The days following Christmas are traditionally steeped in lounging and reverie until the big shebang on New Years Eve. New Year’s is the annual party to send off the year prior and for society to get hyped for the promises of a new one. After the music fades, the alcohol is drained, and the glitter is scrubbed off your face, you’re left with a chubby brokenness that you’ve become. Most Americans tend to come up with a resolution or goal for the year ahead to jumpstart a better tomorrow.
Starry-eyed and full of promises, we naively enter the year with hopes of becoming the next Kylie Jenner. However, most people quit their resolutions before January 31st. Why? I think it’s important to look at what people tend to set as their goal each year. This was a survey of 2,000 people.
- Diet or eat healthier
- Exercise more
- Lose weight
- Save more/spend less
- Learn a new skill or hobby
- Quit smoking
- Read more
- Find another job
- Drink less alcohol
- Spend more time with friends/family
My goal for this year is to stop smoking – and let me tell you, it’s not going very well at all. So what ways can I attack this issue? How do I even start? Jump in with both feet, or do it in increments? According to the SMART steps, these are the most effective ways that professional business men and women approach their goals.
Specific (Goals must be clear and unambiguous) Stop Smoking
Measurable (Results must be able to be measured in some way, for example, the number of products sold each week, or the percent completion) Reducing the number of cigarettes in a day until 0.
Attainable (Goals must be realistic and attainable by the average employee) IT CAN AND WILL BE DONE!
Relevant (Goals must relate to your organization’s vision and mission) my vision of not dying an early death is a good one.
Time-bound (Goals must have definite starting and ending points, and a fixed duration) 30 days to be cigarette free!
I’m confident that I should be able to get over this initial hump over the upcoming 30 days, but I’ll be honest… Even with all the SMART steps in play, it can be overridden by a lack of willpower, a case of the F-it’s, or peer pressure. I hang out with people who smoke cigarettes just as often as I do. I think its important to note that being OK with – but not complacent – with failure is a must. Most people tend to give up on a goal or task because they slipped up on it. Failure is a growing experience to learn from, not to instantly turn in the towel when things don’t go your way. The underlining problem with society is the instant gratification culture we’ve adapted and have gotten used to. Amazon’s next day delivery, Uber eats, and Tinder are just a few modern day examples of how humans quell their baser instinctual thirst.
Our needs for food, comfort and sex vastly override our immediate gratifications we get from “doing the right thing”, whatever that means to us. Losing weight – by far the biggest resolution of the new year – is at the top for a reason. Thousands of years of cultivating crops and creating modern advancements have increased the amounts of fat and energy in foods while dragging down the efforts made to get it. We don’t even have to leave our houses anymore!
As a wise meme once told me “modern problems require modern solutions”, and if we have to go to a synthetic farmland (more notably known as the gym) to achieve it, then so be it. Use that modern delivery system to bring you healthy food, invest time in using social media to go on that date, take that chance. Big parts of changing habits are taking it slow. It’s not going to happen overnight, but we cannot dwell on the time it takes to get their either. It’s best, for now, to take it one day at a time.
What ways are you going about setting your goals this year? What are your goals? List them below and let’s discuss!
