We’re well into January, and I’m guessing that by now you’ve already begun abandoning your well thought out and well intentioned New Years resolutions. And they were well intentioned, weren’t they? That’s because it’s so much easier to be optimistic when you’re looking at the new year through the rosy vapors of last night’s champagne. But then stark reality hits (along with a killer headache if you bought the kind of champagne where you get change back for a ten), and your ambitious plans start to crack and fall apart like a cheap facelift.

Why is this?

I think it’s because the whole concept of New Years resolutions is a flawed one.

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In a recent blog article, I made the observation that too many of the big decisions we make in life are predicated on the avoidance of failure rather than on the achievement of success. In other words, we make too many “safe” decisions because we’re afraid of what might happen if we fail. I encouraged my readers to aim higher—to shoot for greatness, innovation, and influence.

But what if you do fail?

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We spend far too much time trying to avoid failure. It drives many (maybe even most) of our decisions—at least the bigger ones.

“What if I fail?”

“What if this doesn’t work?”

“What if I get embarrassed?”

“What if I get sued?”

Sure, these questions—and others like them—need to be taken into consideration. But all too often they become the primary decision driver. We make our decisions based on the avoidance of failure rather than the achievement of success. And so we end up taking the safest route, the one that will keep us out of trouble.

The problem is that greatness doesn’t live along that route.

Neither does innovation.

Neither does influence.

Greatness. Innovation. Influence. Sounds kind of like the Beatles, doesn’t it? When they began a project, they didn’t spend a lot of time mired in the “What if we fail” question. Granted, if they had then they might not have produced the amateurish Magical Mystery Tour TV movie. But then they also might not have produced Sgt. Pepper. Or the White Album. Or Abbey Road.

Look, there’s no guarantee of success. You might fail. You might get embarrassed. You might even get sued. But if you let the fear of failure be your deciding factor, it’s like you’re aiming for the middle. And I don’t think that’s where you want to be.

Take a chance this year. Aim higher. Aim for success.

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I’ve had the good fortune to meet Paul McCartney a few times. And I say “good fortune” not just because it’s cool meeting famous people; I say “good fortune” because of the lesson I learned—and re-learned—from this guy (who, as a refresher to our younger readers, was one of the Beatles).

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I was recently talking to a fellow speaker about marketing. She was complaining (whining, really) because she had to put together a new marketing campaign for her services, and she wasn’t enjoying the process. She said she didn’t want to do any marketing. I asked her what she did want, and she said:

“I just want people to hire me.”

Well, don’t we all? There are a lot of kids out there who want a pony, and that’s probably not going to happen either.

But her comment got me thinking. It seems to me that in the area of achievement, there are two kinds of people:

There are worker bees…and there are wannabes.

One of them gets results. See if you can guess which one:

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Cool guy Steve Spangler with Ellen DeGeneres

At a recent convention where I was speaking, I ran into my good friend and science wizard Steve Spangler. As always, I was astounded by just how successful this guy is. He runs a multi-million dollar company, he’s an Emmy winner, and he’s appeared numerous times on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. And if you ask him what he does for a living, he’ll tell you the truth. He’s a science teacher.

So how does a science teacher achieve that kind of success? I think it boils down to a decision he made several years ago—a decision that most of us would never have thought to make.

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Jim Rohn once said, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” While there are certainly exceptions to this axiom, there’s enough truth in it that it might behoove us to pay attention. And by “pay attention” I mean “pay attention to just whom we’re hanging around with.” Let me give you an example.

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I recently had the privilege of delivering the opening keynote address at the annual convention of Mensa. This can be a little intimidating, because the sole requirement for membership in Mensa is that you be a genius (in the top 2% of IQ). Granted, I’m a member, but I’m pretty sure I got in under some sort of affirmative action program. In addition to my keynote presentation, I also delivered a workshop on creativity and innovative thinking. And it was during this workshop that I found myself going way off script and found myself admonishing my audience. Basically, yelling at the geniuses.

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My dad is turning 91 today. He never planned to be around this long. Both of his parents died young (his father, my grandfather, died at age 42), so he just kind of assumed that he would too. But here he is, nearly 50 years later, still chugging along.

Most of us don’t plan to live until 91. Oh, we say we do—but we don’t act like it. We have no plan, and we certainly have no savings. Most of us don’t even begin to think about our retirement until it’s already upon us. So this isn’t news.

What might be news—and what I’ve been thinking about this week—is that many of us run our businesses the way we run our lives: with no long-term plan, and no real thought about any kind of future beyond the next few years. So here’s my question to you:

How will your business—the products, services, and value you offer to your customers—hold up 50 years from now?

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I recently read a New York Times Magazine article that says that in the late 19th century there was a theory about how human beings improve in their activities. The theory said that a person “could improve at mental and physical activities until he hit a wall, which he cannot by any education or exertion overpass.” In other words, there’s a point for each of us where we can’t improve anymore.

Turns out that’s not altogether true. Current research, as the article points out, shows that our level of improvement “often has much less to do with our innate limits than with what we consider an acceptable level of performance.” To put it another way, we work at something until we get to “good enough.” And this is where the average people simply stop.

Let me tell you what the above average people do.

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