2021 won’t change your life. Unless you make it happen.
Around the world, New Year’s Eve celebrations looked quite a bit different this year. Absent the black tie affairs, long lines at nightclubs, and big parties with friends and family to ring in the changing of our calendars, NYE 2020 was a bit, well, anticlimactic.
Of course, we are all ecstatic to see 2020 finally in our rear-view, but from stories on Instagram and articles like this one in The New Yorker, it appears the whole “to-do” that comes with planning a typical New Year’s will not soon be missed.
Still, without the party, it was hard to tell if the year was really over or if December 31, 2020 was just…another…day.
Most years, we make “resolutions” to challenge ourselves to grow and achieve more in the year ahead. We take “dry January” breaks from alcohol, gym memberships skyrocket, and we promise ourselves and our networks that in (insert year) “I will finally do that thing I wanted to do.” And yet, maintaining those resolutions is actually quite difficult.
Why?
James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, outlines four problems that come from spending too much time focused on goals:
- Winners and losers have the same goals: For every success story, there are hundreds or thousands of people who aspired to the same level of achievement. Simply having a goal is not an indicator of success.
- Achieving a goal is only a momentary change: This one is my favorite. We all can change our behaviors to overexert against a goal — but that only works for a time. You might be able to get in shape early in the year, but if you don’t build healthy habits in diet and exercise, you’re likely to resort back to the way you lived before the goal.
- Goals restrict your happiness: I know a lot of people that fit into this category. Have you ever told yourself “I’ll be happy once I get a new job,” or “I’ll be happy when I finally get done this project.” As Clear puts it, when you say these kinds of things you’re putting your happiness off until the next milestone.
- Goals are at odds with long-term progress: Again, if you only alter your behaviors to pursue goals, you’re more apt to “yo-yo” back and forth between habits required to get you there.
So, what should you do instead?
Fall in love with the journey of getting closer to the life you want.
I suffer from this problem a LOT, let me tell you. Every morning when I wake up I think about what I haven’t yet achieved, and every night when I lie in bed I lament all of the time I wasted not achieving more. It’s not a healthy approach to being happy.
This year, the weight of making big life changes may feel even heavier than normal. Faced with the burden of a global pandemic, economic hardship, mental health crisis, and more, all of us are sitting here and trying to plan what we want to get done in 2021 to make it better than the year we just endured.
New Year’s Eve is just a construct, it’s another day and a turn of the calendar: it will not magically erase the problems you’re experiencing, it will not make you wake up and take a new approach to your life, and it will not force you to change in the ways you dream of.
Or maybe it can?
The truth is: We do not need a new year to decide to fall in love with our lives. It can happen in any moment, under any circumstance, and for any reason. But New Year’s does give us a built-in timeline to reflect on where we are, where we have been, and where we are going.
Don’t set resolutions this year. They very likely won’t work. Choose to fall in love with the journey of getting to the life you want. Set new habits, make them:
- Small
- Achievable
- Concrete
If you want to be healthier, choose your diet/exercise instead of a “goal weight.” If you want to exercise your creativity, choose a daily journal instead of a publishing deal.
When you create habits and sustainable direction, you’ll find that the results come on their own. And they will outpace even the stretch goals you may be imagining for yourself.
Happy New Year.
