Read If You Failed Your New Year's Resolution

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Today’s Read: 3 minutes

One week from now is the halfway mark of the year.

Did you set a New Year’s Resolution for yourself?

How's that going?

If I had to bet on the status of your resolution, it's probably not flourishing. More likely, it’s failed or foregone. By February, 80% of resolutions are cancelled.

This is usually what the effort curve on resolutions looks like.

If New Year’s is new to you, you’re forgiven for not knowing.

But come on, this isn't your first Resolution Rodeo.

You've been here before: saddled up to a resolution. Gotten thrown off within a month. Only to come back next year to pick a new New Years Resolution.

Or worse, the same.

New Year's Resolutions suck.

Changing human behavior is really hard. And the Resolution Rodeo is not the way.

Instead, to accomplish the positive life change you seek from resolutions, allow me to suggest a gentler idea.

Give yourself a theme.

Rather than setting yourself up to fail with, “I'm going to lose x pounds by next year,” or "I'm going to read one book a week, at least.”

A theme would be something like Year of Reading or Year of Health - I feel bad for everyone who assigned 2020 as Year of Travel.

Now if that sounds a bit broad, that's the point. For some things, precision matters. For hand grenades and self-improvement, it doesn't.

All that matters is the trend line.

Life is a branching path - a trend of your decisions, some big, but mostly small.

Stuck in a queue, what to do? Well, if it's the Year of Reading, why not open the book, instead of opening the anything else.

That's it: you were at a branch and went one way instead of the other.

An example: this year my theme is 'Exploration.'

I felt like things had become too stagnated.

Rather than resolve: “I'm going to do n new things per t time” It was just… Year of Exploration.

So, when a free weekend presented itself, explore the new instead of the known.

It's the Year of Exploration!

So far this year, I’ve visited 15 new countries and 2 new continents.

Mission accomplished.

In picking a theme, go with something that has a broad name for the general direction you want to navigate your life.

The broadness of a theme allows its meaning to change.

You started out wanting to read more books, but maybe as you went on, you realized academic papers are where it's at, or that reading reading just doesn’t work for you and listening reading is the way to go.

You’re still on theme. The theme can change because so will you.

Lastly, you may have noticed the examples were all Year of X.

But a year is uber long.

Instead of Year of x, try Season of x. A season is a nice human length of time.

In a winter of learning, you can learn a lot. But the season will remind you of the fleeting period.

Flowers bloom, the summer sun will wane, leaves eventually drop, snow falls and snow melts, and flowers bloom.

Summer of ‘69 just got a whole new meaning.

Best,

Jacob & The Renewal team

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