Brief guide to New Year’s Resolutions
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| Judah Ben Hur always hit the rowing machine on Jan 1, but never made it last. |
I expect that my gym will be absolutely packed starting in January. For three weeks it will be impossible to get a machine. I’ll probably be one of those jerks, too, and who knows how long I’ll be able to keep it going. I signed up back in April and went like a champ for a month, but a big project at work threw me off my stride and I stopped going entirely. A shame.
I’m not much of a believer in instantaneous radical change. I’m pretty conservative: I wait for opportunities that offer great risk/reward ratios and jump on them. Maybe that’s a learned skill or maybe it’s innate.
So the idea of deliberately changing habitual behavior around an arbitrary signpost, such as New Year’s, strikes me as failure-ready. Real change happens when it becomes too painful not to change.
But for people who want to change and are stuck in the land of woulda shoulda, here are some suggestions for striking out with a real determination.
Career
The best kick in the ass for jumpstarting your career is to sit down and write your biography. Write two of them: one at fewer than 100 words and the other up to 300 words. The latter can be extremely brutal, and that’s the point.
What have you accomplished? Does your career trajectory match where you are in your own mind? Are you impressed or satisfied with the person you’re reading about in that bio?
If you want to be really brutal, write the obituary that would come out if you died now. Now, write the bio or obituary you’d like to see. Do you need to change something to get there? What, exactly? It’s probably going to focus you more than thinking “I’d like a better job and more money in 2008.”
Life of the mind
Feel like you’re falling behind on reading good books, seeing good art, expanding your brain?
Get a good digest of local activities and permanent installations (museums, galleries, lectures, etc.) and circle everything you haven’t seen.
Lately, I’ve made an effort and went to see the Frick Collection, the MoMa, The Neue Gallery, and the new Met exhibits, and I did a tour of several galleries. I was missing something, but it wasn’t until I checked out the NYC website and a full listing of arts establishments that I realized how much I’d not seen.
Not reading? Get a high school summer reading list and check off which of the classics you’ve never read and start there. Ditto, the last 10 years of Nobel prize winners for literature. Ditto, Pulitzer winners.
It’s essential to see what you haven’t done to know what you might want to do. This is so simple, but most people make vague goals (I’ll read more, I’ll be more involved) instead of specific goals (I’ll go to this show, read these books).
Body/Health
This is probably the biggest area of change upon which most Americans embark. Want to really shock yourself? Take a picture of yourself in a Speedo (or naked). There was a very funny article about the Speedo in a NYTimes magazine article about the author’s summer stay in France. He was not allowed to go swimming in a pool because swim trunks can be “unhealthy” he was told.
What they meant was that they can be worn all over and so could be quite dirty, while a Speedo is something you’d only wear to go swimming and so would tend to be more sanitary, but the joke was that the Speedo is truly “healthier” because to wear it you have to be in great shape, as it hides nothing!
Anyway, that picture will bring an objective reality to your weight issue if you have one. There’s no putting a sweater over it and pretending those 10 lbs aren’t a big deal. If you find yourself repulsed by yourself, you’ll know what you have to do…
On the working out issue, I’m very bearish on gyms. I think if you are not already going or have never really been a gym person, it’s not for you yet.
You can do everything you need to with 1 medicine ball and 1 balance ball (perhaps $40 total in cost). And if you’re not motivated enough to work out at home, joining a gym won’t do it. It’s great to be surrounded by fit people, but sometimes it’s intimidating, and the important thing is getting to the workout, wherever it is. If you don’t work out now, you won’t go to the gym and the cost will not compel you to go after the first month or so.
But it might make sense to join if you’re joining for personal instruction/training or a class, because then you’ll be disappointing two people (yourself and the trainer and maybe others) when you don’t show up.
Spirituality
I can’t offer any insight here, but I do believe a clearer and more spiritual mind can be had by cutting extraneous crap from one’s living and working spaces.
I read a great book this weekend about clutter: It’s All Too Much by organization consultant Peter Walsh. I’m currently getting rid of all manner of crap, because it’s spiritually exhausting to have it around.
Clothes that are old or don’t fit, books you’re never going to read again, that 400-pen collection of chewed on Bic ballpoints, old stereo equipment…Peter suggests you throw it out or sell it. OCD? He’s got steps for handling what is often an enormous task.
Relationships
Don’t ask me. I’m either unlucky or clueless or both. But for New York men, here’s a theory: Marry her. You’re never going to find your “soul mate” or that perfect lay, except in the cinema, so stop trying. And if it doesn’t work out, you’ve increased your shelf life. A divorced late 30- or 40-something guy is so much more attractive than one who never got married. At least the divorcee knew how to commit!
