Most new year’s resolutions are bullshit

Every year it seems in the weeks leading up to new years eve and the weeks after a whole bunch of things swirling through my brain about what I should be doing to be a better person. I make the same damn resolutions over and over again. I bet most of us do.

I think this is total bullshit.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the idea of setting and achieving goals. Personal development is a very important thing, but I think the concept of a new year’s resolution leads to the wrong kind of focus on the personal development journey.

For example - every year now for over a decade I tell myself that I need to eat better, get more fit and avoid alcohol. Great goals, but I slip in the lie that this is how I’ll be happy. Then during the darkest weeks of the year, I beat myself up over doing this again.

The truth is that yes - year after year I say the same thing myself, but I am blinded to all the amazing things that are now a part of my life.

In the past decade I have:

Gotten married
Bought a house, sold a house, and bought another house
Had three beautiful children
Started and now grown a pretty successful company - if I don’t say so myself

All of these things are pretty freaking great and make me very happy, proud, fulfilled but my new year’s resolution is blind to this. Why is that?

New Year’s Resolutions May Not Be Very Healthy

Here’s the thing about how most of us think about resolutions. We find areas in our lives that we’ve fallen short on and we hyper-fixate on these issues and this is where we start our resolutions around. We try and solve our problems without taking a big picture approach to our lives. At least I do, maybe you do too.

In this way every year I get really down on myself. I stress eat and overindulge on sweets and alcohol because well “fuck it” or “I’ll fix myself next year”. I paint an unfair picture of the state of my life and I find myself losing joy at one of the most joyous times of the year.

It is not healthy.

It is total bullshit.

I am approaching resolutions in a different way

Now I could just decide the whole concept of a new year’s resolution is stupid and stop the entire practice. I was tempted.

But I do want to get better. I want to improve. I do in fact want to achieve the goals I have in my mind.

What I don’t want to do is approach them from the depths of holiday despair. I end up making over-the-top resolutions that are impossible to follow and aren’t very healthy. In past years I have gotten hurt overtraining or getting even more depressed by my poor adherence to the resolution that I adopt the “fuck it” mentality before the end of the second week of January.

This year I am adopting the “be happy” resolution. What makes me happy?

My family
My hobbies
My fitness and health
My business

Instead of creating a highly detailed resolution built from a negative view of myself, I am building a mentality to build my happiness in a holistic way.

I need diet and exercise, yes. But I also need to focus on my children and my wife. I need to pick up the guitar more and sing more as well as make time to go skiing and camping and gardening. I need to get better sleep and remember it is okay to be stressed out over work - hard work does pay dividends that are bigger than cash flows.

This softer focus will also allow me to screw it up, which I will, and not call off the whole damn thing. I’ll have more tools and things to do and therefore more places to remind myself of what I am achieving.

Happiness is not a destination but a state of being

This year my new year’s resolution isn’t about getting somewhere it is about experiencing the journey and letting life happen and getting joy from the process.