It’s almost the first of the year and you know what that means: sales, booze and broken promises to yourself.
It’ll all work out though since you’ll break at least one of your resolutions within the first couple of days and use retail therapy and the remaining alcohol from the New Year’s party to help get you through that rough patch. It’s all very healthy I’m sure. And I did get receive my medical license from Google Univ.
You can trust me.
I googled “resolution” and plucked these three gems for you:
- a formal expression by a meeting; agreed to by a vote
- finding a solution to a problem
- a decision to do something or to behave in a certain manner;
Not sure why I included that first one–I suspect it had to do with the fact everything’s better in threes–but the last two are relevant. You have a problem–you’re fat, you smoke, you can’t quit eating cat food–and you need to find a solution to said problem. This is the stuff resolutions are made of.
Now you have to make the decision to change your problem. The only problem is habits take almost a month to break.[1] Not joking. I looked that up. And if not eating that cat food was easy then you would have stopped a long time ago. Am I right?
This is where the “Setting you up to fail and you’ll like it.” part comes in.
Just about half of American adults[2] put on their rose colored glass once a year and resolve to make a big change in their habits. That’s awesome! All of those folks feeling optimistic enough to make monumental life changes.
Awesome except for the fact all but ~12% are going to fail[3] harder than the Nexus One.
And here is where the real cool stuff comes in.
No one expects you to keep your New Year’s resolutions. In fact, when you fall off the wagon, people congratulate you on your failure and you get to commiserate over a heaping bowl of cat food. You failed but you won.
Cat food never tasted so sweet.
