could make the products it made. In fact, Jobs was pushed out in 1985 because the board members at that time felt that Apple’s foray into consumer products was a “lunatic plan.” Of course, they were wrong. Jobs learned to reject the first judgments and the objections that spring out of them because those objections are almost always rooted in fear.

“The Things which hurt,” Benjamin Franklin wrote, “instruct.”

In other words: It’s supposed to be hard. Your first attempts aren’t going to work. It’s going to take a lot out of you—but energy is an asset we can always find more of. It’s a renewable resource.

Yet in our own lives, we aren’t content to deal with things as they happen. We have to dive endlessly into what everything “means,” whether something is “fair” or not, what’s “behind” this or that, and what everyone else is doing. Then we wonder why we don’t have the energy to actually deal with our problems. Or we get ourselves so worked up and in

genius often really is just persistence in disguise.

Another way of putting it: Does getting upset provide you with more options?

The old way of business—where companies guess what customers want from research and then produce those products in a lab, isolated and insulated from feedback—reflects a fear of failure and is deeply fragile in relation to

The phrase “This happened and it is bad” is actually two impressions. The first—“This happened”—is objective. The second—“it is bad”—is subjective.

There is always a countermove, always an escape or a way through, so there is no reason to get worked up. No one said it would be easy and, of course, the stakes are high, but the path is there for those ready to take it.