If You Only Make One Resolution This New Year, Make it This One
Forget about every other goal
Every year, the same question: “What are your New Year’s Resolutions, teehee?”
How do you respond?
I bet a good chunk of you say you want to lose X number of pounds. Maybe you want to read X number of books this year. Or earn X more $ every month in your day job. That’s what these wonky stats say, anyway.
Whatever it is, most of them tend to fail.
If you try to find out statistics of how often people stick to and accomplish their New Year’s resolutions, I have bad news for you: Success rates usually fall in the 7% to 20% range after a year.
Even more startling, a statistic based on 100 million points of user-logged data from Strava shows an even bleaker picture. Most people quit their New Year’s goals by January 19 — a day cheekily called “Quitter’s Day” by Strava.
But it’s why I only ever follow 1 New Year’s resolution:
- When I go to the gym angrily in January because it’s flooded with people who are about to waste a 1-year subscription, it reminds me of my goal.
- When I browse my favorite media sites on the internet and get flooded with 1,000 “SCIENTIFICALLY 100% TRUE SECRET WAYS TO GETTING NON-FATTER YOU BIG FATTY,” I remember my resolution.
- When I have a beer over Xmas dinner with close friends I haven’t seen in a while, they no longer ask my resolution, and I am reminded of it nonetheless.
My New Year’s resolution every year is to make no resolution at all.
Because if I want to achieve something enough to make it a target, putting the chances of success down to only 1 day a year with a massive amount of anticipation, expectation, and inevitable failure-to-reach-100% of the goal and then dropping off into a pit of despair and goal-giving-upness is — to me at least — the most statistically improbable way of ever hoping to accomplish a goal in the first place.
If you want to make something great happen next year, start now.
Start tomorrow.
Start whenever you have the desire to because that’s the only way change ever happens.
And then do it again.
And again.
And again.
After all:
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” — Will Durant
That’s what works for me. Maybe it can help you, too.
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