Acronychal
We Can Achieve Our Goals Anytime, Not Just Once A Year
This one is easy. The start of a new year does tend to bring with it a myriad of positive emotions, and I’m sure many of us feel like we can accomplish a lot over the year on that first day in January (or other month depending on what calendar you use).
As the year goes on, however, and as our resolutions seem farther and farther away, the change that we wanted to bring about can quickly seem to be out of our grasp. We then can easily declare this year as a wash and look to the next year, confident that we will be able to achieve our resolutions once the new year comes. This year was terrible, after all, and we would just rather forget about it.
Maybe this isn’t you, maybe it is, and maybe it’s somewhere in between. Wherever you fall, making the decision to change (through resolutions) only once per year is selling yourself short. An amazing thing about human beings is that we have the power to change many things about ourselves and our environment any time we want. We don’t have to wait for the start of the new year to do so.
You’re probably sick of hearing about running, but I’ll go back to it one last time as an example. I started running in the summer of 2004. My New Year’s resolution that year was to lose weight, and at just over 90 kilograms I was failing miserably. I kept thinking that I would do better next year, until one cool summer Saturday afternoon I decided that there was nothing keeping me from starting the change I wanted to achieve except myself.
And so I ran. I didn’t get very far. My best estimate was maybe 500 meters before I was completely exhausted. I was disappointed in how terrible I was at running, but I decided not to let it get me down. I wasn’t going to wait until the start of another year to try and lose weight. I was going to start right now, and keep going.
Somehow I did, and in six months I was running four days per week and lost 25 kilograms. Many friends and colleagues asked me if I was sick. I just told them that I had decided to not wait anymore to make a change. This decision began my love affair with running, which has changed my life. I’ve become healthier, ran races ranging from five to one hundred kilometers, have made a lot of new friends, and have felt much better about myself. This would have never happened if I waited to the beginning of the year to try and change again.
All of those things you want to achieve this year, or change, or do; you can start to achieve them at any time. You have the power to do this whenever you want, and you don’t have to wait until one point in the year to make resolutions that have a good chance of going unfulfilled. It doesn’t matter how far along you are. Every minute, hour, day, week, and month is a new opportunity. Don’t let it pass you by.
