Mistakes I Avoid When Making My 2024 Resolutions
To all the ambitious people out there. Learn from my experience on how you can start your year off right.
2024 is going to be your year. The Year of the Dragon. An 8 Universal Year in Numerology. Manifestation, completion, the year when you are finally a productivity machine. You waited until January 1st to finally start eating right, or start exercising, or finally get down to making “it” happen.
But ask yourself: why this year? Why not last year?
That’s what I feel like right now. It doesn’t help that 2023 ended on the dumb note of my Minnesota Vikings losing embarrassingly. I almost went to that game. My God, the thought of it. But beyond that, I look back on my 2023 and think about how it really should have been better. I met cool people, and I got things going project-wise — but it was otherwise an incredibly underwhelming year.
With that said, I did notice some mistakes and pitfalls that I want to share with you as you set your goals for 2024.
Setting Unrealistic Goals
Let’s take a common issue from the start.
There’s almost a grain of validity to the idea of setting goals so high that they’re unattainable. This process of visualizing what you want to achieve, no matter how lofty, has helped the likes of Jim Carrey who revealed in a 1997 Oprah interview that he wrote a check for $10 million while still struggling as an actor. He kept the check in his wallet for motivation until he finally hit pay dirt in 1995 when he was cast in Dumb and Dumber for, eerily, almost $10 million.
Keep in mind that Carrey is the exception. While he did work hard and find some success before his Dumb and Dumber casting, it was still luck and opportunity strikes.
When setting resolutions, I look for something I can achieve that is in the happy medium of difficult and doable. Your goals need to push you if you’re going to expect any semblance of change in your life. They need to challenge you. With that said, you don’t want to face yourself with something so daunting that you wouldn’t want to will yourself to do it. Our brains are hard-wired towards simpler tasks, doing anything that requires minimal effort or low resistance. It is so much easier to browse on YouTube than it is to, say, write for Medium. Believe me, I know.
I look for something I can achieve that is in the happy medium of difficult and doable.
But we don’t avoid things just because they’re not easy. A better way to see it is that we’re driven to do things that we want to do. There has to be a reward, a dopamine release that is vital when achieving our goals. This is partly why for my goal of writing every day in 2024, I make sure that for at least most of these days, I write a publishable article. It isn’t just for the enjoyment of writing articles. It’s because I don’t have any immediate satisfaction from writing ten to fifteen pages of a script I’m working on (which, yes, does live in the “doable” and “difficult” Goldilocks zone). Yet pressing “Publish” on something I’ve written that day for anyone to see does give me a needed boost.
But still, I have to commit myself to writing every day. To that end, I have to avoid the following pitfalls.
Not Taking Goals Seriously
Looking back at Jim Carrey’s Oprah interview, Carrey acknowledges that one “can’t just visualize and then, you know, go eat a sandwich.” Few industries know this just as well as the gym industry, which yearly earns millions to even billions of dollars in unused memberships from ambitious people who got the New Year urge to exercise more, only to drop out usually shortly thereafter.
When I set myself to write every day last year, I didn’t create an adequate plan regarding what I wanted to achieve and how I would get things done. As I set this same goal this year, I still cannot promise that I will achieve it on the dot, but I do have a better idea about what I need to do to take it more seriously and make it happen.
Writing every single day may still be unfeasible for me, but I do know what is at stake in my life if I don’t. I earn money writing. I garner important exposure and open myself up to opportunities that propel my career forward when I write. I have deadlines now for my writing. I have expectations from producers. And frankly, there’s the incredibly rewarding dopamine rush waiting for me if, somehow, I manage to write considerably for all 366 days this year (remember the leap day, folks).
Likewise, looking at a more common goal like wanting to read more, I need to set a goal that is more in line with what I want to accomplish in life. I told myself last year that in 2023, I was going to read fifty books. That’s almost a book a week. To my credit, I did read forty-five — so close. Still, looking back, what did I attain from that goal? I found myself rushing through some books and not absorbing what I could have out of them. I read books instead of doing things that were perhaps more important…like writing. There were periods in which I focused so much on the “fifty books this year” mentality that I forgot to think about the real, underlying fine print of my reading goal.
I have a lot of books that I want to read, many of which will give me valuable information in life. I read books that were written specifically for people in my professional field; I would certainly call them “must-reads”. It’s also an enjoyable use of my time, honestly.
To this end, it’s important to remember that your goals are expectations for how you are going to live your life this year. They are actual things that you are going to put time, calories, and brain power into — actual lived experiences. Take them seriously. Do them, and do them with the right mindset.
Now, as far as remembering what to set in the first place, let’s keep the following mistake in mind:
Having Short-Term Vision for the Year
Especially as we leave 2023 behind, it’s easy to feel like there was nothing much that happened. How many New Year celebrations felt the same to us?
But remember how gradual change is. Very few people experience a surge of visible, measurable growth. I’ll hear about people who post something so viral that it gives them a burst of followers that launch them to fame or a book that shoots an author to the moon. It’s occasional. Yet it’s certainly not a mile-marker of growth to set on yourself.
Of course, we want our dreams to happen right this minute. The idea of waiting sucks. Still, if I set goals for 2024 that don’t take into account the fact that my world can change in ways that I can’t foresee, then I set limits on the kind of opportunities I can open myself up to.
The truth is that we don’t know what our year going forward has in store for us. While I look back on some of my 2023 goals with a kind of bitterness — for example, I wanted to move back out of my parent’s basement, and that’s yet to happen — I have to remember what I did achieve. There were some things that I didn’t achieve because I did achieve other things. I was setting things up for other things to happen at the right time.
This all leads to my next point:
Seeing Your Past Year as a “Failure”
If you had a time machine and got to go back to January 1, 2023, to have a conversation with yourself, you would be speaking to someone who is surprisingly more different from you than you would expect.
New Year’s Day 2023 I was still writing for a content mill, thinking that I had opportunities in the fire that in hindsight were dead on arrival. I was working on projects that I had doubts about. I wanted to move on from a lot of things yet had no idea how.
Don’t get me wrong — had I given more of an effort towards my dreams and ambitions in 2023, I think I would be in a place now that I would be a little happier with. Sure, I made mistakes in 2023. I waited on things that I wish I was more proactive on.
And yet that’s life. Life is making mistakes, having regrets, and forming lessons. But with these mistakes come growth that you can only begin to understand.
I had a lot of positive things happen in 2023. I formed relationships with incredible people who, in turn, exposed me to a whole slew of opportunities that I didn’t even think would come my way. For that, I am forever thankful. I also did things that enriched my life substantially. Whether it be going to the first concert I went to since the pre-pandemic times or forming a stronger bond with my two future sisters-in-law on a family vacation in October, I have to acknowledge that 2023 was not some dud year when nothing happened.
Things happened. They just may not have been the things that I expected to happen.
And when thinking about my life in 2024, how unbelievably exciting is that?
To this, I close off and say to you all: Happy 2024. Make your dreams come true.
