New It

A cynic’s thoughts on a new year (and other ‘news’)

I’m a cynic. The way I described myself just last night to some friends was that I’m a hopeless idealist who latches on to newfound ideals until they can’t carry me any further at which point I become cynical about them. Now that’s not entirely true—otherwise I’d never find a shred of consistency or stability within life but rather constantly be moving from thing to thing—but it helps get the point across.

Last month’s New Year and its various resolutions would be a great opportunity, I’d say, for that idealism to fall short and give way to a cloud of jadedness. In a general way it’s more than obvious that people fail miserably at their New Year’s resolutions time and time again. On average people tap out after just 8 days. Hardly a week in and they drop out. Pretty sad, huh? Now that we’re two full months in I’m sure a large portion of the millions of resolutions made for 2014 have fallen completely flat.

But it’s not just the general populous that fails (pretty miserably) at staying resolved in their resolutions. It’s me. I need not look to everyone else’s failures to become overly skeptical about the nature of New Year and its resolution making when I have a mirror, a list, a spreadsheet, and other mechanisms that serve as vivid reminders of my failures.

And that’s okay.

While there is a lot of failure celebration going on, at least in the tech world as of late, which has thus brought on some good critique, the truth of the matter is that messing it up is often times good for us. It’s not good to aim for it, of course, but one of the best ways to land at success is simply to know how to handle failure. More, failure could be said to be the point at which we allow our mistakes to finally overcome us, not so much the intermittent mistakes themselves.

That’s not what I’m writing about, though. At least not particularly. What I want to get at concerning the New Year is that it’s built to carry the weight of previous failure. It’s a design feature. That’s exactly why New Year’s resolutions come back year after year. It’s why you should embrace them. And it’s why I’m not yet a cynic about them despite the systemic failure that is often flowing out of our resolutions.

It’s New Year. Not simply Try Again. Not Let’s See What Happens This Time. Not You Sucked Last Time Why Will This Be Any Different?

New.

It’s a small word that has unbelievably big implications for us. You get a reset. You get a fresh start. You have an opportunity to begin again.

The year is new. Your opportunities are new. Your chance to succeed is new. Next month is new. Tomorrow is new. Embrace every chance of renewal you get, however small or big it may seem.

At the risk of almost certainly sounding like an especially bad infomercial: just cause you blew it doesn’t mean you can’t new it.

I love to write, but part of the joy is in being read. Share this if you liked it and let’s enjoy it together.