Editor’s Note: This appeared in the Read and Trust newsletter exactly one year ago today.
By the time you’re reading this essay, it’s been re-written twice.
Most of the time, I don’t re-write pieces. I edit and re-arrange them often, but rarely do I open a new text document and just start over.
Needless to say, it was discouraging. The handful of people who read the earlier versions of this all said the same thing:
What are you trying to say here?
I guess I didn’t get my point across in the previous versions. Maybe I didn’t have a point. Who knows. But all of this got me thinking about the topic at hand this month — resolutions.
I’m not sure why I picked this month to write an edition of the newsletter. I usually don’t make New Year’s Resolutions.
The last one I made was in 2009, actually. It was to work out more often. I joined a gym with my brother, and three days a week, we worked out together in the evenings. It was great. I got to spend time with hanging out with him, and I could notice the effects of working out after just a few weeks. I had no complaints about it, besides a sore muscle here and there. It was — by far — the most successful resolution I’ve had.
(I use the term “muscle” loosely, okay?)
It lasted five months, then life threw me and my family a tumor-sized curveball, and I had to sit it aside.
To be perfectly honest, I haven’t been to the gym since.
So, why share a story about how I haven’t had success with resolutions, and given up on them completely?
Because now, here at the end of January, you’re right on the edge of failing. Experts claim that it takes at least 21 days to form a habit. Check the calendar, bro.
Now, I’m not going to sit here behind my MacBook Pro’s keyboard and preach to you about how vital this (and the coming) weeks are in making your resolution a habit. I simply can’t do that.
What I can do is talk about what happens if you fail to make the transition.
Failure can be caused by all sorts of things. For me, it was a large, external force than (quite frankly) derailed my entire life. For you, it might be caused by something much simpler, like a trip out of town for work, or a new budgetary restriction that makes Activity X too expensive to keep doing. This list can go on and on, really.
Now, I didn’t have the luxury to examine my failure. Again, hopefully, you do. And that’s really my point with this. If you fail to keep your resolution, take the opportunity to examine it.
Not to get all Merlin Mann on your ass, but if you don’t examine failure, you can’t learn from it.
So, in reflecting ask yourself some questions:
- Was the reason I failed within my control?
- Did I respond to the reason correctly?
- Could I have put safety-nets in place to keep me from failing?
If you fail this year, you might not get totally ripped at the gym, but don’t make that an excuse for not learning something.