Try One New Thing Every Week… for One Year

Let me set the scene for this piece..

31st December 2015: I was sitting at home looking at some photos on my laptop and reflecting on 2015 — my best and most successful year to date. In 2015 I graduated from University, travelled to 6 countries, made some amazing new friends from all around the world and secured a Graduate Job at a large Global technology company.

Even though this was all very positive, I also had some difficult periods towards the end of the year (both personally and professionally) which compelled me to make some changes to re-capture my intrinsic motivation and re-invigorate myself.

It was on 31st December that I outlined my resolution for 2016; a simple, broad challenge to myself:

‘Try one new thing every week for one year’.

A little thinking behind this: I don’t believe in large-scale transformations defined within the limits of single sentences (i.e. ‘My resolution this year is to get fit’; — what does fit mean? How do you define it? How do you know when you’ve reached it?)

So I focussed on Continuous Improvement, choosing to make incremental improvements in different areas of my life over a long period of time to achieve that re-invigoration and intrinsic motivation to make 2016 as good as 2015 and every year before it.

Has it worked?

Yes, it has.

I have never felt happier, healthier and more open to new experiences. My diet has improved, my network has broadened and my mental well-being is sufficiently more positive which has carried over to improved performance in my career and development of new skills.

I believe that the fundamental reason this has been successful is because I chose to keep it deliberately open to interpretation — for me, it has been as much about the positive momentum and happiness that I have achieved through experiencing new things as the experiences themselves. In truth, I haven’t tracked the exact number of things I’ve tried, new foods and drinks tasted, or experiences had, but I know it’s significantly more than the 43 that I should have done to date.

You might be thinking that this sounds a lot like the movie ‘Yes Man’ with Jim Carrey — it kind of is, but unlike Carrey who intentionally says Yes to everything regardless of whether it is in his professional or personal life, this has a little more structure and balance, and has a view on achieving some other goals that I set for myself at the beginning of 2016 around health, education, relationships, career progression and overall well-being. It also fits seamlessly into my daily, and oftentimes hectic, schedule.

It’s never too late… What I would say to you is that it’s never too late to start this, and I would encourage you all to search for new opportunities and try new things to reduce the monotony that can sometimes come with daily routines. It can also be vital for well-being — our daily lives have become so fast-paced and frenetic that we sometimes forget to take care of the intricate machine that runs us, our bodies.

Try some new things over the next few weeks to break routines and broaden your horizons.

Have any of you tried anything similar? How have you found the experience?