How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life by Scott Adams

item that needs to be returned to the store that is “right on the way.” Perhaps the receipt will be misplaced, which means there might be some negotiating in the store. All of this would make us fifteen minutes late for our dinner reservation and put us at risk of losing our table. That thought would spike my blood pressure until my head begins to look like the bottom of a thermometer, all red and bulbous. I would need to remind myself that Shelly makes her optimized plans work about 90 percent of the time.
Relax, Scott. Just relax.
    Allow me to predict the rest of the story as if narrating in real time. I might be exaggerating a little just to paint the picture.
    As we leave the house, Shelly suggests we take a shortcut that I am not familiar with. I’m driving, and Shelly tells me that all I need to do is listen to her directions. No problem. At least I think it’s no problem until her cell phone rings just when I need to know which way to go. Now Shelly is talking on the phone and solving some thorny issue such as missile defense or climate change while occasionally saying things that sound as if they might be meant for me. Does “right” mean I should turn right, or is she just agreeing with whomever she’s talking to on the phone?
    Soon I am lost, and I look to Shelly for help. She waves me off because she’s deep into solving whatever problem is happening on the phone. I pull over and look at my watch. I get the brilliant idea of using GPS to find the store, but I’m not entirely sure which store it is. The shopping bag is in the trunk. So now I’m opening the trunk, finding the bag, and hoping to find the store’s address on my smart phone. But my phone has no Internet connection. So I drive while holding my phone like a signal meter, waiting for a data icon to appear and hoping the police are not watching.
    Ifind a signal, pull over, and try to find the store’s address, but it takes forever on my phone. Finally I get it! Now I enter the address into GPS, but I forget to change the route preferences from freeway to shortest route. Shelly sees me heading for an on-ramp during rush-hour traffic and starts gesturing in a way that means I should go in a different direction or possibly means something about chopping wood or taxiing a plane. I can’t interpret the gestures. I pull over and wait for the call to end.
    By now we are so late that our plan will work only if the restaurant allows us to be thirty minutes late and there is a different movie that all four of us want to watch that starts later. This seems unlikely to me.
    But as I said, 90 percent of the times that we try to optimize, we get several errands completed, get a perfectly good table, have a nice meal, and see a movie that might even be better than the one we first picked. Optimizing works often enough to reinforce the habit.
    The cost of optimizing is that it’s exhausting and stress inducing, at least for people like me. Sometimes I think I’m literally going to have a heart attack from all of the optimizing. It also requires full concentration. I prefer simple, foolproof plans that allow my heart to beat normally and my mind to wander toward blissful thoughts of puppies and rose petals.
    (Update: Our dinner and movie followed my simple plan and worked flawlessly. Shelly took the night off from optimizing. My prediction of optimized mayhem did not come to pass. Imagining what might have gone wrong makes me look like more of a jerk than usual, which is funny, so I decided to leave this chapter intact.)
    I have a bias for simplification, but surely there are situations in which optimizing is the better play. So how do you know which approach works best in a given situation?
    If the situation involves communication with others, simplification is almost always the right answer. If the task is something you can do all by yourself, or with a partner who is on your wavelength, optimizing might be a better path if you can control most variables