Happy New Year and Resolutions
Happy New Year, everyone.
I was listening to a song this morning with that specific lyric, and I really resonated with it. I lost a lot at the beginning of last year. I had to rebuild many parts of my life, piece by piece.
The changes I made weren’t “resolutions”—they were critical for me just to feel good and happy again.
I’m actually going to write more about that evolution tomorrow. Tomorrow is my birthday, and I always write a “new version of myself” post on my birthday. But today, I wanted to write a quick post on resolutions and how to actually keep them.
For me, the key to keeping them comes down to three things:
The first is goal setting and tracking. You have to track those goals. I have a spreadsheet (I’ll maybe share a template soon of what I check in on weekly) that shows exactly how I track things week by week, and quarter by quarter.
The second is a spiritual foundation. Having prayer, meditation, and a handful of critical daily goals that I do every morning is non-negotiable. It just keeps me on a consistent track.
The third—and this is the big one—is living 24 hours by 24 hours. I don’t live week-by-week or year-by-year over those long-term goals. I’m just trying to be the best person I can be every day. I’m building a foundation for life that supports that.
The thing that is remarkable about this way of living is what it does for you: It actually just makes you feel better day to day.
There is no guilt. There’s no guilt about not doing certain things or not being “good enough” yet. There are just the small successes of today:
I got up.
I got to the gym.
I did the work I was supposed to do.
It is doing that over, and over, and over again until you actually have the foundation you need in life to accomplish those big goals.
So, I know a lot of people are setting resolutions this year. If 2025 feels like a year where God dumped you over a group chat and you are kind of starting from scratch, I would suggest not making it too complicated.
Instead, just try to be the best person you can be every single day. Choose that way of life.
Happy New Year
and
Happy Birthday dude!
capricorn gang
One thing this makes me ponder is the experience of making unpleasant/uncomfortable good decisions. This may sound trite. But one thing I'm excellent at is devising systems that make the good, desirable behavior also the pleasant one. E.g. building a gym routine that I look forward to, keeping my desk neat and tidy so that sitting down to work is pleasant, keeping only healthy food around so that I don't gorge on junk. Where I have room to grow is forcing myself through something that is unpleasant even though I know it's the good/right thing to do. My approach to these sorts of things has always been to rearrange my life to decouple the unpleasantness from the goodness of the action (like I said before), but 2026 may need to be the year where I get better at bullet biting, so to speak.