New Year’s Resolutions
I can’t remember the last time I made a new year’s resolution. I’m sure I have before, but never in my adult life. The idea of radically changing something just because it’s a new calendar year has never appealed to me.
But, I love the fresh start feeling a new year brings as much as anyone. I love cracking the spine on a fresh planner and hanging a new calendar on my wall. There is something quite invigorating about having a clean slate in front of you. A chance to do something different. A chance for a new perspective.
Most new year’s resolutions fail, and they fail quickly. In the first three weeks of the year, the majority of people who made resolutions abandon them. People who had good intentions and were excited about their clean slate and their new habits.
It’s not a convincing argument for motivating me to make resolutions.
But people don’t fail in their resolutions because they aren’t motivated enough to stick with it. They are plenty motivated, but motivation is unreliable. You can’t expect to want to make the good choice every day. And if you are relying on feeling motivated to support your resolution, well that burden gets too heavy quite quickly.
At that point, it’s easier to walk away than try to figure out a different plan. At that point, you already feel defeated. Like the hill you set out to climb turned out to be Mt. Everest once you started up the trail. Looking up at the much-higher-than-you-expected peak, you decide that you just can’t.
Maybe you didn’t want it enough. Sometimes I do think that’s the case. I think that some resolutions are made hastily because everyone else is making a resolution. Those ones never had legs to stand on anyway. But most of the time, failing has nothing to do with how bad you wanted it.
Want and work are very different things. You can want something without being willing to put in all the work that particular something will take.
And nearly everything takes much more work than we anticipate from a distance. It turns out that the hill is almost always a mountain, and we should expect to find ourselves off-trail at least a couple times during the climb.
It’s like your resolution is to climb that hill that’s only a short walk away, so you set out for it. But then you reach the trailhead, and you realize you forgot your shoes. You start the hike anyway, but it’s rockier and steeper than you expected. Then you realize you forgot to bring water, and your map. And you probably don’t have enough snacks.
You turn back, because you were unprepared for the challenge in front of you. Once you got started, you realized that you would need to train a whole lot more than you expected before you could start the trail again. That training is more than you signed up for when you made your resolution, so you pivot and go in a new direction instead. It’s not because you didn’t want to climb it bad enough.
Most of our resolutions set us up to fail. We shoot for something too far beyond our skills in the moment instead of thinking incrementally. Our plans are too vague, our goals too far away. We take an all or nothing approach instead of realizing that something is a start. Progress is much slower than we expect, and most resolutions don’t take into account patience with the process.
While I don’t personally invest in resolutions, there are a few things about a new year and the clean slate feeling that I can’t resist. I do reflect on the year we’re leaving behind, and I do set some intentions for the one ahead. Intentions like patience, gratitude, and focus. Not things like I’m going to do 15 pull-ups every day when I can’t even do one today.
I also write a few things down that I want to work towards during the year. You could call them goals, but I don’t set deadlines or specific measurements around them. I’ve found it easier to keep making progress when I don’t worry about time limits. The trail up my mountains is always more challenging than I expected, so I don’t carry a stopwatch.
And finally, my first day of the new year is never a lazy one. I don’t believe in the superstition of how you spend the first is how you will spent your year, but I still like to start on a positive note. I like to wake up refreshed and see the first sunrise of the year, so I’m pretty lame to hang out with on New Year’s Eve.
Maybe you made a resolution this year that is already getting heavy less than one week in. Maybe, instead of abandoning it in the next two weeks, you can adjust the load you are carrying now. It is easier to move a pile of rocks a few stones at a time than trying to lift them all at once. It might take a lot longer, but you are also a lot more likely to finish the work.
