A new year and a new me

2022 is finally here, and with the new year I’ve committed to push a renewed effort into keeping up with posts for this blog.  I’ve neglected it for too long.  Though I’ve intended to write about a number of different events and topics, I simply haven’t done it.  And results don’t happen without action.

I’ve also encountered an idea that has intrigued me.  With the new year here, it’s time again for new goals, and I think this new idea will help me tremendously.  In the past, I’ve always struggled with achieving my goals.  Each year I seem to achieve only a small handful of them.  But thinking about this new idea I’ve encountered has enlightened me about why that is.

In the past I always threw myself at my goals, and that was the problem.  I was trying to make too much gain too quickly.  I wanted to make huge changes at the level of my dreaming.  But the new idea I encountered is that huge changes aren’t made in large steps but in small ones.  It’s the aggregation of small wins that make large ones.  And so my focus every day should be on doing the little things, achieving the small wins for that day and being patient in not seeing the results I want to see as quickly as I want.  If I do that every day, in time I’ll have the large wins of my dreams.

And so this year I changed how I make my goals.  I’m still a big dreamer; I can’t help but be anything else.  But I decided that my goals for the year should represent just what I want to be at the end of the year.  What portion of my big dream do I want to have on December 31?  And then for that portion, every day I just focus on the small gain that needs to be made that day.  And the next day just focus on the small gain for that day, and so on and so forth.

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The idea comes ultimately from James Clear’s book Atomic Habits, which I’ll be reviewing later.  He says making just a 1% improvement every day will result in being 37X better by the end of the year.  I actually did the math and found the number is closer to 38X.  I also found some other interesting tidbits.  A 1% improvement every day starting on 1 January means that you’ll be 100% better (or have 2X improvement) on 11 March.  A couple of more weeks, and that’s the first quarter.  By the end of Q2, you have 6X improvement.  Whether or not you’re familiar with the work of Grant Cardone and his 10X Rule, you’ll have 10X improvement on 20 August.  Just 6 weeks later you have the end of Q3 and 15X improvement.  Now you really have momentum, and by the end of Q4 you’re about 38X (or 37.78X) better than at the start of the year.

Having applied these ideas to making my goals for the new year, I already feel a surge of power within me.  I feel incredibly encouraged by this new approach, and I anticipate this year to be my most productive year of growth and achievement ever.  Here’s to a new year and a new me!