Should You Make Resolutions This Year?

If the results of a basic Google search can be trusted, the best case scenario is this: about half of us will make New Year's resolutions and about twenty percent of those resolutions will be kept longer than a few weeks.

Now, you might be inclined to focus on the abysmally low success rate and conclude they aren’t worth making at all.  However, I look at those numbers and think, holding everything else constant (as I learned when majoring in economics), we're looking at a ten percent rate of near term human betterment.  These days, a ten percent rate of return on anything - even something virtually impossible to measure - should be respected. 

But there’s room for improvement in both making and keeping resolutions.

The first issue to address is timing.  New Year's resolutions are tragically ill-timed to coincide with New Year's day, which, as it turns out, is in the middle of winter.  Lifestyle changes are easier to make before or after winter.  The impending change of seasons from fall to winter gives one a sense it is time to buckle down, re-discipline oneself, and jettison all excessive, unnecessary or unhelpful habits of thought or behavior.  Then, when winter is over and the promise of spring arrives, it’s natural to lift one's head with lofty and ambitious goals designed to reach one's full potential.  If I could change anything about New Year's resolutions, I’d change them to Halloween and Easter resolutions which would invariably improve the success rate.

I should pause here and recognize the remote possibility that someone could be reading this in the southern hemisphere and could be thinking I'm a northern-centric hemispherist.  To you, my good friend, I can only say the odds of sticking with a resolution made in the middle of summer are no better than one made in the middle of winter.  And while I'm hedging, it's also conceivable someone could be reading this who adheres to something other than the Gregorian calendar.  If that applies to you, I'd be interested in what time of year your culture makes resolutions, your success rate, and why you are reading a New Year's-themed article when it clearly isn't the start of a new year for you.  And, many of you live in sunny, temperate climates and don't actually experience winter per se.  I'm assuming you are just happy all the time and have no need to make resolutions in the first place.  

So this message is really intended for those of us who, in a couple of days, will celebrate New Year’s Day while wearing snow boots and “wicking layers” under our parkas, and will feel some obligation to commit to some kind of self-improvement, even though we're depressed from lack of sunlight, emotionally exhausted from the holiday season, and unlikely to conjure enough energy to start a new routine.  To you I say: make resolutions with boldness and reckless abandon, but don't have them go into full effect until the opening day of the baseball season (i.e. first week of April).  For now, just come up with a plan of action between now and then that will make it most likely you will actually be able to pull it off when the time comes. 

The second issue deals with what kinds of resolutions you should make:

1.    Make at least one that's really outrageous -- like never yelling at your kids or playing power forward for the Boston Celtics -- but keep your little secret to yourself.  No one else will appreciate the ambitiousness or awesomeness of it at the time.  And when you accomplish it, you can act humble, as if greatness were thrust upon you.
2.    On the other end of the spectrum, make a few resolutions you readily publicize.  The best are those commitments to stop certain activities you’d never do anyway -- like eating processed cheese or watching Latin American soap operas.
3.    Always have some standing resolutions -- mine are learning to speak Spanish and play the guitar, which I've made every New Year since the Reagan administration. 
4.    Finally, you should always have a handful of aspirational resolutions that strike at the heart of your self-worth, but are impossible to define or measure, like being more charitable or a better spouse/parent -- the simple act of repeating these kinds of resolutions with earnestness and commitment might, after all, make you a better person.

Undoubtedly, throughout the year and at this time in particular, you will be confronted with two seemingly insurmountable forces of popular culture: (1) the overly romantic and naïve expectation that you should immediately transform everything about yourself into a perfect composite of Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, and Russell Crowe’s character in Gladiator, and (2) an equally powerful wave of cynicism and fatalism that tells you it’s impossible to change anything and mocks any attempts to try.   Shut those forces out.  Follow the four step plan and come back next year ten percent better.



Good luck, everyone!  Please let me know the best resolutions you've made or heard about for 2010.