My funny (joke) answer: You fold preflop.
That's the standard answer when someone posts a hand where they got a bad beat and they ask "How could I have played this differently?" Answer: Fold pre. LOL
My serious answer: You don't care about money or how you finish, that's how you become successful. You don't worry about bad beats or coolers, and yes, you fold most hands preflop.
Quite simply, you succeed in tournaments by playing better hands than your opponents, but you have to realize that most tournaments, you still won't win anything. You'll wait hours to get AA and either you'll lose to someone who somehow decided it was a good time to play their 85o hand against you, or else you will win the hand but because you folded for the last hour straight, even winning that pot doesn't give you enough chips to fold for another hour straight. That's tournament poker! But I'm a big believer that "tight is right" and eventually you will play a tournament such as Darvin Moon when he finished 2nd in the WSOP Main Event back in 2009 - Darvin was a novice but somehow he cashed for 5 million dollars after qualifying into the tournament via a 130 dollar satellite. As I recall, Darvin said he picked up AA about 25 times over the 7-day tournament and he won almost every all-in with them. Just a phenomenal run of luck, basically... but that's how you succeed at tournaments - you lose for years straight, but you go on a "sun run" for one short stretch and win back more than all those losses. Quite honestly, most don't have the time or the patience, and they either give up or else they go broke trying. Tournament poker is a hard way to make a good living, unless you're just not lucky and then its a terrible way to make no living at all. LOL My opinions obv. Some seem to have mastered tournaments and they don't play tight at all, they play super aggressive and it seems to work for them... but I've never figured out how to do that. I just stopped caring about my results, and that's when I usually score a fine result. Can't explain it more than that, but there it is, for whatever its worth.