In less than a month, many people will create their New Year resolutions and swear this will be the year they reach their goal. While creating goals is a great thing and something everyone should do, dedicating a day or whole month to a “fresh start” is ridiculous. Let’s be honest: Not everyone will go through with the new lifestyle they claim they will have after a few weeks into January.
While there are many people in the world who can stick to the goals they have set for themselves, there are also many who give up on them. Forbes reported more than 40 percent of Americans make New Year’s resolutions but only 8 percent of people achieve their goals because the goals are usually not simple enough to actively pursue or are not tangible.
Growing up, I always made New Year’s resolutions that started big like making everyone around me happy (impossible, by the way) to smaller resolutions like drinking soda only once a week. No matter what they were, I never seemed to follow through with them because once the cycle was broken even just once, I thought, “Well, I messed it up for the whole year now. There’s no point in trying now that my streak ended.” I finally gave up on making New Year’s resolutions and made realistic goals throughout the year.
Instead of waiting for the start of a new year, we should be setting goals now and every month out of the year. There is too much pressure to follow through with the promises we made to ourselves at the beginning of a new year, especially when there will be other priorities in our life to compete for our attention. Self-improvement is something we all want but the idea behind it is more prominent than actually carrying out the actions. We should be making attainable “resolutions” throughout the year, not just at the mark of a new year.
