We all thought we knew what he wanted to hear—“semantic memory”—which was what he was studying. There were five guys there, all of us first-year students (and all male). The first one got up and he said, as you would predict, “semantic memory.” The second and third guys said the same. I knew at least two of them were lying and just sucking up.

Brené Brown, bestselling author, researcher, and University of Houston professor, was surrounded by creativity as a child. “I grew up in a pink stucco house in New Orleans where my mom was always a maker. All the curtains in our house were homemade, and all the art in our house was from us kids. I had dresses that matched my mom’s that matched my dolls’.”

Einstein and Mozart were massively productive because they understood the value of easing back and chilling out. Modern theories of learning say that success is impossible without some degree of failure. Aim for the Goldilocks zone when setting a failure rate: roughly 16 percent.

If you want to succeed really, really badly, the paradoxical solution proposed by many successful people is to ease up. Albert Einstein was obscenely productive, but his productivity came in bursts. Between those bursts, he was gentle with himself. “If my work isn’t going well,” he said, “I lie down in the middle of a workday and gaze at the ceiling while I listen and visualize what goes on in my imagination.”

When I was a child in the 1950s, my friends and I had two educations. We had school (which was not the big deal it is today), and we also had what I call a hunter-gatherer education. We played in mixed-age neighbourhood groups almost every day after school, often until dark. We played all weekend and all summer long. We had time to explore in all sorts of ways, and also time to become bored and figure out how to overcome boredom

For generations, the standard way to learn how to ride a bicycle was with training wheels or a tricycle. But in recent years, many parents have opted to train their kids with balance bikes, pedalless two-wheelers that enable children to develop the coordination needed for bicycling—a skill that is not as easily acquired with an extra set of wheels.

Dale Dupree is the founder and CEO of the Sales Rebellion. He draws on his many years of sales experience to coach sales professionals in developing innovative and creative approaches to their craft. Dale is also one of the hosts of the popular Selling Local podcast. He joined Predictable Revenue to discuss how to create experiences that cause familiarity, fuel relevance, drive curiosity and give your prospect a reason to meet.