2026: A New Year's Resolution To Fail

It’s January 1st, 2026. The gyms are having their fullest day of the year. Diet recipe Google searches are at an all time high. Fitness apps, diet apps, self-help apps, and help me with my over-reliance on apps apps, have their highest download frequency today. And why not? Yes today only marks another revolution around the sun. Our calendars may have reset but nothing else has made today any different than the 365 before it. But why not take advantage of the Agrarian calendar to mark this day as the day that you are going to change your life for the better?

It’s a healthy reset for all of us. Especially coming right after the holidays when we most likely over-indulged ourselves, spent money we didn’t have and ate more than our waistlines could bear. A trip to the gym, laying off sugar for a week or two is just what the doctor ordered. I’ve yet to hear of an unhealthy resolution. Most people want to change their lives for the better. We saw how 2025 went for us and know that there is room for improvement. Nobody wants a worse year than the one before it. 

So why are we so bad at resolutions? I ask my family for theirs every year. I love to schedule and track things so I make them give me something that is tangible, can be calculated or tracked, to see how good they are at keeping to their resolutions. I think most “resolutions” that people have are actually goals. They want to eat better, lose weight, make more money or spend more time with their family. The definition of a resolution is simply, a firm decision to do or not do something. This is where the goals as resolutions tends to fall apart. 

Saying you want to lose weight is goal. Saying you will go to the gym for 1 hour every morning is a resolution. So is saying you will not drink soda for a year. Or you will go for a walk after dinner every night. All of these are things that can help you achieve the goal of losing weight. However, if your goal is to lose weight, what happens when you don’t? Or you don’t lose weight fast enough? You might get so caught up in the results of your goal, that you forget about the process of actually getting there. If you spend more time thinking about your destination, then you do about the path to get there, you are bound to get lost. 

Even with our policy of focusing on the process instead of the goal, the same thing happens every year. We start of strong. For the first few weeks, we hit our resolution every day. The dopamine we receive from the satisfaction of sticking to our resolutions gives us a high and we are pushed further by it. But just like life does in Jurassic Park, excuses always find a way. Things get too busy, we get tired or don’t feel like doing it somedays, it’s the weekend, or my birthday, or father’s day, or arbor day, or Tuesday and I’ll get back to it tomorrow. Only those tomorrow’s keep coming later and later and it’s mid-March and you completely forgot what your resolution for this year even was. Everyone knows, all resolutions are doomed to fail. 

So what is the point. Why do we even bother? To inflate the gyms memberships every January? This year, I want to do something a little different. Sarah Blakely, the founder of Spanx, told the story that when she was a child, instead of being asked what she accomplished that day, her father would ask what she failed at. She would then tell him how she tried out for some team and failed or some other attempt gone wrong and he would give her a high-five and encourage her. On the contrary, he would be disappointed if she didn’t have some failure to bring to the table. 

While this may sound twisted for some, this altered Sarah’s thought on failure. Failure wasn’t about not achieving something but true failure was in not even trying. This helped build the mindset she needed to be named by Forbes in 2012 as “The World’s Youngest Self-Made Female Billionaire.” As Sarah said, "A lot of entrepreneurs are held back from the fear of failure, so that lesson from my dad was a real gift.”

This is where I drew my inspiration for my New Year’s resolution for 2026. Instead of trying to reach a goal, only to fail at it by March, I’m looking to fail right from the start. Every day this year, I am going to find something to fail at. Whether that is trying something new for our business with no guarantee that it will work, attempting something that men of my age should have given up long ago, or attempting a task that their is no way I could actually accomplish it. 

With my daughters, I have tried to give them that same resilience to failure. I explain to them how they learn so much more from a loss in their softball game, than they would from a win. How they learn more about their swing from a strike-out swinging than they do from a hit. But I still sense their hesitation to try something new, to put themselves out there, to do something that makes them uncomfortable. So many times, as a Dad, you want your kids to see your strength so they know they can rely on you. This time, I’m doing that by showing them my failures and weaknesses. 

This won’t be easy, but that’s the idea. Businesses don’t tend to ask how they can fail at something in their board meetings. When I worked for a boss, they never got excited about someone telling them what they couldn’t accomplish. I think that’s what holds some businesses back. Really they should be encouraging it. 

 “Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple really. Double your rate of failure.” — Thomas John Watson, IBM Founder

Trying to fail won’t be any easier than trying to stick to a diet plan or any other common resolution. Actively seeking failure means putting myself in situations that are embarrassing, distressing and uncomfortable. But that’s where growth lives isn’t it? You can’t get bigger muscles by massaging them. You have to break them down, put them in uncomfortable positions with unbearable weight until they are forced to grow more fibers. 

What are your resolutions this year? If you’re not sure, I encourage you to go on this journey with me. If we learn and grow from failure, 365 failures should really push our growth rate. I’m going to keep track and mark my failures each day. And if I can’t find anything to fail at one day, then that is something for me to learn from too. 2025 was a great year for me and my family, but in 2026, we are excited for what there is to come. I hope you have a Happy New Year, and here’s to a year full of failure.