Most New Year’s Resolutions are bad! Which is, at least in part, why most are not successful. Consider the following common resolutions:
- Spend More Time with Friends and Family
- Improve Your Fitness
- Lose Weight
- Quit Smoking
- Quit Drinking
- Enjoy Life More
- Get out of Debt
- Learn Something New
- Help Others
- Get Organized
What a sorry set of vague and distant wishes! No wonder people fail to follow through!!!
A good resolution is specific and short-term with clear measures of success. The resolutions above are awful.
“Spend more time with friends and family.” How much more time and with whom? Why? What would it accomplish? What if you found it boring or painful? Or counter-productive? Get specific! How would you know if you were successful? Why are you even thinking this is important? Do you know what the right amount of time with friends and family would look like or feel like in an ideal world? Do you know what you will quit doing to make time? Do you know what must actually transpire to make a real difference? The amount of time you spend may be irrelevant; I say this while hoping to avoid the mindless phrase “quality time,” but hoping you can give serious thought to how you would measure success.
“Improve Your Fitness” and “Lose Weight.” Now here are a couple of bottomless pits! You could make tremendous progress without feeling successful with such vague wishes. Worse, you could make no progress simply by feeling overwhelmed by the magnitude, lack of direction, and guilt because you know you are not “doing enough.” Get specific! What will you do differently? How about “I will always take half and if I go back for more, I will again take half.” Accompany that with “no sweets or snacks on weekdays.” These are simple and specific decisions. Adherence is easy to assess. Results will also be easy to assess. (And you don’t have to wait until next year to tweak them! But don’t get me started on the inanity of making resolutions by the calendar rather than when they are needed to improve a condition. This is as bad as doing strategic planning once a year!)
“Quit Smoking” and “Quit Drinking.” These seem more specific but if you talk to people who have quit and restarted and quit and restarted and … you know that quitting is quite ambiguous. Get specific! If you know what success looks like, and if it isn’t in the distant future, you can achieve success more easily. And then, with renewed confidence, you can achieve more success. Confidence, motivation and learning snowball when applied in an endless series of successful little steps. Set a short-term, measurable goal. Achieve it and move on to the next achievement.
“Enjoy Life More.” Now there is a prime example of a nebulous goal! For you this might mean eating out more frequently. For someone else, it could mean more frequent self-flagellation. Do you know what would make your life more enjoyable? What would you actually be doing? How would you know you were enjoying life more? Get specific! Far too many people are enthralled with idealistic notions of what comprises a happy life. It is not until you know what you need to do differently that you can begin to behave differently. Expecting increased joy while continuing the same old habits, no matter how hard you wish reality would take a sharp right, is simply self-delusion. You can do better than that!
“Get Out of Debt.” Another good target for wishful thinking. Getting out of debt requires living within one’s means and then some. Your choices are three-fold: spend less, make more, do both. What are you going to give up? How are you going to make more?
“Learn Something New.” Say what? What do you care about? Why would it make a difference if you learned something new? This is as vague as saying that you need to be a better person. (Wait! That might be Number 11!) If you can’t identify an area where learning something new would improve your condition – your happiness, your ability to make money, your parenting capabilities, your relationships, etc., you are not likely to commit to the effort needed to learn something new. Once again, get specific! What do you need to learn and why does it matter?
“Help Others.” Here we go again! Another unmeasurable, unactionable goal not readily translated into specific steps to success! Who do you want to help? Why? How would it make a difference? Are you looking to appease your conscience or make an actual difference in someone’s life? Get specific and be successful!
“Get Organized.” If I believed New Year’s Resolutions were confined to these ten, I would not stress out over one more bottomless pit. But I know this list of ten is followed by ten more nebulous, feel-good resolutions dooming the resolute to capitulation. What needs to be organized? Why? Where would you experience the benefits? What do you want to increase and what do you want to decrease? How will you know when you are done? Have I already mentioned that you need to get specific?
Nebulous, long term dreams are wonderful, evil and worthless.
They are wonderful in that all will endorse your intentions.
They are evil in that their ambiguity and bottomlessness will likely discourage and overwhelm.
They are worthless until you translate them into specific, measurable goals with small, concrete steps.
And all of this, of course, applies to New Year’s Resolutions as well as business visions, strategies and tactics. Get specific. Know what success would look like. Translate big goals into small, concrete steps.
Get specific and be successful!
Best wishes in 2009!
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