New Year’s Resolutions: Volume Two

A blank state, fresh calendar pages, and the best of intentions. That’s how it always starts. This whole new year, new me thing. And inevitably we immediately begin to hit and miss. We’re bobbing and weaving our way to an updated version of ourselves that maybe doesn’t feel all that different than the us from last week.

So, maybe we continue forward, invigorated by the tiny success we feel with each checkmark. Or maybe we give up because it turns out that we aren’t like instant rice. We aren’t going to be fully-cooked in five minutes. Within a few weeks, we reach our annual realization that two days of our new habits don’t erase the itch we feel from our old ones.

Change takes time. We either find the patience for that, or we don’t.

We also bite off more than we can chew. Especially this time of year. When it’s so tempting to believe in the power of the New Year’s Resolution. We think we can get from the lobby to the tenth floor of a building with no elevator without taking the stairs. Instead, we are stunned when we realize that after more than two weeks of effort, we haven’t even moved past the reception desk. It’s deflating when we notice that we’re still in the lobby.

We start to doubt ourselves and wonder why we aren’t the kind of person that can make any progress. That maybe we just aren’t built to be in better shape, and a pull-up might always be out of reach. Or that we’d never make it on Top Chef, and takeout will always be our destiny. That maybe we really don’t want to write that book or learn to play guitar. 

Maybe sometimes we’re right. Maybe we really don’t want to put forth the painstaking effort and boredom of hundreds of thousands of words written, crossed-out and re-written about the same thing over countless drafts. And maybe being able to play the first four chords of Free Falling is enough rockstar to satisfy the itch. But most of the time when doubt creeps in, we’re wrong. It isn’t because we don’t want it enough or that we aren’t capable.

There is no magic guarantee that our story will be a best seller. Or that we’ll write a breakout song that catapults us to millionaire celebrity status by the end of the year. Our home-cooked dinners from our first month of meal delivery kits aren’t going to turn us into the head chef of the most prestigious restaurant by summer. And if we’ve just completed our first circuit-based workout since high school gym class? We probably won’t win American Ninja Warrior this season.

It’s okay to have big dreams and want these kinds of successes for ourselves. But we can only control what we put into something. Chance and so much more influence specific outcomes. And when we set our resolutions and goals to achieve certain result on strict timelines? No wonder we get discouraged after 17 days. We simply didn’t consider the staircase.

This is why I’m not a New Year’s Resolution person. And why, despite being goal-oriented by nature, I try to keep result-centric outcomes separate when I set my own goals and intentions. No matter how many times life proves otherwise, we naively keep believing progress doesn’t have plateaus. And we continue setting timelines that are exponentially too short for getting from where we are now to what we want to achieve.

The fresh slate feeling of January turns us all into hopeless romantics in rose-colored glasses.

But today, we are halfway through the month. It’s starting to sink in that we aren’t going to be the new us we imagined by next week. We are just now realizing the daunting task we set for ourselves. That our goals are a lot heavier than we expected. That it would be significantly more comfortable and way easier to simply give up. We wonder if we’d be happier trying to be content with all those things we were itching to change.

The answer is, probably not. We set our New Year’s Resolution because it was an area in our life where we wanted to spark something different for our future. But the problem isn’t us or with a lack of motivation. The goals we set are the problem. When we wrote it down and decided on our route, we didn’t notice that our map had a scale. That our goal is the equivalent of thinking we can drive from the Atlantic to the Pacific in four hours. On one tank of gas.

So maybe this week, when your motivation tank is running on fumes, you will decide to keep going anyway. Even when you realize that your toes won’t be pressing into California coastline sand before tonight’s dinner. Because maybe the new hint of pine forest in the still salty air east of the Appalachians is enough fuel for you to set a new goal. The kind that makes you proud of being on the steps to the first floor. Even if the rooftop is still where you ultimately want to be.