“He had failed… in so many ways.
Stand up, he thought. And do better.”
– From Oathbringer, by Brandon Sanderson

As much as I do not usually hold with New Year’s resolutions, this is just too good a quote to post on New Year’s Eve. 🙂

This may be one of the most simple and straightforward quotes I ever use. Avoiding spoilers as much as possible, it’s about one of the main characters of this series, who has lately been sinking under the weight of all his failures, both in the past and the present. At this exact moment, he nearly buckles under his grief, but he chooses to… well, “stand up, and do better.”

There is nobody who goes through life without failing. Indeed, success seems to be the rarity, and failure, the norm. It would be so easy, so very easy, to just give up. It’s easy to be forever a failure, because then you don’t have to do anything, just lie down and lose ourselves in pain. It takes so much strength, sometimes more than we think we have, to get back up and do better than we did before.

It’s such a simple admonition. Yet the world turns on it, on humans who, despite all the failure in the world’s history, keep standing up and striving to do better than has been done before.

It starts with us, with you and me, ourselves.

Let’s do better.

And on that note: Happy New Year! 🙂