Greetings from California! I’m visiting family here in the longest domestic vacation I’ve had in years.<\/p>\n
I love opportunities to make declarations, so I always propose new years resolutions. My commitment to them varies, but my success tends to be low. In the end, I usually decide that I didn’t really want to follow my resolution anyhow. I was thinking about this problem, and I think one hopeful formula is to treat oneself more like a country.<\/p>\n
If crime is a problem, you don’t say, “We will eliminate crime this year.” You define measurable criteria, and set a mid-way goal, like cutting violent incidents by 25%. The Millennium Development Goals<\/a> are prime examples of this.<\/p>\n While I believe that people can change quickly and completely, the reason it doesn’t happen is often because you realize that you don’t really want to upend every aspect of your lifestyle. I want to exercise more, but the sporadicness of my current exercise isn’t just that I don’t like it much. It’s because my lifestyle involves working intensely on other things, and when I try to resolve to impose improvements, they turn out to be unexpectedly disruptive to things I don’t want to change.<\/p>\n So, I want to try mid-way, measurable goals, so that by next year I can decide, if I fail, if the goal was too ambitious, and if I succeed, if further improvements are desirable (or even easier from the new standpoint).<\/p>\n This is all to preface my modest new years resolutions:<\/p>\n I need to figure out a place to record my progress. What are your new years resolutions?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Greetings from California! I’m visiting family here in the longest domestic vacation I’ve had in years. I love opportunities to make declarations, so I always propose new years resolutions. My commitment to them varies, but my success tends to be low. In the end, I usually decide that I didn’t really want to follow my … Continue reading New Years Resolution<\/span> \n