By the Way New Year Revolutions January 2007

by Dan Shafer

“I won’t be making any New Year Resolutions again this year. I figure my body and my mind can only handle so much change at one time anyway.”

I’ve never been a fan of New Year Resolutions. It seems to me they don’t make sense on a couple of levels.

First, if you have something you want or feel you need to change, why wait days or weeks or months to get started on it? That reminds of the many times in my life I vowed to quit smoking — on Tuesday. Or go on a diet — right after the weekend of partying.

If you have something about you that you’re sufficiently unhappy about that you want to change it, why would you want to keep doing it for one second after making that decision? My experience — and I suppose this could be unique to me but I somehow doubt it — is that those “one of these days” commitments to myself generally get forgotten, overruled or so badly modified as to no longer resemble their original intent long before the deadline rolls around.

The second reason I find New Year Resolutions to be unhelpful is the fact that so few people seem to stay with them for very long at all. In fact, I’d wager that fully 90% of the New Year Resolutions made in this country every year are forgotten about 11 seconds before they’re actually implemented.

I don’t think we make these resolutions with bad intent. It’s just that the enthusiasm that is present at the instant we decide to change something diminishes rapidly over time.

That’s not true only of resolutions, of course. How many times have you bought something you desperately needed only to find it lying unused and perhaps even unopened in a drawer a few weeks or months or years later? When that happens, do you shed any tears over the long-lost article? Probably not. In fact, if you’re anything like me, you may scratch your head and wonder (out loud if you’re really bad at this) why you bothered to buy it in the first place. Stupid old thing!

A few years ago, recognizing my allergy to New Year Resolutions, I started making New Year Revolutions instead.

The differences between the two are critical to me and my ability to stay with my plans at least long enough to see most if not all of them come to fruition.

The first big difference is that rather than letting the date drive the decision, I let the decision drive the date. Whenever it occurs to me that I ought to be working on some habit or pattern or behavior that no longer serves me well, I reflect on it and decide whether it is worth spending the significant time and energy I know it will take to correct it. If so, I start at that moment, and I declare that to be a new year for that new version of Dan. I think I’m up to Version 327,104 by now. I stopped counting a few years ago.

The other big difference between my old New Year Resolutions and their replacement New Year Revolutions is that I try to make them big, juicy, meaningful changes. For example, it’s not a revolution in my life to decide I’m going to reduce the number of football games I watch. (That’s probably a bad example since the number of games I watch is far more closely related to how badly my teams are playing than any other single factor I can isolate.) It is, however, a revolution in my life to decide to cut 50% off the amount of time I spend watching television, something I recently decided and implemented in a few days.

Such major (need I say revolutionary?) changes make a measurable and noticeable impact on my life and allow me to feel good about starting a new year in my head regardless of what the calendar says.

So I won’t be making any New Year Resolutions again this year. I figure my body and my mind can only handle so much change at one time anyway and I’ve already got this reduced-TV thing going.

By the way: That 50% reduction in television viewing? I made an exception for football and baseball. Hey, you can’t move too quickly on these things, you know. Might throw your mind into whiplash, or worse.

By the way: Happy New Year to you and yours. As you celebrate the page-turn of the calendar, pause for a moment and reflect on how lucky we are to be living in such an incredibly beautiful, magical place. °

Dan Shafer
Associate Editor
dan@65mag.com