Why New Year's Goals Fail
A low success rate, but…
Once the year starts I’ll be going to an article every 18 days. However, this week I wanted to share some basics for preparing and executing goals.
It’s true, a huge majority of New Year’s goals and resolutions fail. It’s pretty much an accepted truth that any goal is going to fizzle out by mid-February at the latest.
Bible reading plans die in Leviticus. The gym goes from being packed to its usual clientele sometime around February. Savings plans go out the window when some unexpected January expense pops up.
Thus, New Years goals have become a joke, shorthand for “things I’d like to do but everybody knows I won’t.”
A lot of times you’ll hear someone say, if you really want to change you don’t need a calendar to turn to make it happen. And that’s true enough, to a point. Sitting in mid-August and saying “I’ll change next year” is a bad idea.
On the other hand, a new year does carry meaning. There’s a reason cultures have celebrated them for thousands of years. Looking backwards we can see the way we all sort much of our lives into years. For better or worse, it’s a complete book.
As a preacher it always felt like an inordinate number of funerals fell around either January 1 or people’s birthdays. I found out later it wasn’t just my feel—it really does happen. And it seems to indicate the sense of closure a year brings. Something in our brains understands the turning of a year as the end of one thing and the start of another.
So, I’ve long been a fan of using January 1 as a fresh start. Lord willing, next week begins another year, and 365 days later we’ll have a full book on the shelf.
You can’t write the book in January, though. Trying to do so will burn you out and turn you into another failed resolution statistic.
You need to be thinking in terms of what kind of book you want to have written on 1/1/25.
Then you need to think about what must be done to write the first chapter.
Breaking the year up into 18 day sprints makes for 20 chapters. 20 great chapters would be ideal, of course, but it might not happen. Write 13-14 good chapters and you’ll be a much different, much improved person. And you’ll probably hit those goals, or at least get closer than you really thought possible.
We’ll talk about setting realistic but ambitious goals next time.