If you have read my older articles, you will know that I am not a fan of doing New Year’s Resolutions. I do reviews instead. For me, doing resolutions are pointless as it means:
Change can only happen at a “special” date – the common trap of people signing up for gym classes in January, and then slowly dropping off in the following months until they cancel their membership. And then having the mindset of “I’ll do better next year!“, waiting for the year-end, and the cycle repeats again. Change should start the moment you decide to do it.
Setting goals mean something – when you are thinking of the changes that you plan to do for the new year, what do you feel? Energized, with a warm fuzzy feeling? Our brains make us feel that we are doing something even though we are just thinking about it. This is an illusion, though. Reality is what is important.
So if setting resolutions are not the answer, then what do we do?
The future is not real
Resolutions are what we call forward looking statements. These are declarations for things and actions that are in the future. The problem is that there is an illusion of accomplishing something just by defining our resolutions. It can result in the plan itself becoming the goal, rather than the results of it.
Instead of forward looking, I believe that change can only happen if our statements are backward looking instead. What does this look like in real life? At the end of the year, instead of setting your plans and goals for the upcoming new year, you look back and review what happened during the past year.
When you are studying at school, you are graded by the results of the final exam, not on the course’s goals at the start of the school year. This example sounds ridiculous when you think about it, but it is the same when we set New Year’s Resolutions.
“But you can do both, like setting goals for the year and evaluating the results?“, you may retort. You can, although the goal setting exercise is going to matter much less than your evaluation. And isn’t it a better question to ask “what have you done this past year” rather than “what will you do in the next”? The former deals with the reality, while the latter does not.
Reviews are more forgiving
I get it, introspection is hard. There are lots of reasons why you did not accomplish what you intended to do. You may feel like doing reviews are passing judgments on yourself, and this is hard. Making yourself accountable can feel threatening, and can oftentimes even hurt. But I would argue that looking backwards allows for more flexibility in your results rather than a forward looking plan.
If you set a goal to lose 50 pounds in the coming year, and then an accident happens mid-year that gets you bedridden for months, then your resolution will likely be a failure. But if you are doing a review instead, you can take into account the months that you are physically incapable of losing weight, and evaluate the results based on that reality. Instead of “failing” to hit a 50 pound goal, you still “succeed” by losing 10 pounds, given that your mobility is limited.
And that in the end is a much better outcome than gaining weight or just maintaining it. The easy route is to just make excuses because of your physical limitations. Instead of beating yourself by not hitting your resolutions, you can celebrate because you still moved the needle in the right direction. This simple paradigm shift opens you up to even greater success at change in the future.
The only benchmark that matters
Setting New Year’s Resolutions also tends to be similar to what you see other people do, what other people say, or what is the trend at that time. If you see in social media that the next year is a “year of financial success”, you will set goals related to monetary goals. But are these goals the most important and the most impactful for you?
Doing reviews instead of resolutions have this one important characteristic. Backward-looking analysis makes it easier for you to compare against the only benchmark that matters: your past self.
Life isn’t a race with other people to see who will die with the most at hand. Life’s meaning can be found in the pursuit of becoming better than our current selves. If you are wretched now, pat yourself in the back if you were less wretched this year. As Jordan Peterson put it: “Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today“.
- Did your net worth increase this year compared to last year?
- Are you feeling better in terms of health and fitness than 2 years ago?
- Do people treat you better now and are you treating others better than in the past years?
Conducting reviews instead of resolutions does not mean you are not aiming high enough. If you treat life’s challenges and changes like a sprint, there will come a time when you will burn out and treat yourself like a failure. But if you see life as a marathon, with waves of ups and downs, then the best thing you can do is not to aim high, but to just aim up.