There is a chapter called The Energy Metric in How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, which Scott Adams, famous as the author of the comic Dilbert, published in 2013 and became famous as a New York Times bestseller. It gave an important message to me, who was suffering from excessive workload and was not really able to take care of himself. The point is that there are many things we need to take care of and consider important in life, but among them, we must pay the most attention to our own energy. That way, you can take care of many other things.

The System: How someone who failed at almost everything ended up achieving great success

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Memorable Phrases

• We humans want many things: good health, financial freedom, accomplishment, a great social life, love, sex, recreation, travel, family, career, and more.

• The way I approach the problem of multiple priorities is by focusing on just one main metric: my energy.

• Maximizing my personal energy means eating right, exercising, avoiding unnecessary stress, getting enough sleep, and all of the obvious steps.

• I'm suggesting that by becoming a person with good energy, you lift the people around you. That positive change will improve your social life, your love life, your family life, and your career.

• I don't mean the frenetic, caffeine-fueled, bounce-off-the-walls type of energy. I'm talking about a calm, focused energy.

• The main reason I blog is because it energizes me. ... So while writing takes me away from my friends and family for a bit, it makes me a better person when I'm with them.

• Managing your personal energy is like managing budgets in a company. ... Ideally, you want to manage your personal energy for the long term and the big picture. Having one more cocktail at midnight might be an energy boost at the time, but you pay for it double the next day.

• If you look at any individual action that boosts your personal energy, it might look like selfishness. Why are you going skiing when you should be working at the homeless shelter, you selfish bastard! My proposition is that organizing your life to optimize your personal energy will add up to something incredible that is more good than bad. ... Like capitalism, some forms of selfishness are enlightened.

• One of the most important tricks for maximizing your productivity involves matching your mental state to the task. ... My comic-creating process is divided into two stages to maximize my natural energy cycles. In the late afternoon and early evening my hand is steady. I'm relaxed from exercising and ready to do some simple, mindless, mechanical tasks such as drawing the final art for Dilbert or paying bills online.

• The cost of optimizing is that it's exhausting and stress-inducing, at least for people like me. ... If the situation involves communication with others, simplification is almost always the right answer. ... If the cost of failure is high, simple tasks are the best because they are easier to manage and control.

• Optimizing is often the strategy of people who have specific goals and feel the need to do everything in their power to achieve them. Simplifying is generally the strategy of people who view the world in terms of systems. The best systems are simple and for good reason. Complicated systems have more opportunities for failure. ... Simple systems are probably the best way to achieve success.

• Simplification frees up energy, making everything else you do just a little bit easier. ... In other words, maximize your personal energy, not the number of tasks.

• One of the biggest obstacles to success, and a real every killer, is the fear that you don't know how to do the stuff that your ideal career plans would require. ... When you start asking questions, you often discover that there are simple solutions. ... When you know how to do something, you feel more energized to take it on.

• One of the best ways to pollute the energy in a group situation is by being a total asshole. ... When you piss off the people around you, there is bound to be some blowback and wasted effort cleaning up the mess you made. It can all be quite distracting and draining.

• Asshole behaviors:

• Changing the subject to him/herself

• Dominating conversation

• Bragging

• Cheating, lying

• Disagreeing with any suggestion, no matter how trivial

• Using honesty as a justification for cruelty

• Withholding simple favors out of some warped sense of social justice

• Abandoning the rules of civil behavior, such as saying hello or making eye contact

• I assume asshole behavior exists because it feels good when you do it. It that sense it's like an addiction.

• When you're on the right path, it feels right, literally.