One of the main reasons New Year’s resolutions fail is complexity. We think in terms of wholesale reform instead of incremental improvement; we generate multiple levels of metrics to gauge our progress. A month or two later, we’re swimming in a sea of complications and spending as much time trying to figure out our game plan as we do actually executing that game plan. In a word, we quit.
Some people will never own up to their own humanity. If you are one of those people, tough luck: there’s nothing anyone can say to convince you can’t dunk a basketball in your short old age if that’s what you’ve set your mind to. Our only hope is that you cut yourself a little slack if you still can’t grab the rim by 12/31.
For the rest of us, we need to first acknowledge a few things:
1. We are creatures of habit and change better by increments than by sweeping reforms.
2. We will fail at our incremental efforts anyway. Big deal.
Maintaining an ardent desire to change is far more valuable in life than actually changing. Without the will to improve, any short term changes are quickly reversed; with the will to improve, we naturally achieve more with our lives.
A helpful exercise for us ardent yet fallible human beings is to come up with 3 words that distill our best hopes for the New Year down to easy concepts we can think about every day. For instance, “wellness” is a word that can swim around in your brain for 365 days, providing a constant measuring stick for every decision, every day. A page-long list of wellness goals can actually allow for more BS, more compromise, and more failure simply because the list implies a finite set of tasks, whereas the distilled “wellness” identifies an unswerving ideal.
So what are your 3 words for the New Year? I’d be willing to bet that if you can’t boil the resolutions down to a simple 3 words, you’ve become at least a little “lost” in the striving by now.
