Did you set a New Year's resolution for yourself? How's that going?

I don't know when in the year you're watching, but if I had to bet on the status of your resolution,

it's probably not flourishing, but failed or foregone. This is usually what the effort curve

on resolutions looks like. If New Year's is new to you, you are forgiven for not knowing,

but come on. This isn't your first resolution rodeo.

You've been here before, saddled up to a resolution, gotten thrown off in short order,

only to come back next year to pick a buck of a different color, or worse, the same.

Riding, rolling, retreating, returning, year after year after year of your unchanging life until a disappointed

Reaper calls time. New Year's resolutions suck. Human behavior change is really hard and

the resolution rodeo this is not the way. Instead to accomplish what you want out of

resolutions positive life change but in a better way allow me to suggest a gentler idea.

Give yourself a theme.

Instead of setting yourself up to fail with, I'm going to lose X pounds by next year, or I'm going to read one book a week at least,

a theme would be something like year of reading or year of health. Now if that sounds a bit broad, that's the point.

For some things, precision matters.

For others, it doesn't.

And when trying to build yourself into a better version of yourself, exact data points don't matter.

All that matters is the trend line.

If the trend is going in the right direction, so are you.

Just moving a trend from

negative to positive is hard enough without defining falling short of a goal as failure. Heck, even

just decelerating the negative is a positive. Is there something you want more of in your life,

...