My Decade-Long Journey To Five Million

“What are your New Year resolutions?”

Probably one of the most frequently asked questions between Dec 31 and Jan 15, year after year after year after year.

Which leads me to my next question to you, dear reader:

Can you name one friend, just ONE friend, who has managed to achieve what he/she was set to do in the beginning of 2008?

Because I cannot name one.

I heard many beautiful, grand, noble resolutions in January 2008. Hearing them in 2008, it was almost as if by now, in 2009, I would be surrounded almost exclusively by slim, trilingual, very fit, healthy, and not to mention wealthy friends.

Fast forward 12 months, to January 1, 2009. What did I get? Still the same bunch of friends. Still not reaching their ideal weight. Still not speaking the foreign language. Still so far away from their million-dollar targets. Still having credit card debts. (In case you’re wondering, I still love you, friends.)

Pot, kettle. Kettle, pot.

And let’s not do the pot calling kettle black thing. Did you achieve at least one thing that you planned to achieve in the beginning of 2008?

If you did, from the bottom of my heart, I salute you. Because I cannot name even one.

Here are some of my last year’s resolutions:

1. Bring down my body fat percentage to 15% — nope, went down to 18%, now hovering around 19% again.
2. Being able to do 100 pushups, 100 situps, and 100 squats – nope, except for the last one (the squats).
3. Read 50 books – nope, stopped at 30+.
4. Create a passive income stream of at least S$500/month – nope, business still not earning close to that.
5. Learn to write and read 500 Mandarin characters – nope, abandoned entirely for my CFA preparation.

And the horrible thing about this is that even a resolution breaker like me is already ahead compared to most of my friends. Because at least I still remember what the resolutions I broke are. Most people I ask don’t even remember!

Schmesolutions

Resolutions, schmesolutions. What’s the point of having New Year resolutions, then? 

I say not much.

Not when for most of us–at least for most people I know, including me–”New Year resolution” really means “Something I wish will happen this year, somehow, without any particular effort on my part”. 

Not when we don’t actually stick to it for the whole year, which is very easy if we don’t have any way to know how well (or badly) we’re doing.

Not when we pick resolutions that don’t really matter to us (if you say you want to lose 10kg but you don’t do anything about it for the whole year, let’s face it: losing 10kg doesn’t matter that much to you.)

Not when the end point of the resolution is so far from where we are right now that we have no idea whatsoever how to get from here to there.

Might as well don’t have any resolutions. At least we don’t have anything to feel bad about in January 2010.

Meta-Resolutions

Since I want to feel good in January 2010, here are my meta-resolutions for 2009:

1. I shall come up with no more than 3 SMART resolutions, only in matters that are REALLY important for me. Just 3, and no more.
2. I shall do a monthly review of those resolutions, on the 8th of every month.
3. I shall adjust the goals and approaches as necessary as I learn more about those goals. But I shall not break them.

The New Year resolutions themselves are in another post, coming up on the 8th of January. Meanwhile… Happy New Year!

(Images courtesy of Mimi Kat @ flickr and It’sGreg @ flickr in the order of appearance.)

January 4th, 2009 | Tags: goals | Category: Goal Setting | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL