It’s the first post of the year. Tradition requires that I write something about the new year, or new goals.
No more resolutions
An article on resolutions that 70% of Americans won’t make resolutions.
I don’t know what research backs this statement. But it sounds about right. Most of us will say we didn’t make any resolutions for 2025.
When and why did we stop making new year’s resolutions? Probably when we realised that we made the same ones year after year. We stopped making them because we knew we wouldn’t keep them.
That same article claims 23% of adults quit their new year’s goals by the end of the first week of January. That number doubles by the end of January. Again, that sounds about right to me.
Call it something else
We may have given up on new year’s resolutions. That doesn’t stop us having goals or objectives for the year. Google’s AI claims these are all different:
“A goal is a desired outcome, an objective is a quantifiable action, and a resolution is a statement of intention.”
If you’ve been on management training, you will have some fancy definitions. You will say we need to set SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound). That’s all good advice. But deep down, we don’t care about the difference between these terms.
What we care about is this: we want a future that is better than where or who we are now.
You haven’t failed
Why do we fail or give up on our goals? There are many reasons. Maybe our goals weren’t smart enough. Maybe we relied too much on willpower. Maybe life just interfered.
But the real failure is believing that we have failed. We didn’t get it right today. But that doesn’t mean we won’t get it right tomorrow.
Forget the date. We don’t have to start our diet / exercise / business plan / study plan on the first day of the year, or the first day of the month, or the first day of the week. We can start later today or tomorrow, or whenever this problem that interferes is out of the way.
Have a better 2025
Maybe the first few weeks of 2025 haven’t gone as planned. But that’s ok. Tomorrow will be better. And if it isn’t, you can try again the next day.
Future you is the result of all the things you do between now and then, not just what you do or don’t do today.
So I don’t just hope you have a wonderful 2025. I hope that you have a 2025 that is a little bit better every day.
I’d love to hear your views about resolutions and goals and not giving up.