Tis the season for resolutions.
As the holidays wind down and the calendar resets, many are planning on reinventing themselves. On pursuing ambitious goals and improving their self-worth.
Count me out.
For years, I’ve railed against New Year’s Resolutions. I’ve never understood why we let something as arbitrary as a calendar change affect our actions. Why we let the ticking of a clock serve as our compass, instead of following our heart.
We are not robots. Yet we seek to reprogram ourselves every time the days get short, and the guilt of holiday indulgence sets in.
So, we commit ourselves to crazy goals. Commitments we’ll break within three weeks.
There’s a better approach. One that can yield better and more consistent results. And all it takes is commitment to two words:
Be Better.
It’s ridiculously simple, yet amazingly complex.
You see, by committing ourselves to these words, we hold ourselves accountable. We require ourselves to show up each and every day with a singular mission: Improve on yesterday.
How we go about doing that is our business. But we will ultimately find ourselves making incremental improvements each day.
Why? Because that’s the only path forward.
We might be enthralled by the quick fix, the growth hack, the express elevator. After all, society and technology have hard-wired us to believe that we can have whatever we want in an instant.
But it’s all an illusion.
When it comes to self-improvement, slow and steady is the only way. For this is a continuous process. One that can be painfully monotonous, yet effective.
Living into this process can yield success. But that takes a mindset shift.
It takes us abandoning our illusion of grandeur in favor of the 10 feet in front of us. Something that we’re naturally loathe to do.
Simon Sinek once said of Millennials, “It’s as if they’re standing at the foot of a mountain, and they have this abstract concept called impact that they want to have in the world, which is the summit. What they don’t see is the mountain.”
It’s not just Millennials with this selective blindness. We all have it to some degree. It’s why we have resolutions in the first place. And it’s why we let the calendar dictate our lives.
If we really want to break the chain, — to realize true self-improvement — we must open our eyes.
We must focus on the journey more than the destination. We must accept the challenge of taking a million baby steps, rather than a moon leap. We must embrace a process that, by definition, will never be complete.
We must live into two powerful words, day in, day out.
Be better.
Will you?