Ditch the New Year Resolutions, You’ll Do Just Fine
…but before that, you need to break something first
Every year this time many of us would passionately come out a list of TOBEs and TODOs — New Year Resolutions — the gist of the next 365 days.
Extremely excited!
1. I am going to write a blog post once a week
2. I am going to get six-pack by going to gym
3. I am going to save $100K
4. I am going to buy a car
5. I am going to get a girlfriend
6. I am going to …
7. I am going to …
8. I am going to …
9. I am going to …
10. I am going to be …
Just to make it to 10. Heh
Look at those fireworks, magnificent.
Look at the crowd, so happening!
Look at the business sectors, next year will be a prosperous year.
Look at the AR/VR predictions, next year will be a leap.
Loot at me, NEW YEAR NEW ME!
1st month, despite the overeating and hangover, you hit the gym. You write, just about anything that hit your mind, ignore the grammar, ignore the profanity, ignore the flow, your promises to yourself got published. Like you, your company just announced the NEW YEAR NEW VISION, fire burning within, excited. It has been superb!
31st day, same shit different day. (︶︹︶)
March, same shit different month. What did I tell myself in the last December? Never mind.
The fat belly is still around. Check the bank account, well, at least it is not empty, at least withdrawable. That because you’re still single? You started to hate the Mondays and struggle on living the weekends.
The New Year Resolutions, guess it’s long gone by now.
The NEW YEAR NEW ME, she’s laughing at you.
It didn’t work out.
I’ve been there, trust me. That feeling, it sucks.
If it is too far away, don’t even bother to look at it.
Setting far-fetch objectives, they are not going to do good to you. Setting goals that you don’t need, they will break you. Time flies, but the next 365 days is unpredictable. Human fear what they don’t know. Fear is the first factor to run your motivation dry. When you’re not motivated, the wheel stop rolling.
Enthusiasm is common. Commitment is rare. — Thomas Oppong
I stopped writing New Year Resolution for the second year. Even it is now in December, I never bother to project what’s my 2017 going to look like. I focus on the day, 24-hours. Highlight the actionable, cut down the crap.
Focus. Just do it…
Laser focus on what you want in life. Articulate it, visualize it, lock it down, and move 1 step every time. Plan for every day, that’s it. Prioritize the most important task within that 24-hours, the task if you do it, it brings you closer to that person you’d want to be.
…everyday
I’ve been doing it for the second year. In 2015, I’ve decided to start an Internet-based business. I started to learn to code, every day. HTML, CSS, and JS. Without a strong programming background, coding JavaScript was challenging. But for that vision, I move bit by bit every day, I’ve committed 3 hours everyday 5–6am and 6–8pm for coding. In August 2015, I co-authored a hybrid mobile application with my friend from scratch using AngularJS 1.x and Meteor. I modularized a major backlog (expectations and use cases) to pieces on Trello and strive to check each of them every day before I go to bed. We completed that learning project in 5 months.
One step at a time.
Fast-forward to June 2016, my friend and I wanted to move on to next stage. It was the time, we had a very strong feeling. We decided to make our idea come to life. A community-powered adventure travel platform, web-based application. The old way of doing it, we broke it into pieces. We designed the entire application in Sketch. The entire visual being our vision, the ultimate objective. Moving on, we set a list of product backlog on Trello, break it down, commit and assemble every day. Sometimes things got delayed due to complexities and the level of our knowledge, but we rarely get frustrated, because we sort of hacked into a mindset of those tasks are very small. They are not some Goliaths, we don’t need to be David every day. If I can’t get it done today, I’m sure it is at least 70% done, so it will be alright by tomorrow. That awesome mindset hack, we love it.
“Whoever wants to reach a distant goal must take small steps.” — Helmut Schmidt
Breaking things down to pieces is extremely important in moving forward. An objective or a new year resolution may be easy to write, but most of the time it can be very heavy when comes to action. If we never make things smaller, we could have ended up in despair finger-pointing at each other. Now this is frustrating. The good thing about modularity is to bring you back to the focal point. To trick your mind that things are manageable and attainable. “Six-pack” is easy to write, but without visualization and a plan for you to move on progressively, the first day of HITT cardio can cripple you to move forward.
You can skip the New Year Resolution and that’s perfectly fine. In the closing of 2016, perhaps we can ask ourselves a more important question, “Who I want to become?”. Go somewhere quiet, visualize the answer. If that’s truly what you want, lock it down, break things to pieces, and start checking them every single day. Don’t get distracted by what is not helping you to be that person. Most importantly, don’t ever stop, 0.1% is better than none. 1 step forward is better than not moving at all.
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If the way we do things and our project got your attention…
Allow me to introduce you to Expade — A community-powered adventure travel platform. Our very first version is almost ready for launch. It is currently in private beta, there will be some bugs here and there which will be fixed as soon as possible. The private beta will be conducted for about 2–3 months time for feedbacks and iterations. In this period, we are open for suggestions of what should be done to make it serve you better.
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If you would like to discuss something beyond what we have here, feel free to reach me through alvis@expade.com or a tweet.
