A wise leader should never make a promise he cannot keep. Men are so simple that those who wish to be deceived will be deceived.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Your Year of the Question That Opens Everything. This is the year asking becomes a practice, and the practice becomes the thing people trust in you. A habit you have been quietly tending, something you built without fanfare, reveals its full shape by spring, and the shape is more useful than you knew when you started. A working relationship deepens because you ask the question no one else thought to raise, and the room shifts in that particular way rooms shift when someone tells the truth on everyone's behalf. By autumn, a conversation you initiate with genuine curiosity sets a small project in a direction it could not have found on its own. You have always known that asking well is a kind of leadership. This year, everyone else figures it out too.