Saturday, December 31, 2011

New Year's Resolutions

     I don't make New Year's resolutions. Doing so never has worked for me. Instead, I take a different approach.
     I know that I should do something. It needs to be done. Whether for myself, for someone else, or for my institution. Maybe it's simply the right thing to do. So why wait for a new calendar before acting?
     I try to make daily resolutions. Perhaps I have to complete a specific task. I may want to make significant progress on a long-term project. More than anything, I try to do things at least a bit better than the previous day.

1 comment:

pam said...

I love resolutions, but I don't think I reserve them for the new year. I see them as lots of little new starts. A burst of chocolate just because, if you will!

I was up ridiculously early this morning (painting the kitchen in a fit of insomnia) and listened to The People's Pharmacy on NPR. The show was titled Willpower Science and featured a Stanford psychology professor who talked about ways to approach resolutions that aren't so all-or-nothing. The most interesting, I thought, was the concept of a measurable difference. For example, instead of saying "I'm going to quite smoking," say "Tomorrow, I'm going to smoke exactly the same amount that I smoked today." The idea being to project today into the future and see how life will be if things don't change. I love that. If you don't take action -- any action -- nothing will change. Seems obvious, but it's not always. My best wishes for a new year full of interesting things around every corner!