New Years Resolution

Ahh, the New Year. 2012. Everything seems so fresh and clean….and then you read the news and find out Philly was able to book 5 murders in the wee hours of the night number 1. That’s one hell of a pace. I’m hoping Philadelphia is the Tuffy Rhodes of cities, or we’re looking at some kind of record here. ($1 to the first person who gets the reference WITHOUT using the internet.) Regardless, this is the time of year that most people start making resolutions. It’s all you hear about on the news. It causes a noticeable rise in the number of exercise-related infomercials. Every douchey morning talk radio show has a bit about what resolutions people are making. I’m not a big fan of New Years resolutions. If you wanted to make big, sweeping changes in your life, why do you have to wait until the middle of winter to do it? Do you really need the changing of the year to motivate you? Why not just decide to do these things when you think of them instead of stacking them all together in January and claiming you’ll do them all before the next January? Even worse are the people that talk about how they make resolutions every year and actually do very few of them. You’d think they’d be smart enough to just stop making the resolutions every year if they know going into it that they’ll fail. Or at least be smart enough not to talk about how you make claims and promises that you can’t keep. Of course, the fact that they already assume failure while making new resolutions is part of the reason they fail. Once your expectations are set for failure, there isn’t really any punishment when you do fail. It’s why Cubs fans are so happy year after year. We talk a big game, but we don’t really think they’ll win it all next year. When they’re mathematically eliminated by the end of June it hurts less when you kind of expected it. Except for this year. 2012 is totally the year they finally win it all. It’s all part of Armageddon. Here’s one of the few times where I think we can take something from the corporate world and actually make it useful in real life. Think of your resolutions as a year-end performance review with yourself. You review how you did last year and then set your goals for the upcoming year. The real trick to making this work is having some system of rewards/punishments. At work, your reward for achieving your goals typically is a raise, bonus, and/or some type of promotion. Failure means not getting a raise, demotion, and eventually being told to hit the bricks. Real life can be much more fun, especially when it comes to the punishments. If we steal a page from How I Met Your Mother, you can make a Resolution Slap Bet with a friend. Let’s say you make 5 resolutions. For each one that you fail at, your friend gets to slap you in the face as hard as they want. That will definitely make you think long and hard about the resolutions you do make to ensure that they’re reasonable and can’t be undermined by outside parties. Saying you’ll get a 10% raise at work would be a pretty stupid one, as that is more dependant on the company’s performance rather than your own hard work. You’ll also make sure that you have a really clear pass/fail system in place. Nothing vague like ‘I resolve to be nicer to people this year’. You’re going to get slapped for that one no matter what you do. This probably wouldn’t work for everyone. You need a malicious friend that has no qualms with hitting you in the face. I have several, but I’d like to think my friends are degenerate animals and other people wouldn’t have such a deep talent pool. But even if you don’t go for physical abuse, you could just as easily set a non-violent reward/punishment. I’m sure most couples can think of dozens of things they’d like the other person to do that could be used. You could bet money on each resolution, so long as the money isn’t being exchanged b/t people sharing accounts. I have no problem giving Hayley $100, since it’s just going back into a joint account. Whatever it is, it just needs to be something that only can be triggered by the pass/fail of the resolutions and is strong enough to motivate you. Betting a friend $5 that I’ll do 10 crazy resolutions isn’t going to do squat. Now if you put some extra 0s in there, then you have something that will get me moving. And no, I’m still not making any resolutions. I don’t really feel like getting cracked in the face on New Years Eve 2012. Besides, there’s usually a non-trivial chance of that happening anyways, making it pointless to tie that to a resolution.