January 1 has never been about ambition for me. It’s a day of gentle inertia. No urgency. No resolutions shouted into the void. Just a day of lazy reflection. Growing up, it meant watching the Wiener Philharmoniker with my parents, followed by the ski jumping from Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Sound, beauty, flight, stillness. A rhythm that never asked anything of me.

This year felt similar. And different.

Now, as a father of five (almost) grown-ups and deeply engaged in my coaching work, I felt compelled to switch on my computer and share what stirred. I hope you enjoy it.

The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy.

Robert Burns

These lines are enough.
They say what needs to be said.

Plans fail.
Even good ones.
Especially good ones, sometimes.

Burns names the problem. He doesn’t explain it away. He doesn’t soften it. He simply states what life keeps teaching us, whether we are ready for it or not.

The second poem, by A. J. Cronin, does something different. It doesn’t move past the problem. It lingers with it.

Life is no straight and easy corridor along which we travel free and unhampered,
but a maze of passages,
through which we must seek our way,
lost and confused, now and again checked in a blind alley.

But always, if we have faith,
a door will open for us,
not perhaps one that we ourselves would ever have thought of,
but one that will ultimately prove good for us.

What strikes me about Cronin’s words is that they don’t rush toward reassurance. He doesn’t deny confusion. He doesn’t romanticize it. He accepts it as part of the architecture of life. A maze. Passages. Blind alleys. Not mistakes or good decisions. It just is.

In human performance, this is often the part we skip too quickly. We want clarity back as fast as possible. Direction. A new plan. Something solid to hold on to. We treat being lost as a failure, instead of recognizing it as a phase.

Cronin seems to suggest that being lost is not a deviation from the path. It is the path.

In coaching, I see how unsettling that is for people who are used to competence. To momentum. To being “on top of things.” When the corridor disappears and the maze appears, confidence takes a hit. Not because ability is gone, but because certainty is.

Cronin doesn’t promise the door we want. He’s very precise about that.
Not the one we would have thought of.
Not the one we planned for.

That’s the hard part.

Moving forward without knowing where the door is. Or even if it exists yet. Continuing anyway. Not out of blind optimism, but out of trust that standing still in the maze is worse than choosing a passage and walking.

That kind of courage is understated. It doesn’t look like bold vision statements or five-year plans. It looks like staying present when things don’t resolve quickly. It looks like continuing to act with care even when the outcome isn’t clear. It looks like movement without guarantees.

Maybe that’s what made this January 1 feel different. Not the idea that plans fail, but that failing plans don’t mean we’re failing. They mean we’ve entered the maze.

And the work, then, is simple.
Not easy. But simple.

Keep walking.
Pay attention.
Trust that a door will open.

Maybe not the one you imagined.
But one that, in time, will prove good.