I’m stuck! Heading into 2024, I need to rethink how I approach challenges. I want to truly embrace failure as learning.

But there’s a problem. It’s not enough for me to say, “Failure is learning” because I can sense that I don’t truly buy it.

How do I know? Because when I repeat that phrase to myself, I notice tension in my body. I can feel myself recoiling. It turns out my distaste for failure is stronger than my love of learning. My mind makes a move psychologists call “backward association,” and I associate learning with failure instead of the other way around.

But I crafted a solution. I decided to just take failure out of the picture altogether, and focus on what I want. I want victory and joy, and it just so happens that learning is my favorite ways to get both of these.

Now, I know I sound a little pie in the sky. We don’t always get to control which goals we take on or the resources available to us. But we do control how we go after the goal. So 2024 is my year to go after my goals with curiosity, for two reasons:

⚡️Curiosity isn’t just the best way to learn everything, it promotes creative thinking and a more motivated state of being. Behavioral psychologists at UC Santa Barbara found a correlation between curiosity, creative behaviors, and a feeling of desire.

⚡️Curiosity makes me thoughtful to consider all the moving parts before pulling the trigger on a solution. This safeguards me from failing too big and inadvertently causing harm. The aim is a create safe-to-fail experiments that increase our wisdom for effective solution-crafting. You can learn more about safe-to-fail experiments in the book Immunity to Change by Kegan and Lahey.

2024 is a year of learning! (… failure?)