You're Supposed to Fail!

If you’ve been attending school for a long enough time, the title of this blog post may come as a bit of a surprise to you.  Growing up and going to school, many of us have been conditioned to always strive for good grades, and to always avoid failing in class. People around us, such as our parents, may have also reinforced this paradigm outside of school, rewarding us for good work and looking down upon any failure.

What is Failure?

Failure seems to always get a bad image, and for good reason when you look at where failure usually comes from.

In school, failure usually comes from being a bad student: not paying attention in class, not doing your homework, not handing things in on time (or at all), and so on. Outside of school, failure seems to generally come from some combination of incompetence and carelessness, which, like in school, is always to be avoided.

But if you ask any older person who has had a lot of experiences in their life, who has built themselves an amazing life, they will all tell you that failure is a good thing. In fact, you’re supposed to fail.

Thoughts on New Year's Resolutions

Throughout most of my life, I had never once made a single New Year's Resolution. To be honest, I never saw the need to make one specifically for the New Year. If I had a goal or habit that I wanted to make, I would always start as soon as possible (or never at all).

This changed when I started attending university, where the second term of each school year just happened to fall in the beginning of the year (in secondary school the first term would drag on until February). Goals that I would usually make for myself at the beginning of each school term just happened to fall around the time that other people would make their New Year's Resolutions.

One Step at a Time to Building Good Habits

With the beginning of a New Year approaching, many people may begin thinking about something that they would like to do for their New Year’s Resolutions. What are yours?

The usual ones include:

1.  Losing weight/getting fit
2.  Quitting smoking
3.   Learning something new
4.  Eating more healthy
5.  Paying off debts and saving money
6. Spending more time with family
7.  Traveling more
8. Being less stressed
9.  Volunteering
10. Drinking less

Of course, it’s quite obvious what usually happens to these New Year’s Resolutions after a few weeks.

This is what the attendance rate at any regular commercial gym looks like throughout the year: