Just about every year you see an article or two going on about how New Year Resolutions “don’t work” or they “just discourage you.” I feel like the people who say that are just as bad as the people who say NaNoWriMo is no good because its “too hard and people who can’t do it get discouraged.”
Yes, setting goals and sticking to them is hard. No one said it wasn’t. But accomplishing something that is difficult is an amazing feeling and keeps us from becoming complacent in our lives. Saying something isn’t worth doing because it’s “too hard” and you’ll be discouraged when you quit is, frankly, ridiculous.
I am a big fan of New Years Resolutions and I have gotten better and better over the years of making them reachable goals and less open ended. I have several on-going goals this year (such as working on keeping a normal sleep schedule) and several reach and done type goals (finishing a long standing project or two).
As you’ve likely noticed, I am pretty big on goals (often very difficult ones) in general so it should come as no surprise that I like to give myself new ones every January. I think it all comes from that school mentality that I often miss. I need life to be broken up into checkpoints, marking periods and due dates or I just flounder around.
That said, whether you are a fan of the resolution or not, I highly recommend reading this great article by Maggie Stiefvater called “I Intend to Smack 2010 Around”. It is long but very much worth it (and it also has some funny pictures in it to break up all the text). I don’t normally give such a big recommendation to an article but I think its very universal advice that just about anyone could use this time of year told in a funny, conversational style.
I intend to write up a few of my new resolutions as I go in posts of their own but I have to ask, what are your goals for the year?
Hillary DePiano is a playwright, fiction and non-fiction writer who loves writing of all kinds except for writing bios like this.
