When I started this blog this year, I had a goal of writing one post a week. I completely failed to do that. This post will be the 17th one this year so I’m sitting at a ~33% completion rate. Not my best work.
I’m not here to feel bad about this though. Failing is cool.1 Sometimes. I really believe that failing is a skill. With all skills, the only way to get better is to keep practicing. Every failure is an opportunity to learn. Every failure means that I at least tried. I’d prefer to fail a thousand times and succeed once than never try something new or challenging.
I don’t want this to be misconstrued as “hustle culture” in any way. You do not need to always push yourself to failure. You should not just shrug off all your failures and mistakes. Some of those require sitting down, thinking about what went wrong, and letting yourself feel bad for a bit. For me though, the biggest thing is not letting the fear of those feelings stop me from trying. The guilt and shame that I feel when I mess up are okay. It’s good to feel bad sometimes.
It’s the end of 2025. 2026 starts tomorrow. We’ve created these boundaries and like to pretend that they are discrete. That there is something about the relationship between calendars, Earth’s orbit, and our lives that meaningfully distinguishes this period of time from the last or the next.
At the end of the day2 though, it’s all continuous. I will continue to try my best, continue to fail, and hopefully continue to be a little better.