If you and I don’t announce our failures, we repeat them.

So I guess we should start announcing them?

A TRUTH

The first step in avoiding a repeat of that failure is to admit it.

A PROBLEM

But this is where the Resistance sneaks in and offers to help us avoid the shame. The voice in our head says things like:

It was someone else’s fault.

You were tired — it’s no big deal!

It was just one time. Don’t worry about it.

These might be facts, but it doesn’t matter. They’re tools of self-deception.

A SOLUTION

Maybe if there was a place to go to anonymously announce your failure — then maybe we’d be more inclined to do so.

That’s my idea for dailures.com: a repository for daily failures. I‘ll probably never implement this idea — just another website I bought on a whim — but the underlying principles are sound.

Let’s try it out. (Except for the anonymous part.)

From my journal, here are three failures from my past three days.

• My Omnifocus Inbox is overflowing. I promised myself I’d do something about it — it was even on my to-do list— but I didn’t.
• I went to bed three hours later than I wanted to, throwing me off the next morning. Whoops.
• When my daughter is engrossed in some activity, I’ve developed a bad habit of pulling my phone out and perusing. Every time she looks up, I feel shame and put it away. Yet a few hours later…

Will I repeat these failures, even though I announced them? Maybe.

But I’m giving myself a fighting chance. And that’s a lot more than we normally have.