Resilience—the ability to recover quickly from setbacks—is an enormously valuable skill.

It might seem more like a personality trait than a skill, but (lucky for us) resilience is something we can develop. And there’s no doubt it’s worth developing—both common sense and scientific literature (check out the work of Norman Garmezy and George Bonnano) tell us that if we can bounce back from problems fairly easily, we’re likely to lead more effective and enjoyable lives.

When life is good, we get attached.

We become comfortable with how things are—our job, our surroundings, our daily routine—and we hope for more of the same. I know I do. When life is easy and familiar, we expect it to stay that way.

But it won’t. Not for very long, anyway.

Change is always coming, and some of that change is negative. Catastrophic, even. If you’re quite young and haven’t faced significant hardship yet, don’t be fooled into believing it won’t find your door. It will, and you don’t want to be caught hoping against the inevitable. Much better to be prepared when challenges arrive.

One of the questions I hope to answer through this blog is, “What do highly productive people do differently?

What can we learn from the best of the best? There’s a whole range of answers, of course. But if you study high achievers in any field, you’re bound to notice an emphasis on quality over quantity.

Instead of trying to do everything, top performers are obsessed with getting the right things done. Most aren’t super-geniuses; they’ve just installed various tricks in their lives to keep them focused on doing the hard things that deliver results (instead of the easy things that make them feel productive but don’t move the needle).

It often feels like our lives are shaped by big events. Looking back at an unexpected promotion, a health scare, or even just a surprisingly large tax return, we see a lot of change taking place over a short period of time and attribute the cause to the event itself. It’s easy to forget, though, that these big events are rarely random happenings—they’re often the cumulative result of small daily habits.

I’ve been showing the same video in my college study skills classes for almost five years now.

Maybe you’ve seen it. It’s a two-minute audio excerpt of a TV interview with Ira Glass, creator of This American Life. Glass gives the best description of the creative experience I’ve ever found.

Here’s the video (and a lightly-edited transcript).

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish someone had told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there’s a gap. For the first couple years you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good—but it’s not. But your taste—the thing that got you into the game—is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you.