Why (New Year) Resoultions are vanity

Don’t resolve. Just do it.

I have grown up listening to people making resolutions and revising them next year. I was never motivated to make my own resolutions. I could never figure out the reason why. Is it that I am not motivated? I am not goal oriented?

When I shifted to larger city to work with English speaking, bar hopping (most of them), sophisticated looking colleagues and friends that I started thinking about possible reasons:

Is it because, I come from a small town, where these weren’t fashionable thing to talk?
Is it because, I come from middle class where these weren’t dinner table conversation
Is it because, I come from vernacular medium of education, where the focus was more on getting good marks?
Is it because, I didn’t go to premier institutions for my higher studies, and hence missed out on the important of resolutions?

All these questions pointed to a possiblity of me having an inferiority complex. I put them to rest, because I certainly wasn’t inferior, then why was I thinking on those lines? I stopped trying to analyse. I simply smiled when someone asked me about my new year resolutions.

Few decades have passed by, I am in my mid forties, highly successful in non-traditional, non-materialistic, sense : someone who has no regrets. However, It’s only this time I realised : New year resolutions are useless, they are vanity. And vanity doesn’t motivate me, and possibly that’s the reason why I never had any new year resolutions.

Word “Resolution” comes from “Resolute”. However, most of the new year resolutions, are really “intentions” or “desires”.
These intentions aren’t driven from a strong inner desire to achieve something, they are driven by, what ‘sounds’ good, what’s something you could flaunt or driven by guilt of something that you have not done earlier.

Those who want to spend more time with family, do it, they don’t express the desire to do so.
Those who want to live fit, start walking/running/join a gym, they don’t wait for the cheapest offer or a particular date. They simply do it.
Those who want to stop/reduce drinking/smoking — don’t want for an auspicious date.

If you were working in any organisation, and you failed to achieve your targets, you’d be out of job fairly quickly. Somewhere on the Net I read that, only 8% of people are able to achieve their new year resolutions — don’t fire themselves, do they?

All of us know, things get done, when we do them, not when we flaunt a list containing it.

So do we not make the list? Make them by all means, but only if you could plan the detailed steps to acheive them, when you could look at the feasibility of achieving them, then most importantly, quickly get down to execution. That’s what successful people do. I personally take a different route. I jump to execution first and think later — not that it’s a great idea, not that I recommend them.

Just do it!

Rather than talking about our new year resolutions, let’s start sharing our end-of-the-year achievements.

Wish you all an achievement filled new year.