Happy Holidays! Welcome to resolutions season, where we ponder and identify the changes we need to make and then quickly push them off to the new year.
Shall we start with my favorite holiday advertisement? The Dutch mail-order pharmacy DocMorris hit all the right notes in this one. You might need a tissue.
Watch it again if you’d like.
I love the daily practice used to reach a goal. The motivation, questions, comments, and concern coming from his community. The special moment at the end, lifting his granddaughter up to put the star on the Christmas tree. And the even more special moment, that look from his daughter, who finally understands what he has been working towards.
The man in the commercial gives us an example worth following. He didn’t wait until the New Year to start on what could and should be done today. Because at his age, he knows that another Christmas is not guaranteed.
But it’s not guaranteed for any of us.
A Stoic Perspective:
Ryan Holiday, writer and teacher of stoicism, starts his popular Tedx talk titled Memento mori with, “I’ve got bad news, you’re all going to die.” He points out that the “heart breaking fact remains, that of everyone who has been born, the mortality rate remains at a steady 100%.”
In Meditations Marcus Aurelius wrote “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.”
Seneca, in On the Shortness of Life, wrote, “You are living as if destined to live forever; your own frailty never occurs to you; you don’t notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply – though all the while that very day which you are devoting to somebody or something may be your last.
“You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire.
“You will hear many people saying: ‘When I am fifty I shall retire into leisure; when I am sixty I shall give up public duties.’ And what guarantee do you have of a longer life? Who will allow your course to proceed as you arrange it? Aren’t you ashamed to keep for yourself just the remnants of your life, and to devote to wisdom only that time which cannot be spent on any business? How late it is to begin really to live just when life must end! How stupid to forget our mortality, and put off sensible plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth years, aiming to begin life from a point at which few have arrived!”
That was a big quote, but damn, Lucius Annaeus Seneca had it dialed in when he put pen to paper that day.
The stoics contemplated all this 2,000 years ago and yet we still feel like resolutions are best used as a means for cutting back on peanut butter M&M’s.
Memento mori. “Remember that you must die.”
In other words, the doing needs to happen now, or it may never happen at all.
Lucky for you, I know someone who can help you get moving.
World’s Best Boss:
Michael Scott, a man of action, a master motivator, a stoic, and the World’s Best Boss.
Because Michael is all those things, it’s no surprise that he got a little hot under the collar when his coworkers at Dunder Mifflin started pushing off their resolutions (S7, E13, “The Ultimatum”). They were making excuses. Failing to start.
Creed wanted to do a cartwheel. “But real casual-like. Not make a big deal about it. But I know everybody saw it. Just one stunning, gorgeous cartwheel.”
Kevin said that he “would eat more vegetables,” and like Creed, he hadn’t started either. “But it’s okay,” he said, “I still have time, since last year, I ate none.”
Michael jumped up and asked, “What’s the point?” He told the team, “I made a resolution to floss, and I did it. 12:01, January first, BAM! Blood everywhere.”
Man of action. Leading from the front.
The scene culminates with Michael force feeding Kevin a head of broccoli to kick-start his veggie consumption. “No cheese whiz, no hollandaise, no chocolate sauce, just eat it.”
Michael’s tactics could have used some polish, but he understood something that the others didn’t.
The thing that guarantees failure, is failing to start.
Creed announced his resolution with passion and longing. “Just one stunning, gorgeous cartwheel.” He didn’t just conjure that on the spot, it was something he’d been living with.
Kevin knew he should be eating this “new food group” well before the calendar turned.
They both took the resolutions they had been delaying until the new year and they chose to delay them further.
Should we be surprised?
This is what we do, and its why people don’t keep their New Year’s resolutions. It’s why the gym clears out in February and the diets don’t find their way to swimsuit season. It’s why the books don’t get read and the debt doesn’t get paid down.
At some point, you’ve got to get busy. And sometimes it takes a special person to help you change those oldest of habits; delay, excuse, and procrastinate.
Of course, Michael was reported to HR where he apologized. He said, “I really wanted you to follow through on your resolutions. The cartwheel, the veggies… I… care about you. Very much.”
Well, to my dozens of readers, I care about you very much. And today, I am your Michael Scott.
Resolutions:
What is a resolution?
A resolution is simply a decision to do something. It’s the quality of being resolute. The act of solving or resolving a problem. The popular usage is in relation to goals, as in a New Year’s resolution, something you will strive for in the new year. But resolution is also defined as the sharpness and clarity of an image. And the best resolutions bring both interpretations, the decision to do something and the clarity of that image.
The image of our future selves.
Who we want to be can be pieced together through a laundry list of goals and daily habits, but it can really come into focus through a high-resolution image of our future state.
With that said, I hope it’s clear that I’m in favor of good resolutions.
I am all in on intentions, goals, systems, habits, and daily practices too. If used properly they can work in tandem to help you make progress.
But the New Year’s resolution is a special kind of resolution, and I don’t mean that in a good way. A New Year’s resolution is a resolution that you’ve been putting off until the calendar turned, just like Creed and Kevin.
You think that January will bring a blank slate, a fresh start, but those new beginnings require a much larger shift.
You want to get fit, but not right now. Let’s inject another night of mayhem directly into our liver, and then we’ll really get busy.
Do I have that right?
So, while resolutions can be a wonderful thing, New Year’s resolutions come attached to a bad habit. Procrastination. Using procrastination as a trigger for this new resolution is a hard way to kick things off in the new year. Like starting your new diet with a cookie. Starting the new job with a day off.
You’ll need to break that bad habit first. That excuse making – hard thing delaying – habit of inaction.
Maybe the best resolution for you on New Year’s Day is to stop putting off until tomorrow what you can do today.
That would be quite a resolution.
The first step in achieving our goals:
Zig Ziglar asked, “You ever know anyone who was going to do something ‘just as soon as’?”
It is the opening line of his finest rant on the topic of goals. And what is a New Years resolution but a high-level goal. It’s a goal you’ve delayed, but a goal, nonetheless.
Zig touches on all our favorite reasons to delay the first step in achieving our goals, dreams, and resolutions. Instead of building new and improved habits, we lean on the old reliable ones; procrastination, excuse making, and delay. The self-deception that’s involved when people say one thing and do the other.
Physicist Richard Feynman famously said, “You should never, ever fool anybody, and you are the easiest person to fool.” He must have heard one too many New Year’s resolutions.
As Zig rightly points out, what most people do is think about the things they should do, the changes they should make, and they push them off. Until the new year, until the seasons over, until the kids are older, until they get a raise. Once the calendar turns, “then they’ll really get busy.” That day eventually arrives, and you know what? They could just as easily push that resolution off one more day. That wouldn’t hurt anything right? They’ve already delayed things this long. They’ll feel better tomorrow, and “then they’ll really get busy.”
When you act like this, you’ve unintentionally set in motion a different resolution. You are setting a negative intention; you are now the type of person that will push off until tomorrow what should be done today.
Zig put into words the feeling that we’ve all had, that we’ve all witnessed, and if we are smart, we’ll all try to avoid in the future. How?
“The rule is simple, you do it now.”
We all have a timeline:
Before Super Bowl XLVI (46), Peter King interviewed Steve Gleason who was diagnosed with ALS in January 2011. At the end of the interview, King asked Gleason if he’s ever thought about how much time he had to live. Gleason said, “Yes, I have, which is a really good thing to think about as a human being. Because we all have a timeline, most of us don’t live like we have a timeline.”
In other words, ALS or not, we are all on the clock.
The good news is we get to choose how to spend the time between now and the end. And because we don’t know when that day will come, we are best to live each day in a way that contributes to our resolution, our intentions, and our goals. And we do that through daily practice.
Which brings us back to the beginning. The DocMorris commercial and our favorite kettlebell swinging grandfather.
This ad is a few years old now, and in my mind, he keeps lifting, keeps making his way to the shed every morning. In my imagination, this wasn’t a short-term goal towards a singular moment, but a true resolution. An intention to be there for his family.
He has resolved to be a better version of himself.
While everyone else sees the man, the moment, the work he put in, and the mission he accomplished, I’m left wondering one thing.
What happened the day after Christmas?
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