The only New Year’s resolution you’ll ever need.
Written by Miles Oke
With another new year comes the annual influx of goals we want to achieve in the form of New Year’s resolutions. As timeless as they are, most of our resolutions tend to be either overly ambitious goals, filled with an overwhelming desire to forget the previous year or a strange mix of both. My resolution is to reframe how we think of them and start being more intentional with what we want to achieve, maybe even getting rid of them altogether. Before you start tearing up your lists of ‘2022 Goals’ and labelling me pessimistic, hear me out.
I’m sure a few of you already feel called out but everything I said about the way resolutions are constructed, I’m guilty of myself. Last year, I set a goal of wanting to write one post a month and uploading it online. Things were going well and I managed to balance it pretty well alongside the final year of my undergrad, up until around April. With assignments beginning to pile up and exams starting to loom I had less time to write about what I wanted to, and the times that I did I felt pressured to put anything down which led to me getting burnt out. Though it was hard for me to admit, I failed at my resolution. I could just choose to forget last year, disregard my failure and try again in the same way. I could even choose to stop trying altogether and think that I’m not capable of writing consistently. Instead, I’ve chosen to focus on quality rather than quantity and remember the fact that I failed because it taught me what didn’t work out. With this I can write about what I want to, focus on the process of writing and not risk getting burnt out so easily. There is a part of me that worries about not having a post out each month and staying relevant but, in that same vein, I also worry about putting out something that I don’t fully believe in and that fear is what motivates me to write about what I genuinely want to, even at the expense of not posting as often.
The same principle applies to just about anything you can think of. Starting the gym, getting better grades or making a daring leap forward in our lives. Without wanting to sound too much like a self-help guru, succeeding at anything is the culmination of a million tiny, consistent and progressive steps forward rather than the one massive jump that we lead ourselves to believe it is. Dream bodies don’t come by going to the gym once, staying for hours and lifting until you collapse. Good grades don’t come from studying an entire textbook for a whole day. Radical life changes are rarely the result of one singular thing. Consistently going to the gym, eating right and doing so over weeks, months, years gets us to our ideal physique. Failing tests and reinforcing concepts/information gets us to the grades we want. Dramatic changes in our lives come about because of all the tiny steps we’ve taken thus far that have allowed us to get here. Failure, consistency and “the process”, what we tend to overlook when coming up with our resolutions, are exactly what will drive us to succeed regardless of what we want.
In the new year the temptation to want to wipe the slate clean and start anew is a very real one for all of us and, given the last few years, a very understandable thought. That being said, we won’t grow if we don’t take the chance to reflect on what we’ve been through and how it’s affected us, both good and bad. This time of year I think of Kobe Bryant, rest in paradise, who embodied these core values with his #MambaMentality. He missed thousands of shots, lost dozens of games, and had many moments he wished went differently. In spite of it all he dreamt endlessly and worked with a passion that many of us can only dream of – repeating the same moves day in and day out, taking personal responsibility for his shortcomings and using his failures as fuel to propel him to become immortalized in history through the game of basketball. If there’s anything to take away from my words and his legacy, it isn’t to stop dreaming big but instead realise that the path to our destination lies in the journey, and that journey is made up of many, many small steps forward.