CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- I don't talk to myself as much as I used to. Maybe it's because I've pretty much heard all my stories. Or maybe I hate how I'm always interrupting myself or screwing up punch lines or not telling it right.

But I've learned that once in a while, I should let myself talk. And insist that I listen.

I was several minutes into a conversation with one of my more tolerant friends when it occurred to me that I needed to hear what I was saying even more than my friend. Although the roots of our problems were different, we both get ourselves tangled time and again by the same kinds of knots. With her, it's finances and relationship issues. With me, it's that I burn the candle at both ends with the middle stretched over flames. I have too much stuff and too many commitments and the clock hands are spinning so fast they're kicking up sparks.

Yet we both continue doing the same things while wishing for different results.

"Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer, but wish we didn't," wrote Erica Jong, author of "Fear of Flying."

My friend's a smart woman. I suspect she already knows what she should do. Yet suggest changing this or stopping that and she'll rattle off a half-dozen reasons why it won't work. I've caught myself doing the same.

Since it's the season for scrubbing our slates so clean that they squeak, it seems a sensible time to spend some time coming up with a game plan to take on those things that need changed.

"Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it," wrote 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes.

Breaking down large projects into smaller, more doable, parts has been something I've always done with home repair issues and large writing assignments. Simplifying the complicated is sort of my thing, yet I don't recall ever trying to deal with my more mundane (yet extremely draining) difficulties in that fashion.

I'm someone who needs to have goals with deadlines attached, something to focus on and work toward. But I also need to remember to keep my goals realistic, and not throttle myself when one of my many self-imposed deadlines goes whizzing past.

"Establishing goals is all right if you don't let them deprive you of interesting detours," wrote longtime Green Bay Press-Gazette columnist Doug Larson.

My 2011 schedule now includes time for detours.

"The difference between stumbling blocks and steppingstones is how you use them," says my friend Millie Snyder.

I've become fond of a few of my stumbling blocks. Some are quite comfortable. And some have been around so long they've begun to take on the shape of my butt. I like that I'm now able to recognize the good that tripping over them has occasionally done, how they've forced me to slow or take a path I'd not have noticed before.

That's the thing about advice. By heeding it, there's a chance you might miss out on some genuinely great gaffes. Some of my biggest mistakes have brought about my greatest joys.

"It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failures," wrote Scottish author Samuel Smiles. "Precept, study, advice and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done."

And so, with that last bit of wisdom in mind, I begin this new year determined to notch even more failures into my belt. Because through them -- so very, very many of them -- I must surely be destined to someday swim in success.

Reach Karin Fuller at karinful...@gmail.com.