All knowledge workers will fail! Guaranteed!
Nobody likes to fail. In fact, a harsh stigma is often attached to failure. Yet ironically failure is a natural part of life. It is both unavoidable and necessary especially in the realm of knowledge work.
Remember that knowledge work is composed of tasks and goals that must be defined by the knowledge worker themselves. Alas, even with their best judgement and experience, knowledge workers are often faced with a deficit of information. Based on an incomplete picture, they are forced to make their best guess and then see how it plays out. A knowledge worker living in fear of failure becomes paralyzed into inaction, perpetually avoiding a decision.
To counteract this problem, I agree with blogger Venkatesh Rao in that our approach to solving problems should be similar to that of software engineers. Successful software engineers are constantly tinkering with code, testing it over and over again looking for bugs and creating situations where it will crash. It is only after many different trails and iterations that they reach a pragmatic success. This approach, known as “agile” has its own mantra, “Fail Early, Fail Often.”
Therefore, I believe that agility is a key factor for a successful knowledge worker. They must be willing to learn from mistakes, course correct, and experiment constantly until they reach the desired goal. When viewed this way failure is not a problem, but instead a necessary component of the path. Once this is understood, failure loses it sting. The knowledge worker can become fearless!
Don’t worry about your failures, as each one is a stepping stone on the path to success. As President Theodore Roosevelt said:
“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, then to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”
I’m a big fan of the British SF series, 
Did you make a New Year’s Resolution? While good intentions are plentiful on January 1, it is clear that many people have dropped their resolutions before the month is even a week old. So are New Year’s Resolutions just another pointless tradition or is there a way to make a resolution stick for the year?
The pursuit of efficiency often requires a cleanup of our physical spaces. While clearing out clutter should be easy to do, in practice it is hard to throw away objects we own. For example, maybe you got a mug at a conference six years ago. The conference was unmemorable and the mug is an awful yellow color. As you are considering parting with it, a colleague asks if they can have it. You quickly decline and put it back on the shelf. This is a direct experience of the Endowment Effect.
Remember, a sunk cost is not recoverable, which gives rise to the famous expression, “Chasing good money after bad.” The trick is to evaluate the current status of a project, investment, or commitment in light of where it stands now and ignore past contributions. This way, it is possible to stay nimble and take advantage of better opportunities when they arise.
In this book, Head in the Cloud, author William Poundstone explores the question of whether all this online information is only serving to make us less informed. Online information is easier to skim, but hard to dive into deeply. Poundstone specifically highlights a phenomenon known as the Dunning-Kruger effect which can lead people to overestimate their own level of knowledge in a subject area.
This is a question of great interest to behavioral economist Dan Ariely. So much so that he did several experiments which aimed to probe deep into how people assign value to the work they do. The results of the experiments were shared in a TED Talk. From the video description:
Illusory Superiority is a cognitive bias whereby individuals overestimate their own qualities and abilities relative to others. It is sometimes called the Lake Wobegon Effect after 
Optimal stopping : when to stop looking
Efficient Librarian 