New Year’s Resolution

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”

 --Henry Ford

My 2023 New Year’s resolution is to fail more. I want to lose chess games, take bad photographs, write mediocre essays—I hope this isn’t one of them—play wrong notes on the piano, and make a lot of mistakes in Spanish. I’ll be adding to the list during the year. In short, I want to fail; in fact, I need to fail, because I’ve come to realize that success inhibits growth as well as promotes it.  

It’s true that success breeds success, as the old saying goes. “Turning 100 dollars into 110 dollars is hard work; turning 100 million into 110 million is inevitable”, remarked Edgar Bronfman.

 Success can also be a powerful motivator: a student—or an employee--recognized for outstanding work may well build on that success and do more outstanding work. The contrary is equally true: failure, especially repeated failure, typically demotivates. It’s hard—not impossible!--to persist when the world gives you zeroes—and keeps on giving them. Success gratifies and failure hurts; we’ve all had experience with both.

 But sometimes success feels too good: it can seduce us into measuring our lives and our self-worth by the recognition we receive, as if life were a grade in a class, a score on a test, a promotion at work, the value of our financial accounts.

 I’m concerned about something else, though—that we don’t grow when we don’t fail, we won’t grow when we won’t fail, we can’t grow when we can’t fail. Elon Musk—currently doing a lot of failing—said it powerfully: “Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating.” The insight is critical not only for business but for anyone imagining a life other than the one being led right now.

But because succeeding feels good and failing feels bad, we often pursue safe challenges, ones we know we can succeed at. In doing this, we exchange potential failure—but also opportunity for meaningful growth—for easy and empty success. As the Positive Energy Guy Brandon Johnson says, “If you are unwilling to fail, then you are unwilling to succeed.” In other words, you’re not going to grow if you’re not going to risk: the road to success is paved with failures. But if you can recognize the need to fail, and if you have the courage to act on that recognition, then you needn’t get what you’ve always got.

 I’m excited about my upcoming failures, and even more, about the successes that will spring from them. I just need to be brave.