No Resolutions

Another year has passed, and with the start of 2014 I imagine that some of you are making resolutions for the new year. Even though the years that we have developed are simply humankind’s way of keeping time as our planet revolves around our closest star, I feel lucky to have made it to 2014 and be able to experience the dawn of a new year.

But this isn’t the time of year I feel like I should make a bunch of New Year’s resolutions, which personally I’ve never really liked. The following are five points, in no particular order, that serve as an explanation for my reasoning and are based on my own experiences with trying to make and achieve such resolutions.

It’s Easy To Make Unrealistic Resolutions

With an entire year ahead of you, it can be very easy to make resolutions that are in fact unrealistic. “I have an entire year in front of me, I can do anything!”, you might find yourself saying. Sure, a year is longer than a week or month, but as we all know it goes by very fast. In the typical euphoric period of celebrating the new year, it is all too easy to forget how short a year really is, and that it is likely not enough time for you to build that spaceship you’ve been dreaming about since you were five or transform your physique into that of the perfect human specimen.

Whether it is something you want to change about yourself, a new hobby you want to take up, a place you want to visit, or a target weight you want to attain, typically these things take time and commitment. A year is likely not enough time for you to go from a casual tennis player to competing in Wimbledon. At the same time, while a year is short, it is long enough for unforeseen circumstances to occur, impeding your progress and further shortening the year.

I’ll take myself as an example. Last year I wanted to run 1,000 kilometers. This wasn’t a resolution, but a goal I wanted to achieve. Unfortunately, I failed and only finished at 788 kilometers. But my failure was due to two unforeseen and rather serious injuries that kept me away from running for nearly four months. My year turned into eight months, and my goal of running 1,000 kilometers was farther away and, as it turned out, unattainable for me.

Given my history as a runner and knowing my yearly average over the past nine years, running 1,000 kilometers in one year was not an unrealistic goal for me. Even so, I didn’t achieve it. If I set a resolution to run 2,000 kilometers for the year - a distance I have never done but have come close to - it would have clearly been unrealistic. I would have surely felt worse only completing 788 kilometers out of 2,000 than 788 out of the 1,000 goal that I made.

It can be all too easy to forget the resolutions we made last year, especially those that were unrealistic. This can then lead to a new set of equally unrealistic resolutions for the year, which only sets us up for disappointment and lowering our feelings of self-worth. This is not something we should be doing. There are plenty of forces beyond our control trying to bring us down already. We don’t need to add anything to this.

We Set Ourselves Up For Disappointment

This ties in directly to my last reason. I’m sure we have all had seen a loved one, friend, or family member disappointed that they didn’t achieve their resolutions for the previous year. And I’m equally sure that many of us have experienced this disappointment for ourselves. At least, I have.

On the last day of the year, I often wonder how many people are actually happy about the resolutions they made and what they achieved for that year. To me, New Year’s resolutions don’t serve a good purpose. If you had a great year and achieved all that you wanted to achieved, you didn’t do that because of the resolutions you made. You did that because of yourself. If you had a bad year and didn’t achieve any of the resolutions that you made, you will likely only feel disappointed, which is something that you set yourself up for in the first place by making resolutions. This is exacerbated if the resolutions were unrealistic.

One thing I’ve always tried to do is to expect nothing, and it’s served me well in many instances to lessen any disappointment. Applied for a fantastic new job? Don’t expect to get it and then if you do it’s a nice surprise. If you don’t, it’s no problem because you weren’t expecting to get it anyway.

In my experience, from setting my own resolutions in the past to seeing those of others, making New Year’s resolutions brings with it the expectations that we will achieve them. When we don’t - which I would argue happens more often than not - we are disappointed. This is all self-inflicted.

No resolutions means no unrealistic expectations, and less disappointment in life. And isn’t that better than being disappointed at the end of every year?

A New Year Does Not Equal A Clean Slate

Okay, this might sound a bit pessimistic, and I like the idea of a clean slate just as much as everyone else. But the fact is, everything that happened in the previous year is not erased simply because the calendar moved to 1 January (or other day that marks the new year for your particular calendar).

I’m the first to say I’ve been guilty of this on more than one occasion. And it’s an easy thing to fall into. “Last year was awful. I’m so happy to leave it behind and have a new beginning. This year will be different/better/happier/insert appropriate adjective here!” How many times has this crossed your mind as the new year came?

Now I’m not saying that we should all live in the past and focus on all of the terrible things from the previous year. Nor should we focus solely on any of the resolutions we made for the previous year that we couldn’t achieve. My argument is that we should take a look at why we weren’t able to achieve our previous resolutions, and what we can do about it to bring change.

If we do this, we give ourselves a better chance of breaking the cycle of trying to achieve the same resolutions over and over again each year. If you’ve ever thought “Well, I couldn’t do [insert resolution here] last year, but it’s in the past and I’ll forget about it and try again this year,” you know what I’m talking about.

Failing is something to never run from. Some of the greatest success is born from the deepest failures. What is important is to learn from our failures, something we have likely heard all too many times but have not implemented into our lives enough.

Making New Year’s resolutions and simply forgetting about our failures of the previous year does us a disservice. It gives us a false sense that we have a clean slate, when that’s not what we should be taking with us into the new year. We have a slate that is splattered with our achievements and failures; our hopes and dreams; and our moments of sadness and joy from the past year. It is what defines us.

We should not want to erase this slate. We should want to vividly remember it and all the beauty we enjoyed and the failures we endured so we can use them to make ourselves better for the new year and beyond.

Goals, Not Resolutions

Resolutions come in many forms, but I would argue that we should be focused on goals instead. These are more attainable because they target specific and concrete results, such as taking and passing a foreign language class, instead of abstract concepts such as being a nicer person for the year.

The problem with New Year’s resolutions is that, while a year is short, it can feel long and it can be difficult to measure your progress. When your resolution has something that is ambiguous at best to track - such as being a nicer person - it is even more difficult. Goals can be as long or short and as easy or difficult as you want and can apply to anything, even to un-measurable concepts.

The trick is to turn them into something that can be measured. Let’s go back to the “becoming a nicer person” example. Instead of making such a resolution for the entire year, we can make individual goals for a specific time period. Taking it month by month, our January goals could include the following:

• I’ll give up my seat on public transportation for people in need when I see them.
• I’ll pay a friend/colleague/family member a compliment at least once per week.
• I’ll offer to do something I wouldn’t normally do that would help someone at least twice.
• I’ll attentively and caringly listen to a friend’s problems at least once.
• I’ll lend someone something if asked at least once, even if I wouldn't normally do so.

If you achieve only one of these goals, I would argue that it is much better to achieve one goal during a month than to not achieve an abstract resolution over an entire year. Imagine how good you would feel at the end of the month if you achieved all five. Even if you didn’t achieve any of them, you still made an effort and could see how far along you were to achieving your goal. Only give up your seat on the train once? Make a new goal to do it twice next month.

In my experience, setting goals provides you with a way to actually implement change. Instead of vague resolutions, measurable goals allow you to see your progress over a specific time period. You can track this any way you want - in a notebook, a spreadsheet, text file, or by memory - and it is satisfying and encouraging to see the progress you make. This progress represents real steps taken towards the change you want, which is what New Year’s resolutions aspire, but often fail, to achieve.

We Can Achieve Our Goals Anytime, Not Just Once A Year

This one is easy. The start of a new year does tend to bring with it a myriad of positive emotions, and I’m sure many of us feel like we can accomplish a lot over the year on that first day in January (or other month depending on what calendar you use).

As the year goes on, however, and as our resolutions seem farther and farther away, the change that we wanted to bring about can quickly seem to be out of our grasp. We then can easily declare this year as a wash and look to the next year, confident that we will be able to achieve our resolutions once the new year comes. This year was terrible, after all, and we would just rather forget about it.

Maybe this isn’t you, maybe it is, and maybe it’s somewhere in between. Wherever you fall, making the decision to change (through resolutions) only once per year is selling yourself short. An amazing thing about human beings is that we have the power to change many things about ourselves and our environment any time we want. We don’t have to wait for the start of the new year to do so.

You’re probably sick of hearing about running, but I’ll go back to it one last time as an example. I started running in the summer of 2004. My New Year’s resolution that year was to lose weight, and at just over 90 kilograms I was failing miserably. I kept thinking that I would do better next year, until one cool summer Saturday afternoon I decided that there was nothing keeping me from starting the change I wanted to achieve except myself.

And so I ran. I didn’t get very far. My best estimate was maybe 500 meters before I was completely exhausted. I was disappointed in how terrible I was at running, but I decided not to let it get me down. I wasn’t going to wait until the start of another year to try and lose weight. I was going to start right now, and keep going.

Somehow I did, and in six months I was running four days per week and lost 25 kilograms. Many friends and colleagues asked me if I was sick. I just told them that I had decided to not wait anymore to make a change. This decision began my love affair with running, which has changed my life. I’ve become healthier, ran races ranging from five to one hundred kilometers, have made a lot of new friends, and have felt much better about myself. This would have never happened if I waited to the beginning of the year to try and change again.

All of those things you want to achieve this year, or change, or do; you can start to achieve them at any time. You have the power to do this whenever you want, and you don’t have to wait until one point in the year to make resolutions that have a good chance of going unfulfilled. It doesn’t matter how far along you are. Every minute, hour, day, week, and month is a new opportunity. Don’t let it pass you by.

Final Thoughts

Well, there you have it. My reasons for not making New Year’s resolutions. Of course, I could be completely off the mark and maybe I’m the only one whose never managed to achieve all of their resolutions for the year. Perhaps you completely disagree with all of the above points and think that it’s not worth its space on the server. Totally understandable. We all have different opinions, beliefs, and ways of thinking. That’s what makes our world so very fascinating.

But for me, getting rid of New Year’s resolutions for the reasons above and replacing them with goals has worked well. Until I discover otherwise, I’ll keep this belief, and maybe some of my rambling words have benefited a person or two. Or a squirrel, because we all know how much trouble they have keeping track of all the nuts they come across every year.

And with that, I’ve achieved my goal of writing more this week. Let’s see if I can keep it up.