Make Your New Year’s Resolutions Fault Tolerant
Part 1 of 3: WTF Are Your Goals
We’re officially a little over a week deep into the new year and we all know what that means: the majority of us have already shattered our overly ambitious New Year’s resolutions.
But me? I have found that the best way to achieve my New Year’s goals is to build them into my routine in a fault-tolerant fashion. Fault-tolerance is the ability for a system to function properly in the event of failure even if one or more system components fail. Life falls apart sometimes, and it’s best to shape your life in a fashion that allows for the occasional breakdown (or hangover). If you’d like to learn more about fault-tolerance, I recommend you pause and skimm my favorite free encyclopedia, Wikipedia.
Last year, I achieved about 90% of what I set out to do*.
Like any type A overachiever, I began writing my plans several weeks before the New Year began, dividing them into six different categories:
- Work
- Fun
- Finance
- Relationship
- Soul
- Health
Each category has a sub level of 3–5 objectives, many of which were based on my previous goals for 2017.
If you’re reading this now, I have a feeling you may be a bit behind, and it’s time to get started. Writing things down is the only way that I have found to turn my dreams into more than just verbal fodder to circumvent awkward questions from prying strangers at social gatherings.
“So, what do you do?”
“Well, I’m a marketing manager for Time Warner Cable but in in my spare time I’m learning Mandarin so I can move to China to start an English school.”
Truth: You signed up for Duolingo, then re-watched the latest episode of Fresh Off the Boat.
So don’t wait for next year, take out that pen and paper, or open up a new Google doc, and get started. That’s the only way to migrate from Fresh Off the Boat to Beijing, and there’s no better time than now.
To increase your chance of success, be realistic. Want to visit more of the good ‘ol USA? — start with a target of visiting two states this year. You’re not Mark Zuckerberg; visiting thirty states in one year is highly likely to backfire. I believe in business school they call these SMART goals — specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely. I’ve included some sample resolutions below:
- Exercise three days a week (health)
- Eat a more natural, plant-based diet Monday through Friday (health)
- Go Smartphone free one day a week (soul)
- Visit one country internationally (fun)
- Learn basic coding (work)
- Acquire a pet monkey, train to pickpocket strangers on the subway (fun and maybe finance?)
Personally, I like to divide these into the six categories I listed above. This helps later when mapping out resolutions so you don’t overlap too many from the same category at once. You set yourself up failure when you tried to work on your posture, adopt a Mediterranean diet, and attend soul cycle five days a week beginning January 1st. Such an abrupt overload from the “health” category would shock even Richard Simmons from the 80s out of the tightest rainbow spandex ensemble and into a ice-cream eating bingeathon. It’s just too much.
Still lost? You know what’s better than nothing? This random goal generator.
Keep in mind — figuring out what you want to achieve is often the hardest part. But the only way you’ll even come close to finding out, is by starting. But you can do this, take the step forward, and when you’re discouraged, please refer to figure 2018.1 below for inspiration.
Next up: Part 2 of 3: The Products, Apps, and Other Shit You Need to Guarantee Success
*Please contact me for my email address address ParkerKVaughn@gmail.com for any gold medals, Pulitzer Prizes, or gift cards.
