There’s a great story about a guy who attends a Tony Robbins seminar, and complains to Robbins that, despite trying everything, he can’t lose weight.

“You’ve tried everything?” asks Robbins.

“Everything,” the guy replies.

“What were the last hundred things you tried?” asks Robbins.

“Well,” the guy admits, “I haven’t actually tried a hundred things.”

“Then what were the last twenty-five things you did?” asks Robbins.

“I haven’t tried twenty-five things, really, either,” the guy responds.

“So how many things have you actually tried?” asks Robbins.

“Well,” says the guy, sheepishly, “maybe five or six.”

Perhaps it’s an artifact of America’s Protestant work-ethic roots: when we fail, our first response is to try the same thing again, just harder, and with more resolve.

Problem is, that rarely works. If the strategy didn’t work the past five times, the sixth isn’t likely to work either, no matter how much energy, commitment, and enthusiasm you throw behind it.

Just observe the number of people making the same New Year’s resolutions year after year. If you’ve been vowing to lose weight each of the past five January’s, odds are good, by the next one you’ll still be a fat fuck.

As the old saying goes, if you always do what you always did, you always get what you always got. Or, in Einstein’s more eloquent words, “the thinking which created today’s problems is insufficient to solve them.”

So as you embark on this new year’s old resolutions, do some new thinking. Brainstorm about what you’re going to do differently, smarter. How you’re going to change your strategy. Because trying the same thing again – this time, with feeling! – just isn’t going to work at all.