It’s the same every year. I make a shedload of resolutions, on the principle that if I do that, one of them is bound to be in tune with the moon. Then I’ll wake up at some point in the summer to discover that all’s well with the world, and that while I’ve been mourning my abject failure to read a book every week, I’ve somehow forgotten to eat anything that’s bad for me and, as a consequence, I’ve lost three stone.
You will not be surprised to learn that that has yet to happen.
Last year’s resolutions were a wide-ranging lot, too many to recount and, from my point of view, too humiliating to consider in terms of their cumulative failure. Suffice it to say that not one of them made it past January.
Perhaps, after all, the scattergun approach doesn’t work. What I’ve learned from experience is that my most successful resolutions involve things I’m almost ready to do anyway. In other words, rather than give me a boot up the backside to take on a challenge that’s too big for me, a New Year resolution should really be about encouraging you to make the small changes.
For example, every year I resolve to be more organised and every year I fail. Anyone who knows me will testify to that. While I’ve never knowingly missed a deadline and am rarely late for an appointment, that reliability only holds if I remember to write that decline or appointment in the diary, and write it down correctly if I do. No matter how many times I decide to make that change, I can’t seem to do it.
But I’ve succeeded at other things. When I was about sixteen, I gave up biting my nails. I was ready to. Some decades later, I managed to stop playing games on the computer. Again, I just needed a little nudge away from the habit of clicking on it in moments of procrastination (though admittedly, I’ve found plenty of other time-killers to fill the gap).
So this year I have two resolutions. One of them is to go to the gym more often. I’ll do that, because I already go four times a week so there’s minimal effort required to increase it. And the other is to write more. I’ll do that, as well. Because if I can make writing a thousand words a day an average rather than an exception, a habit, rather than a triumph…I’ll have written 365,000 words by the end of the year.
Capital Writers 