New Year's Resolutions are BS

When I was younger, my friends and I always asked each other what our New Year's resolutions were. They typically revolved around getting rid of acne, working out more or getting better grades in school. Honestly, it sometimes turned into a competition to see who had better resolutions (I’m not even joking). However, these goals we set for ourselves were only important for that first week or two of the new year; after that, the resolutions would be forgotten.

I’m sure this experience of sharing goals for the year ahead isn’t new to anyone. It’s a pretty common tradition. So, even though you are all reading this on your phone or computer and don’t know what I sound like, I’m going to pretend I’m giving a TED Talk and ask for a bit of participation.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever written down a resolution. (This is where we pretend we’re all together and hands start to fly into the air.) Look around the room. (Again, just pretend with me.) Each year, we come up with a goal, we write it down, we speak it into existence and then what happens? (This is where you all respond by yelling out from your seats.) We forget about it. By the time February rolls around our New Year's resolutions become this forgotten memory of the past; we can't even remember what they were.

If we’re so passionate about setting these goals, why do we often forget them once we awake from our holiday hibernation? The answer is that we don’t actually understand what a resolution is. Seriously. If you were to look up the word “resolution” in the dictionary, you wouldn’t find some description of half-assed goals. You would find an impassioned story of a young girl who dreams of becoming a ballerina. Each day she practices her twirls and leaps and ultimately, becomes the best prima ballerina in history. (Okay, my imagination got the best of me there, but I think the point is pretty clear.) A resolution is something you set your mind to. A resolution is something you so firmly believe in, you will do whatever it takes (within reason, obviously) to make it happen.

Now, by no means am I saying that goal setting and working towards accomplishing your dreams is BS, but rather, the practice of setting New Year’s resolutions is. If you set a goal for yourself, you better be working towards accomplishing it. The New Year is no time to flake out on a big dream. Trust me, I haven’t always been the best at following through on my own goals, but it's something I have worked really hard to improve upon.

In some of my undergraduate classes, we would be asked to create SMART goals for ourselves (SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-oriented, in case you didn’t know.) In all honesty, I thought this exercise was stupid and didn’t appreciate the structure of said goals. It wasn’t until after graduation and being in quarantine that I realized the importance of setting structured goals.

While in my current life, I’m not planning on using SMART goals, per se, I do set goals, both short and long-term, that make sense for me in the moment I write them. For some people, coming up with New Year’s resolutions might be incredibly helpful and the way in which they personally set goals. For others, it's setting SMART goals in class. For me, well, it’s just putting pen to paper and curating a long list of things I want to achieve. Once I’ve accomplished that, it gets crossed off, and so on and so forth. Whatever goal you set, whatever dream you have, resolve to achieve it. Only then, once we actually understand what it means to be resolute, will New Year’s resolutions not be BS.