By mid-January, most people have given up on, or are about to give up on, their New Year’s resolutions. It’s an American tradition more predictable than a drunken New Year’s Eve. And that’s a good thing. Attempts at self-improvement can’t succeed until they first become failed attempts. You don’t succeed by succeeding. You succeed by failing and resolving to try again.
But how to try again? This is the challenge of failure — when you fail, aren’t you right back where you started? It is hard to regain focus and purpose when you made an effort and have nothing to show for it. But the truth is, failure is rarely empty. Most of the time, if you achieve nothing else, you at least learn from the experience. Failure isn’t total failure if something has been learned.
If you haven’t achieved your goal, and especially if you haven’t come close, consider the possibility that the goal may have been all wrong in the first place. Not that your intentions were wrong, but the goal may have been. The first step back from failure to achieve a goal is often to throw the goal away.
The problem with goals is that they are black or white — you either achieve them or you don’t. This leaves no room for flexibility, for the small successes, failures, setbacks, and rebounds that are substance of most human endeavors. Goals leave no room for commonplace improvement.
An example: I run regularly. My commitment to running, however, took years to establish. I would run for a few weeks, maybe even a few months, and then fall back into months of inactivity. I would set goals: Run 5 miles, run a 10K, run a marathon. I always had a goal. And I didn’t achieve any of them. Finally, I did what any sensible person does in the face of constant failure. I surrendered. I flushed all my goals down the toilet and decided that instead of worrying about goals, I would just decide to be a runner.
What does it meant to be a runner? It means I go out 3 or 4 times a week and run. Five minutes, five blocks, five miles, no matter. It's all running. Just as long as I put on my shoes and go out, it counts. And the interesting thing is that this simple change in approach worked.
Before, when I ran, I was not able meet any of my goals, and so my passion for exercise lessened with each failure. I would quit. Then, I would feel guilty in couch-potatodom and set up the goals again. And the cycle would repeat. In this cycle, there was no chance I would ever succeed as a runner. Why would I keep doing something if I kept failing again and again? By simply telling myself I would run for the sake of it, for the heck of it, and that there were no goals at all, I was able to change my frame of reference. If my only criterion was to run — any distance, any place, any day — that was something I could succeed at. This thinking replaced long-term goals that I might never achieve with small, simple ones, achievements that formed a modest base that I could build on.
One might object: What good does it do to run for five minutes? Five minutes is nothing. Yes, it is nothing if your attitude is “Boston Marathon or bust.” But that is not my attitude. My attitude is, five minutes running is not everything, but it is five minutes better than nothing. It makes me a runner. I may not be as good an athlete as someone who runs five miles, but I am still an athlete. I don’t stop being an athlete if I can’t run five miles. I stop being an athlete if I stop running altogether.
And with that I had uncovered a secret that, while new to me, I have since heard other writers allude to. Rather than goal setting, it turns out that it is often more useful to change your personal story. Rather than saying, “I will achieve X,” it is better to say “I am now Y.” In other words, improvement is not an act of will, picking a goal and driving towards it, but an act of identity, deciding to be a changed person.
Let’s look at how this works. You can set a goal of writing a hit song. Or you can just choose to be a guitarist. You can set a goal of bench pressing 500 pounds. Or you can just choose to be a weightlifter. Setting a high goal sets you up for failure: if you don’t have a hit song, or if you never bench press 500 pounds, you have not succeeded in your mind. But if you choose to rewrite your story, you can turn repeated failure into sustained success. You may never bench 500 pounds, but if you spend as little as five minutes in the weight room three days a week, you are a person who lifts weights. Who has a right to say otherwise? No one can take away your identity as a weightlifter. You can only fail at that if you stop lifting.
Nike had it wrong. You don’t just do it. You must be it.
Need some more examples? Consider some common New Year’s resolutions.
Lose 10 pounds. What kind of person loses ten pounds? Someone who is a healthy eater. So instead of trying to lose weight and being disappointed when you can’t, just choose be a better eater. Decide to have a vegetable with every meal. Choose to drink plain water with your lunch. You can do that every day even if you never lose weight. And one day, it might help you lose weight.
Travel to Paris. What does it take to travel to Paris? Money. How do you get money? By saving. So instead of setting the goal of Paris, choose to be someone who saves. Any amount is fine. Like running, if you save anything, you are a saver. Recently someone showed me a very simple weekly savings plan. For one year, every Friday you set money aside. On week one, you save one dollar. The next week, you save $2. At 52 weeks you will set aside $52, and have $1,300 in your bank account. That’s enough for a plane ticket to Paris.
Get a promotion at work. That isn’t up to you. But doing a better job at work is. So pick a simple habit that will make you a better worker. Choose to be someone who is always at work on time. Being at work on time might not get you a promotion, but it won’t hurt. Or maybe choose to be someone who dresses well. Too simple? Choose to be someone who listens at meetings. Prove you have been listening by reflecting back what people say to you before you make your opinion known. Everyone values a listener.
Learn to play the piano. Consider being a musician instead. What does a musician do? A musician listens to a broad range of musical styles, and learns about them. That’s easy. A little harder: A musician sits at the piano every day, even if it is just for a minute. Every minute counts. Do that, and the skill will eventually follow.
When I started writing this blog fourteen years ago, there were hundreds of doctors hosting blogs across the internet. We had a network, and we linked to each other’s blogs and even had a weekly online Grand Rounds that served as the “best of” posts among blogging docs. Now, all of them are gone except me. I don’t have the most popular blog on the net, and probably not the best one either, but I have been here 14 years and counting, and have no plans to stop. The difference between me and the dropouts is that the other guys wrote for a goal. To vent their spleens. To call attention to their medical practices and attract patients. To make money. To pass on medical knowledge (or show it off). Those are all goals. You either meet goals or not. If you do, your reason for blogging goes away. If you don’t meet your goal, you get frustrated and quit.
But for me, blogging is a way to be a writer. That’s what I am, a writer. What does a writer do? He writes. Every day. So I write every day. Some says I only write a single sentence, and sometimes a write for an hour or more. But I write.
And the reason my blog lives on is because I write to be a writer, and not for any particular goal. I do it because writing is what I want to do, and because a writer is what I want to be. One day, I expect to find myself on my deathbed ginning up another article for my old blog. And I will do it because writing is an expression of my being, not the fulfillment of a goal. Goals are for quitters. If you want to succeed and keep succeeding, you have to do something because you have made a part of what you are, a part of your personal story, and not some arbitrary finish line.
And that, my friends, is how you keep a New Year’s resolution. You ask yourself not what you are trying to achieve, but what you want to be. Do you want to be a writer, exerciser, healthy eater, spiritual thinker, saver, friend, spouse, father, doctor, teacher, mentor?
It is not possible to achieve everything. But it is possible to be many things. Choose to change your identity, and you will find your life changed in ways that you did not think were possible.
I am telling you: it works. I have been running regularly for eight years now. I am still terrible at it. But it keeps me fit, it keeps my mind sharp, and I will keep doing it as long as I can, not because running will take me anywhere, but because running makes me what I am, right here.