#36 - How to Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions
Slow Is Smooth, Smooth Is Fast
Happy New Year!
New Year’s resolutions are easy to make and hard to keep. In this newsletter, a few ideas that can help you follow your New year’s resolutions effortlessly and live your 2022 worth binge-watching.
Pace Yourself
“When we’re trying to achieve something that matters to us, it’s tempting to sprint out of the gate. The problem is that going too fast in the beginning will almost always slow us down the rest of the way.
The cost of this boom-and-bust approach to getting important projects done is too high: we feel exhausted on the days we sprint hard, drained and demoralised on the days we don’t… Luckily, there is an alternative. We can find the effortless pace.
Slow is smooth. Smooth is Fast. When you go slow, things are smoother, and when things are smooth, you can move faster. When you go slow, things are smoother. But go too slow and you may get stuck or lose your momentum. This is just as true in life and work as it is on the battlefield. To make the progress despite the complexity and uncertainty we encounter on a daily basis, we need to choose the right range and keep within it.
We can establish upper and lower bounds: Never less than X, never more than Y. An example:
Essential project: Complete an online class
Lower bound: never less than signing in to the class every day
Upper bound: never more than fifty minutes taking one practice test each day
Once we get into the rhythm, the progress begins to flow.”
- Effortless: Make It Easier To Do What Matters Most, by Greg McKeown
Show Up & Practice
“Lower your standards for what counts as progress,” writes Adam Grant, “and you will be less paralyzed by perfectionism.”
To get good, you first have to be willing to be bad. Don’t practice to get good, practice to suck less.
Something small, every day, adds up to something big over time.
What should you practice? Whatever you want to suck less at. You can practice drawing, you can practice kindness, you can practice praying.”
- 30-day “Practice and Suck Less” challenge, Austin Kleon
Start & Finish Your Day Purposefully
“The beginning and ending are the most critical moments of everything.
Birth and death. First day and last day at work. New moon and full moon. The beginning drives expectations and intrigue. The ending gives a new meaning to everything that happened in between.
Start and finish your day purposefully.
A great beginning will keep you engaged with your own story as the hours go by. You don’t want to ditch your dreams by noon.
Finish each day with a story that you want to remember forever. How you end your day imputes the mood you wake up with the next morning…
Remember, live a life worth binge-watching”
Check out the morning and evening routines at the following link:
- This Is Why Your Life Needs a This Is Why Your Life Needs a Screenwriter, by Gustavo Razzetti
Keep the Record
It would be a pity if everything that you accomplish flows into the past without your taking a good notice. Seeing how you’ve progressed can be a wonderful motivator to progress further. I recommend using Day One app as your completely private digital space. It works nicely for the morning and evening routines, for time boxing your day if you wish to see how you spend your time, and for recording progress, big or small, on your practices.
And even if you have stumbled and failed with one of your resolutions, you do not need to wait until the next January 1. Any time, you can begin again.
Stay healthy, show up, set an effortless pace and live a life worth binge-watching,
Arina
Image: Kwan Fung, via Unsplash