Posted by Elizabeth

Here at Life in Pencil, where we talk about change every day, the dawn of a new year – and, in this case, a new decade – is an exciting time.  New Year’s Day is, quite simply, a change-a-holic’s dream.  It’s the one day of the year when even the most diehard change-phobes come over to my camp for a spell, allowing themselves to feel the tingle of anticipation that comes with the possibility of new beginnings.  It’s a day for wiping the slate clean and starting over, my favorite activity.  It should come as no surprise, then, that I am an enthusiastic proponent of New Year’s resolutions.  At one New Year’s Eve party a few years ago, I famously invented the “New Year’s Resolution Game,” which involved writing five resolutions on different slips of paper, throwing them into a hat, drawing said resolution, and trying to guess which resolution belonged to which party guest.  In a group of engineers, it was pretty easy to guess who had resolved to “learn more about lasers in 2006.”

What struck me about this game was that I had no trouble coming up with five resolutions, when most of the guests struggled to come up with one or two.  I noticed that I set weighty and ambitious resolutions – I believe, at that time, there may have been a slip of paper that read “I resolve to spend at least three hours a day writing” during a time in my life when I was working 40+ hours a week – whereas most of my fellow partygoers set modest goals that had a reasonable chance of being attained.  When I set my resolutions, I think I knew from the get-go that many of those resolutions would never be achieved in their entirety, if at all.  But I seem to suffer from a delusion that, as the old saying goes, “if you shoot for the moon and miss you’ll still be amongst the stars.”

That’s why I was so excited to read Ari Herzog’s Resolve to Fail in 2010, a brief meditation on the importance of setting overly ambitious New Year’s resolutions, ones that you will likely never accomplish.  Essentially, Herzog says if you never fail then you can never succeed, because failure is an integral part of the process of being successful.  And to fail means to take a risk.  Herzog says, “The moment you divert from the path most traveled is the moment you can make a difference.”  I’d like to think this is what Life in Pencil is all about:  taking a risk on the unknown, trying something new, behaving outside the bounds of the ordinary.

So today, as you contemplate what the next year will bring, I encourage you to resolve to fail.  Amongst your more manageable resolutions, create one – just one – that you are likely to fail at.  And perhaps, over the next 12 months, that failure will lead to your eventual success.

What’s my impossible goal for 2010?  I want to write a book.  And sell it.

Now, what’s your resolution to fail?