We’re deep into January, and statistically, many of us are well on our way to quitting the resolutions we so determinedly put into place on the 1st. Personally, I’ve always hated the new year–holidays made me reflective of the past year and I never felt as if I had accomplished enough. And, the daunting task of setting up resolutions just to watch them quickly fall into the graveyard of unrealistic self expectations was frustrating and frankly, depressing.

The worst thing is, I love making resolutions–I love sitting down and making a plan for the future, laying out goals, dreams and aspirations for the coming year. But, I have, like many, had a hard time keeping them past January. That is, until I took the time to evaluate my goals, set them as moving targets, and allow myself to fail. 

Failure is something we all have a hard time with – no one likes failing, messing up, being the last to finish the race, but any monumental success story often begins from a place of failure. Thomas Edison tried over a thousand times before perfecting the filament for the lightbulb, Henry Ford declared bankruptcy twice, Sir James Dyson made 5,126 prototypes of his vacuum before the 5,127th one worked how he wanted and now Dyson is a household name. Yet, we often miss these failures and assume success comes easily. 

At the risk of sounding older than I am, we all want it to be easy and to change our lives overnight. We want to set our resolution to run one mile every day in 2024, and hope we’ll wake up January 1st a changed person. We want the easy route to success. And, marketers know this. We are inundated with promises of “easy side hustles that will earn you $1,000 a week” or probiotic pills that will “flatten your tummy” or help you “lose 5 pounds in a  week”. All this feeds into our recurring cycle of failure–we have high hopes and big dreams of self growth and change, fall for these traps claiming easy success, and when they inevitably fail, we feel worse.  

As I recognize this cycle of failure and guilt in my own life, I have started giving myself more grace for failure. My new year’s resolutions have turned from hard resolve to “Goals and Growth for 2024”, and I allow myself to fail in the name of growth. Not to say I’ve gone into the year with a mindset for failure, but moreso an acceptance of the possibility for failure.

So, here’s to 2024–a year for growth, failure, and more growth. Set your resolutions, take time to regularly evaluate them (monthly or quarterly works best for me), and make adjustments as needed. You probably won’t run a mile every day – but that’s okay, adjust your resolve to running 2 times a week, and don’t count that as a failure, remember to give yourself the perspective that last year you were running zero days a week, so two is still a success.