21A – Reading Reflection No. 2

1) Adams writes about productivity tips, failing, succeeding, never giving up, he also writes about professional and personal struggles. He says that systems will never fail as long as you stay in the system. With goals you are in a constant state of failure until you succeed and then you have nothing left to pursue. This was the most obvious point in the book, leaving me wondering why I hadn’t thought of that in the past.

2) In the book Adams states that “Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous pre-success failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system. That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.” This enhances what I am learning because I know that I need to keep trying and working hard and even if I get a bad grade I should keep my head up and pursue my education goal.

3) If I were to design an exercise for this class based on the book I read I would ask the students to build something that generated light, I feel like this could be a challenging task and require trial and error activities in order to succeed.  

4) In the beginning of the book I thought that Scott Adams was in the upper middle class with access to a good private or very good public school and he got a state scholarship toward a school one tier below an Ivy. He graduated, worked on a handful of successful advertising campaigns, and then started Dilbert, which was popular from day one.