Why Your New Years Resolutions Fail
It's getting to that time in the year when, if you set a New Year's Resolution for yourself, you may be at the breaking point. If you are, this is probably the reason why: you reached too high.
The image above is one I saw on social media at the start of the year. 22 goals for 2022. While I'm a sucker for alliteration, this is the worst set of goals I have ever seen. It is doomed to fail because it is too much. 22 is a big number. Looking at this picture, if we were to break down what it would take to actually achieve these goals, it means every two weeks you would be completing a project (whatever that means), going on a date, reading a book, painting your nails twice, writing a blog post, exercising 5-6 times, doing an act of kindness… Oh and on top of that you’re also reselling things, remembering birthdays, tracking outfits, food, decluttering 2022 items, establishing a cleaning routine and keeping memories?
The only way this person is doing all this, is if they already naturally do most of it anyway. Or maybe they have no job, no family, and this is all they plan on doing? Ever? For the average person, this is too much. I am all for setting the bar high and reaching for the moon, but if you do then you need to be prepared to fall short and be okay with it.
Sometimes goals like these are called BHAGS - Big Hairy Audacious Goals. Coined by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in their book Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, BHAGSs are important because they stretch you farther than you thought possible. If this person tries to write 22 blog posts but only gets 18, well that's higher than they would have gotten if they set a more practical goal of 12 (one per month). The key, though, is to prepare yourself for the failure so you don’t give up after month 1.
In 2021 I set a goal, and I failed. I set two deadlines for myself to finish the second draft of my book. The first was August. Then I pushed it back to the end of the year. Both I failed and I’m okay with it because what I ended up with was a website, a weekly email, and better writing habits that will last me a lifetime. I had set a pretty high bar, but the bar wasn’t the only thing I was reaching for. I had smaller weekly and monthly commitments that kept me going so when I failed at the big one it didn’t stop my progress.
Matt McCauley, one of the youngest CEO's to head a million dollar company, had a similar approach to business that he learned from his college pole vaulting days. According to Liz Wiseman in her book Multipliers, Matt would set a bar at seventeen feet, six inches, which is the bar he knew he would be able to clear. This is the bar that kept him sharp. This is the bar that kept him in shape and this was the bar that kept the habit of jumping every day. This was a good bar, but he also set one at twenty feet which was the world record at the time. When Matt took over as President of Gymboree, he used this same pole vaulting strategy to encourage his employees to set a "Mission Impossible Goal."
By setting a high bar, and defining it as "Mission Impossible," it gives us permission to push ourselves farther than we thought we could ever go, while also preventing us from giving up altogether when it looks like we won't reach it. If you have already given up on some of your 2022 goals, that’s okay. You set a high bar and that’s good, you just missed out on setting the one you know you could reach. High bars take time and the mistake we make is thinking that it's a failure when we don't hit it. It's not failure, it's just part of the process.
In 2 days it will be March 1 and I give you permission to take another stab at the New Year. Don’t let one or two bad months keep you from 10 months of positive change. Find your Mission Impossible bar, and then find the bar that will keep you showing up every day.
