New Year, Old Resolutions
Humans as we are, are very predictable beings who will very easily hop onto the latest craze or trend, a behaviour that you are no stranger to. Working in the world of tech, it is very common to observe developers onboarding the latest technologies, or Sysadmins getting into the latest tooling applications. In the world of tech, this is very much sensible and even beneficial as our stack as developers get better, or as our tools as Sysadmins get friendlier and even more secure.
Interestingly, We seem to apply this same behaviour to the annual selection of goals and dreams that we wish to accomplish, the annual ritual of verbal dream chasing that we happily engage in with much enthusiasm, as if the New Year presents to us a massive vase full of time correcting magic, that will magically clean our records from the previous year and set our goals straight.
You will hear statements like: “This year am going to work out more”, “This year, am learning a new language”, or a fun one like “This year am living life to the fullest”.
For me, this is all great and encouraging that people dream of becoming better annually but I have resolved upon much thought and reading that, it is optimum to stick with one goal until it has been accomplished.
Let me explain why: we know not what will happen in the course of the year, be it a pandemic or a great distraction (like falling in love, don’t we all? ), therefore why burden myself with goals that I will probably not meet, (not that am not going to be ambitious anymore, I just want to get there with better strategy). In retrospect, I have hopped on and off several goals and accomplished them all (or still in progress, you don’t just pick up a guitar and be done?!).
Some are little achievements in their own rights.
Like when I decided to get my Microsoft Certification or the time when I decided to take the GRE (by the way 296 isn’t a great score, result of poor preparation), nonetheless I did all of these things, between a year and a half, I am still going strong and not relenting on JavaScript as my primary language of choice (programming-wise, I don’t know of a human that speaks JS, yet!) and I have been going on for about 2 years now, that’s definitely not a year, it’s more!
So why go through the trouble of setting new goals every year then?
It’s great but a year is too long for me or perhaps too short to benchmark my progress, I direct my anxiety into introspection on a daily basis as a result; This is my new resolution, if you have gotten this far, perhaps you have been wondering what I have been trying to arrive at.
That is to say, I have long term goals now, really long, like 5 years worth, I will start working again, I might take up a new hobby but my prime goal now is to not wait to schedule my goal over another promise full new year, my goals are just going to be spread out until each is checked off of the list, I have resolved to get better every single day, one step at a time, one item of the list at a time. This has worked for me once and it might just work for you too, so in 2021, I have no New Year’s resolution but a long list of todos.
This long list of todos includes: writing more, getting better in React, getting faster with reading the music sheet and many more, definitely won’t be able to squeeze all into a year, so every day I tick off some micro-tasks belonging to this list, I know that I am getting better and experiencing profitable growth with every passing day.
Thanks for getting this far, perhaps you learnt from my experience, perhaps you might want to leave a thought, and that’s perfectly fine, let’s get better together.
