I’ve been reading a fantastic book called The Extra One Per Cent recently. In it, the author references a study that found that 75% of people regret something they haven’t done, and only 25% regret something they have done. That’s a pretty convincing stat. And it’s why my new year’s resolution for 2014 is to fail more.

Like most people, failing is something I naturally shy away from. From a young age, we’re pushed towards seeing failure as being something bad to avoid wherever possible. Until a few months ago, I equated it with fundamentally wrong things. Failure was something to beat myself up over, to torture myself with for years, to make me feel that I was never good enough (this in part is due to my dad’s attitude towards everything I’ve ever done, but that’s a whole other blog post).

Then I went to a couple of talks by entrepreneurs about their failed businesses, and I started thinking about failure in a whole new way. The guys who spoke were very honest about their experiences, but they were also incredibly matter-of-fact. They naturally expected to fail as part of life. A failure wasn’t ‘game over’ or ‘did you really think you could do that?’ or ‘you aren’t capable enough’. A failure was, ‘it happened, let’s move on – what’s the next thing?’

This is the same attitude that established startups have at their core. Google isn’t afraid to launch new products and services and then drop them a few months or years later. In many cases, these things aren’t failures. They’ve served their purpose, or they’ve been replaced with something better, or the resources have been moved to a new project. Yet news sites and end users often report them – and class them – as failures. Quite frankly, it makes me respect Google more. The fact that one of the world’s most important and successful companies can hold its hands up and say, ‘Hey, we created this thing, but now we need to do something else,’ is pretty groundbreaking. It’s inspiring. If it’s ok for Google to get it wrong, then it’s ok for us.

I met up with one of my good friends recently for a drink. Like so many of my friends, he’s an incredible, intelligent human being with very little confidence. He told me that his new approach is to expect rejection. This isn’t just a passive pessimistic attitude – it’s making him go out and try new things and new ways of interacting with people with the expectation of being told ‘no’. So far he’s had some successes (including getting a ride in a police car and convincing everyone in a pub to swap drinks) and some rejections (I was with him when he asked a road sweeper if he could drive the vehicle for a bit. Even though he was told no, the driver gave him plenty of tips for getting his own licence and that definitely counted as a minor victory). What he epitomises is the same thing that Google and the entrepreneurs embody – that you truly don’t know what’s possible until you give it a go, and even if you fail you can learn a hell of a lot from the journey.

And that’s what I want to do in 2014.