Stephen Robbins here.

Welcome to the Get It Done Guys quick and dirty tips to work less and do more.

The Scottish poet Robert Burns observed,

The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.

He observed this in 1785, and he observed it in Scottish, Rizot's Scots. But I don't speak either. The rock band

Talking Heads put it even better. Things fall apart. It's scientific. We try to do stuff,

and a lot of the time, it doesn't work. Surveys have shown that most projects fail for reasons

that were known or could have been predicted at the very start. That's called

the universe's sense of humor. We evolved big brains to deal with social interactions. We spend

hours each day predicting what other people are thinking, and if we ever bother to ask them,

which is almost never, we're almost always wrong. And yet, we spend almost no time predicting

how our most important efforts might fail, even though we'd usually be right.

I combine these two trends in a masterpiece of prediction with my final power and influence paper at Harvard Business School.

I successfully analyzed the interpersonal dynamics between me and my proposed business partner.

I identified all the way as the relationship could end in disaster,

and then it did, exactly as I'd predicted.

Don't make my mistakes.

Do some simple risk management and boost your success rate a lot.

Tip number one, embrace what might go wrong.

When you start a new project, you're probably full of

excitement about how wonderfully it will all turn out. Otherwise, you wouldn't be starting it. As we all

know, good feelings are not considered appropriate for the work environment. So spend some time

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