We’re at the end of January.  Have you given up on your goals and resolutions yet?  You have, haven’t you?  Me too.  Maybe that’s ok.

It’s a common pattern.  We get all excited about the freshness and promise of a new year.  We dream big and make grand plans.  We’re going to start running, lose all the weight we gained in 2020 (cleverly called the ‘covid-19’), or turn our side hustles into full-fledged businesses.

With all the motivation we can muster we put on our running shoes, meal prep a bunch of kale salads, or sketch out a month’s worth of social media posts.  That momentum carries us through a day or two or three of the thing(s) we planned to tackle this year.  

Then a funny thing happens.  We realize that starting a new year doesn’t actually change the real lives we are living.  The people we were and the lives we lived last year don’t just disappear because we buy a fancy new planner.  We’re forced to admit that January 1st is an arbitrary date. We still need to take care of the kids, submit reports to the boss, do laundry, cook dinner, and get the car serviced.

Our lives are exactly like they were in December.

Motivation and momentum are frail and easily destroyed by the slightest disruption to the master plan. 

The streak is over.  Maybe that’s ok.  Maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be.  Perfect doesn’t exist.

Our instinct is to give up.  But is giving up those grand plans a bad thing? I argue that giving up our resolutions and goals is ok and that there might be a better way.

Instead, maybe we can just work toward being better tomorrow (and next week and next month) then we were today (and last week and last month).  Instead of making grand plans that are unrealistic and require complete overhauls of our lives, maybe we can focus on making small, steady improvements. Then we’ll end this year in a better place than where we started. 

I think that’s a better way to tackle a fresh new year, especially if the alternative is that we give up and end up doing exactly what we did last year because things didn’t go as planned.

So, examine what you did today, and plan to do a little bit better tomorrow.  If tomorrow goes off track, no problem. Just do a little bit better the next day.