On Resolutions

(Inspired by actual imbecility)

I’ve never been overly fond of New Year’s resolutions.  I’ve also never been able to avoid making them.

I think the real problem when you get down to it is that there’s only one time of the year that I think about New Year’s resolutions, and that’s at New Year’s.  Either I’m trying to remember what I resolved to do this past year (and cringing), or trying to think of reasonable and useful things to resolve to do for next year (and feeling pessimistic).

So why am I thinking about them now, when New Year’s is weeks away?  Two reasons, really.  

First, I was actually able to accomplish one or two of the small projects I set out for myself this year (I’m just as surprised as anybody, and also don’t worry, I failed to finish or even start many more).  Before I get swept up in New Years Mania again, I’d like to try and reverse-engineer an explanation of how that actually worked, so that I can possibly use that information in the future.

Second, for some reason, the more I thought about New Years and whether I’d like to get things done next year, the whole idea of resolutions in general started to seem silly to me.  I started trying to think of a way to get out from under this creeping feeling of self-obligation and standardized failure I seem to set myself up for, and get free of the cycle of New Years for good.  I don’t know if the thoughts I came up with would work for everyone, but I’m looking forward to trying them out for me.

How Not To Make a Resolution

First, some thoughts on why my resolutions have failed in the past.

The list is a short one, really just one entry long, because I think it’s where I’ve gone wrong most often.  Don’t set vague goals for yourself without developing a plan for making them a reality.  

It doesn’t have to be a perfect plan, or even a good plan.  What it does have to be is specific.  If you’re going to get anywhere, you’ve got to start with a goal that you know you can accomplish, and do some thinking about it.

One thing I’ve learned from reading Trent Hamm’s blog (thesimpledollar.com, seriously look it up if you haven’t) is the best thing you can do to yourself if you’re trying to accomplish something that seems impossible is to break it down into smaller, specific steps that are more manageable and easier to picture than vague statements like “lose weight” or “change my career.”  All good ideas start out vague and unspecific, but if you don’t take the time to try and make your goals make sense on a smaller, quantifiable scale, you’ll never really get anywhere.

Once you have a goal in mind, sit down for an hour or so and write down what you really mean to get done.  Write that down.  Then figure out, doing research as necessary, what the steps for getting that done might be, and write those down.  Break down the steps into smaller steps if they seem too big.  Or, better yet, realize that your goal is probably more than a one-year project, and plan accordingly (although this is sometimes frustrating).

Sooner or later you’ll reach a way of looking at the project where you have small things that you can do with only a few minutes of time each day. 

Hopefully, it will now seem manageable.  Instead of one overwhelming and open-ended idea, you have simple steps you can carry out every day, and you have three hundred and sixty-five chances to get that part right. 

The catch is, you’ll just have to absolutely and without fail manage to get yourself to put in that small amount of time each day, or it’ll still come to nothing.

How Not to Fail a Resolution

It’s simple really.  You just have to put in the time every day.

How do you make yourself do this?  Don't be distracted.  Yeah, but how do you do that?

Well, this is where I wish I had a $10,000 secret to tell you guys.

First, I wish I had one because I could charge each of my readers $1 apiece to see what it was, and quit my day job.  Or buy a sandwich, whatever.

Second, I wish I had one, because if I did I could accomplish anything I want.

Sadly, I do not have any grand secrets for how to make this part a reality.  All I have is the things that have worked for me before.

1. Self-Guilt

I like to picture myself as a five year old version of me (this is never difficult) who was promised a trip to the movies today.  Or better yet, it’s his birthday, and you promised him a trip to the pool.  This imaginary child symbolizes the me I want to be if I could manage to fulfill my resolutions (or dreams, if you like).

Then, I tell myself that if I don’t do the few-minutes-a-day thing for that day, then that little five year old doesn’t get to go to the pool, even though you promised him.

*insert expertly-drawn picture of pitiful mini-Den here*

In a nutshell, this is my secret.  I coach myself into feeling worse over letting myself down than I feel when I have to live up to the obligations I set myself.

I still fail, I will always fail, but I try to fail as little as possible, and to be aware of my failure when it happens.

In the end, the time you truly fail yourself is when you forget that you even had dreams to try and live in the first place.

(nota bene: pretending to forget until bedtime and then saying out loud “Oh! I was supposed to do X today, I’ll have to do that tomorrow” doesn’t count.  Don’t do that.)

2. Habit

Say you’re able to bully, beguile, badger, bribe, and bamboozle yourself into doing what you said you’d do for a few minutes a day, something magical starts to happen.  Well, maybe not magical, but at least sufficiently outside your direct control to seem neat-o the first time you notice it.

You’ll find you don’t have to remind yourself to set aside time to do the thing anymore, you automatically know that you’ll have to take time to do it.

You’d think this is where things get easier, but sadly not.

This is where you enter an even more challenging phase, because you start to bargain with yourself to get out of your responsibility, of course always on a temporary basis.  I’m doing great, you tell yourself, so I deserve a break.  

Logically speaking this strikes me as somewhat hilarious.  Consider a man, marooned at sea, whose only job is to not punch a hole in the bottom of his own boat with a pickaxe.  He manages to go without for three months without doing so, and he feels great.  He’s really accomplished something, three months straight, what a victory.  He feels so great about not breaking his streak that he decides to celebrate.  And how does he celebrate?  By punching a hole in the bottom of his own boat with a pickaxe and ending his streak there and then.

Don’t do it!  Don’t bargain, don’t procrastinate, don’t alter anything in your course if you can help it.  Just keep going.

3. More Self-Guilt

Just when you think you’re free.  

The really good stuff comes in when you’ve got a streak going, you’ve gone almost two months without missing a day, and then suddenly! you skip a day.  Or two days.  Or a week.  What happened?  Is it too late?  Should you just give up and try again next January?

No!  Remember that kid who’s crying over the pool!

If you fall down, get back up.  Get back on track.  You’ll feel worse if you don’t!  Or at least I do.  The worst is when you wait to get started again long enough for starting again to make you feel guilty too, because so much time has gone by that you’re rusty and it’ll take that much longer to get done.  But keep going!

Don't you ever start to feel good, like you're getting things done?  Sort of, but for me that's always sort of mixed up with this growing dread that if I ever completely miss a day, it all goes back to square one.  This isn't a bad feeling altogether, but it's not like you'd expect to feel as the plan becomes reality.  It's complicated.

As for how I’ve managed to accomplish the resolutions I’ve done this year, it’s simple.  I’ve also failed at them.

When I think over the things I managed to get done this year, I can’t think of a single one that I was trying to accomplish for the first time.  At least once already I’ve gone out, had a try at getting it done, and either found that my goal was too ambitious and laid it aside, or run out of steam for some other reason.

I guess this is why it’s a positive thing that good old December Thirty One rolls around again and again, to remind us of what we wanted to accomplish before, and that there’s still time to try again.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t think it would be better if we could get rid of the whole system altogether. 

How to Get Rid of Resolutions Altogether

When I was a kid, I used to wish I had a camera with me all the time, because the clouds in the sky would do remarkable things.  Vivid colors, huge dramatic shapes.  I could never quite remember it right, or draw how it had felt after the fact, and I thought that if I had a camera and an unlimited amount of film I could make a wonderful collection of the ways the sky looked, to reflect on whenever I liked.

Now that the world is twenty-some-odd years older, I find myself equipped virtually at all times with essentially just that: a phone, of course, with a camera built in, like everyone’s, that I can take as many pictures with as I like.  And I can see the pictures immediately after taking them, and try again if they didn’t quite turn out.  Wonders indeed.

From time to time I’ll be clearing out the memory on my phone and I’ll find a tiny picture of some clouds.  The trouble is, I’m almost never able to recall just what the sky looked like to cause me to take that picture, because it’s never the same.  Sometimes I’ll be able to guess at a reconstruction, but it’s just a representation.

Perhaps if I studied photography, carried sophisticated equipment, went out on purpose in pursuit of interesting weather, was diligent and bold in my decisions, and had some luck, I could collect a few images that seemed to represent the sky when I took them, or that would be dramatic and interesting on their own, whether the sky had been interesting or not.  But it still would not be the same as being there yourself, it would only be a winning representation.

This is roughly how I’ve come to feel about New Year’s resolutions only backwards.  No matter how carefully I plan out the goals I have for the coming year, it’s just a photograph, a representation.  Worse, it’s a representation of something that hasn’t even happened yet!  How can a person possibly know how things are really going to turn out six months in advance?  I occasionally have a hard enough time visualizing next week.

The point is, don’t let the vision take the place of reality.  Part of this is being specific and concrete with your plans, part of it might have to do with adapting those plans to fit your personality as you continue to rise to meet the challenges you set for yourself.  But mostly it’s in remembering that the reason you’re making these resolutions in the first place is to try and make your life better.  So don’t get so bogged down with plans for the future that you forget to live your life along the way.

In the end, New Years is a time of dreams.  We all want to think that next year will be better than last year.  Will it?  It never hurts to hope so, in fact hoping is sort of the first step towards doing the work it takes to make it better.

I wrote a longer version of this portion and deleted it, because it really boils down to one sentence.

Stop looking at time in terms of years.

No matter what you want to do, the first step you’ll have to take  to get it done has to be done today, or tomorrow at the latest.  It can’t be done in March, or June, or September (unless it’s witnessing a Lunar Eclipse or something, and even then I’m sure there’s something you can do to get ready).  It has to be done today or you’ll never do it.  Don’t trust the future version of you with your dreams, he or she is a good-for-nothing dirtbag and will promise you whatever they like.  You’ve got to do it yourself, or it will not happen.

And the best part is, if something takes you more than a year, just keep working on it!  If something takes less than a year, you get to do whatever’s next!

There must be a day coming up some time (obviously for many of us who celebrate the holidays, it may not be soon), whether it’s an hour in the evening, or half of your next solo lunch break, or even if you’re lucky a random weekend afternoon.  

Take that time.  Walk somewhere you don’t normally walk to, and sit down if you’re able.  Daydream.  Think about who you’d like to be but aren’t, the answers might surprise you.

If you make time to do that as often as you can, you will hopefully never be short of ideas that deserve to be made reality.

Then all you have to do is dragoon yourself into doing the work.  Once you’re used to it, that’s the easy part.