Failure is inevitable.

In life, you will fail.

There will come a time when you attempt to do something, be it big or small, and you will not succeed on your first, second, or thousandth try. At some point, you will have to decide that enough is enough, and it’s just not going to happen.

You didn't give up. You failed.

Now what?

Sometimes it seems like the world is conspiring against you. Or at the very least, conspiring against your goals.

As we enter into 2017, some are looking forward to a new year filled with possibility. Others are dreading what could be a dramatic change in the global political climate.

Regardless of where you stand on the issues, one thing is certain: there are incredibly passionate people making very impassioned arguments. People who feel their emotional involvement and need to create or support a cause as an outlet for their passions. It's as if a spark has been ignited, and that cause serves as the oxygen and fuel that grows that spark into a flame.

If I came back from the future and told you that in the next 12 months you would need to launch a spaceship into outer space to ensure the survival of humanity...what would you do?

After you got over the shock of having time-travel confirmed (or called the police to have my mental state evaluated), there's only one thing to do.

You begin to plan.

After the ball dropped and my wife and I sat sipping Bellinis at home to celebrate (watch out we get crazy), we talked about our plans for the new year. It was a good moment, one in which we discussed not only what we wanted individually, but also as a couple.

Later that night, as I sat in bed thinking about the year ahead and reminiscing about the year gone by, I started to wonder: Was there something I wanted to get done in 2016 that I didn't do?

Back in April I mentioned my hope to build Crazy Enough To Try into more than it is. I wanted to grow the website and mission to provide additional resources to help you incorporate your passions into your life.

Specifically, I planned on referring products and services that have helped me in my journey to not only incorporate my passions, but build upon them. To that end, I've worked to narrow down the field to the best items that I think will help you on your journey. So appropriately, I've called them The Tools.

I'm a big fan of to-do lists. I use them as an external memory bank, storing up all of those tasks that are important, but I'm unable to work on at that moment.

Need to make changes to my insurance plan in a few weeks? On the to-do list.

Need to call someone back when I'm not in a meeting? On the to-do list.

Need to change the cat's litter every week? On the to-do list.

It's super helpful to let something else remember everything that floats through my head. However, every few weeks a task is added to the to-do list and it just stays there forever. I look at it and think "I really don't want to do deal with that right now" and easily find something more appealing to do.

Looking at the definitions of expert and expertise, you would be hard-pressed to see a meaningful difference between the two. In fact, as you probably could guess, expertise is derived from the word expert. However, in practice, the two words are very different, with one increasingly becoming more important in today’s workforce.

When I sit back and look at what I've accomplished in life, I have a lot to be proud of and a lot to be grateful for. A strong education, good jobs, great family and friends, and so on. Many of these accomplishments came not only from hard work and sacrifice on my own part, but that of many others as well.

So why do I feel like a failure sometimes?

We all have our most productive time of day dictated by our chronotype, the natural times of activity driven by our circadian rhythm. For some it's the dead of night, after everyone has gone to sleep, and there's nothing left but your thoughts to keep you company. The evening can be a great time to be productive, and for some it is probably the only time.

But for me, and many others, there's nothing like an early morning to get going on something wonderful. Before everyone else starts moving, the world is just...quiet. And there's a lot of very interesting research that points to why the mornings can be the most productive time of day.