Failure is inevitable, useful, and educational. Just don’t give up—stay focused over the year—and it will pay off.

And I was getting good at it. Scheduling. Rescheduling. Finding a way to keep the conversation going. You’d think it wouldn’t be something hard or useful to become good at, but you’d be wrong on both counts. Most of our jobs hinge on repetition. That’s how we become good at anything. The problem is that we give up too soon because anything we do

There is a much cheaper, easier way to place a person—you or anyone—in a position to succeed. Ask one question: What do you do in your spare time?

ingredients that encourages opportunity, persistence, and luck. I call them the four elements. The four behaviors around which you should shape your next year: Leverage your strengths. Embrace your weaknesses. Assert your differences. Pursue your passions.

Second, I made significant progress on challenging projects. The kind that require thought and persistence. The kind I usually try to distract myself from, like writing or strategizing. Since I refused to allow myself to get distracted, I stayed with them when they got hard, and experienced a number of breakthroughs. Third, my stress level dropped

The fourth element is your passion, which is sometimes hard to find. One way to recover your passion is to pursue your desire. As you choose your focus for the year, pay less attention to “shoulds” and more attention to “wants.”

Delegating work to someone? Give him the task and then ask: Why won’t this work for you? When he answers, you respond: That’s a good point. So how can you change it to make it work?

Instead of looking for how things are the same, we can look for how they are different. Instead of seeking evidence to confirm our perspectives, we can seek to shake them up. Instead of wanting to be right, we can want to be wrong. Of course, this takes a tremendous amount of confidence. Let’s face it, we’d all prefer to be right rather than wrong.

We do this all the time. We think someone is angry with us, so we respond aggressively to a gesture and they become angry with us. See? We were right all along. We think a customer isn’t going to give us business, so we don’t pursue them, and they don’t renew our contract. We knew it! Our neglect was justified. What can we do about it? As Einstein