Another year has gone by and a new one has begun. Like most people, I engage in the annual ritual of reflecting on whether or not I accomplished my goals from last new year’s resolution then create new ones for the coming year. Like most people, I do not accomplish the majority of my goals and roll them over to the list of goals for the coming year. I reluctantly confess that some of these goals have been rolled over from year to year to year for decades.
As I desperately fought the feeling of being a failure while going through reflecting and goal-setting, an Albert Einstein quote and Thomas Edison story came to mind. Albert Einstein said that insanity is doing the same things and expecting different results. As I reflected on the previous year and set goals for the new year I realized that my life is proof that Einstein’s definition of insanity is a fact, maybe even a cosmic truth! I also realize that if I do not want to be in the same place twelve months from now, I need to…I have to do things differently.
The first thing I have to do differently is replace a failure mentality with a lessons-learned mentality. Thomas Edison worked for years to develop the light bulb. His biography reports that after he discovered one theory that did not work, he immediately developed another and tested that theory. When that theory proved to be unsuccessful, he replaced it with another, then another, then another. He repeated this process until he succeeded. Edison went through thousands of attempts before creating the light bulb. The story goes that Edison said he did not view his unsuccesful attempts at failures. He viewed them as lessons learned and took that knowledge into the next attempt. I want to think like Mr. Edison. I want to stay so committed to a belief and a dream that I will not let an unsuccessful attempt (or thousands of unsuccessful attempts) create or perpetuate a failure mentality. Instead of continuing to do the same thing over and over, I want to try something different and keep trying until I find what works.
What about you? What are you still trying to accomplish by doing the same things over and over? Do you need to start with an attitude adjustment like I do? Or have you already adjusted your attitude and now you need to change your behavior? Whichever one it is, let’s stop the insanity this year and do things differently.
