in a few national chains before being crushed by the competition, invented some ill-fated computer games, and built several websites that went nowhere.

????All of this is described in a chapter called "Some of My Many Failures in Summary Form" along with a few big, bad investments -- including one in a predecessor to YouTube that flopped because Internet speeds were not yet fast enough for online video sharing to catch on. "This was about the time I started to understand that timing is often the biggest component of success," he writes. "And since timing is hard to get right unless you are psychic, it makes sense to try different things until you get the timing right by luck."

????Trying lots of different things, while holding on to his day job, led him to come up with a formula: Every skill you acquire doubles your chances of success. Most people, he writes, are "better off being good at two complementary skills than being excellent at one ... When I combined my meager business skills with my bad art skills and my fairly ordinary writing talent, the mixture was powerful."

????Refreshingly for an autobiography by a rich and famous person, How to Fail at Almost Everything skewers the usual clichés about what leads to success. To take just one example, consider passion. Adams says successful people often cite passion as a reason for their rise because "everyone can be passionate about something or other ... Passion feels very democratic. It's the people's talent, available to all. It's also mostly bullshit."

????In his view, passion is a byproduct of succeeding at something, not a prerequisite to it. Looking back over the dozens of business ventures he started, or tried to start, he writes that he was passionate about each one until it fizzled. "The ones that didn't work out -- and that would be most of them -- slowly drained my passion as they failed," he writes. Drawing a comic strip "started out as just one of many get-rich schemes I was willing to try. When it started to look as if it might be a success, my passion for cartooning increased" -- a lucky break for Dilbert fans.