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Why I don't have New Year's resolutions

01 Jan 2020

392 words • 2 mins

It’s that time of year when everyone asks about their New Year’s resolutions. While I like the rationale, personally, I don’t think it works. Here’s why.

The New Year’s mindset

In my opinion, New Year’s resolutions encourages thinking of our life goals as seasonal commitments with motivation waning after the holiday season. I mean, who hasn’t experienced slowly fading into old habits once the holiday season is long gone or put off their goals until the holidays?

However, if we truly want to commit to achieving our goals, it’s not viable to treat them as something to put off until the holidays. In fact, goals shouldn’t even be things we wait until New Year’s to make; they should be made and updated on a regular basis, not a one off commitment.

What I’m doing instead

Instead of yearly commitments, I make general self-improvement goals (which I like to call LLCs for Life-Long Commitments) that each have their own subgoals.

For instance here are my goals and subgoals:

Expand Midway, the Chrome extension for students and teachers

  • Increase my marketing efforts within my school by getting Midway on the Scarsdale High School library page
  • Bring Midway to schools across Westchester
  • Build admin portal and an automated new school request form

Become a pro at Web Dev

  • Learn Svelte3 and TailwindCSS
  • Learn React and React Native
  • Complete the FreeCodeCamp Front End Libraries Certification
  • Learn Typescript and NodeJS
  • Learn Backend

Do more fun things

  • Read an article on programming, science, tech, or AI each day
  • Learn something new each month by watching educational Youtube videos from channels like 3Blue1Brown, Numberphile, Ted Talks, Physics Girl, Computerphile, Practical Engineering etc.
  • Make more puns (hope you punderstand!)

While I admit, these look awfully close to New Year’s Resolutions, the difference is that I revisit my goals and subgoals regularly and update them to match what I value and what I think I’ve been missing in my life. As a result, my goals are effectively a reification of my long-term vision in the same way that a to-do list is a concrete description of my short-term vision.

A Challenge to You

No matter what day it is that you’re reading this, I challenge you to come up with your own life-long commitments. Plans are scary, but at least figure out what’s the first tiny steps needed to achieve it.