Taco ‘Bout It: “Resolving Success Through Failed Resolutions”

by Taco Olmstead

“Taco ‘Bout It” is Taco’s new blog series consisting of musings, inspirations, and life lessons, also known as “Tacoisms”.  

2014: a great year, a year of growth, a year of change, a year of great joy and great sadness, another year of living.

We always look back on the passing year, take note of events, view many as life changing and then, we inevitably continue on our way, down the same road, down the same path invariably making the same choices we made the previous year.
Our New Year’s Eve traditions are “firm” resolutions full of only the best intentions. Well, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and despite those intentions our lives are generally marred with lack luster results despite the resolutions made.
Some people even make a New Year’s wish! They wish for peace, an end to hunger, financial security, pick your pleasure or persevering fantasy but the list goes on and on… The outcome is again the inevitable invariability of another year closely resembling the past year. There will be no magical change, no divine intervention sweeping the land, no consistent magnanimity or gratitude. Don’t get me wrong, there is a change in behavior for a short time, that is of course until life sweeps through the door giving you the seemingly impossible hurdles it ceaselessly places in our way. The types of obstacles you will never find folks heralding on social media platforms. Herein lies our problem as to why our years never change.
It’s easy to be grateful for winning. Winning validates us, it soothes us. Winning reassures us of our choices that are made, strokes our egos and nurtures the narcissist within us all. Winning defines us.
What we do not hear enough of and what we all need to hear more of is that it is our failures which chisel us. It is our failures that are our true monuments to the grit we lay back down at life. When we fail, it hurts us and we question our choices. I will learn more about myself, this life I live, in a single failure than in a dozen victories. It’s easy to win, it takes a whole other type of person to take a shot on the chin and walk away holding their head high.
In 2014, I failed more than I ever won and I am grateful for every glorious defeat and will continue to revel in the data gathered from every one of my disastrous choices made. Winning is for the content and the complacent but failure, failure is where we find the glory. No person has ever grown from floundering in the mediocrity of complacency but a Phoenix cannot be created without embracing the glorious flames of failure and be born anew from the ashes of its poor choices. The struggle is real and I will embrace it.
So please, have your resolutions and wishes, celebrate your easy successes and forget the failures, I can assure you that your new year will be just as good as the last. For those of you who are looking for more, take my hand and let us celebrate not only our successes, but bask in the glories of the changes our failures create together. I can assure you our new year will be even better than the last..