How to Make 2020 Your Best Year Ever
I was on a flight recently when the traveler sitting next to me asked what I was doing. “I just gave a talk at a university,” I responded, which brought a follow-up and unexpected question: “Are you a good speaker?” I thought about that one for a bit. “Well, I’m not a great speaker,” I replied. “If I were great at it, the things I said would stick with my audience for the rest of their lives — so I am probably just a good speaker.”
And so it is with New Year’s resolutions. They just don’t seem to stick for us.
Research conducted by Strava, a social network for athletes, shows that January 12 is the day New Year’s resolutions die — amazingly, just twelve days in. But is that really so surprising? Be honest with yourself; have you ever set a resolution only to give up on it after just a few days, a mere week, a month, or midway through the year? Of course you have; we all have done just that. In fact, I’ve been the heavyweight champion of the world at just this. Almost every year I start off motivated as all hell — disciplined and strong, and stay that way for a period of time. Some years I last a month or two, but I always succumb to the same thing, habituation, and the daily living and grinding of life take over, and the motivation subtly but insidiously wanes — day by day, inch by sad inch. The resolution before long doesn’t seem so vivid, and soon it isn’t even a goal. It’s a distant memory.
Why? Because, among other things, you have been programmed for self doubt since the first time you vowed you would do something and did not — and the older you get, the more that programming has become hardwired. But it doesn’t have to be that way at all — because, keeping with the analogy, you can introduce a much stronger program. I know this because I’ve done it for the past year. I’ll be brief.
On January 1, 2019, I set a resolution, and as I write this, a year later, I can say not just as an anecdote but with empirical facts, I have reached and maintained that resolution for the entire year. The resolution was to get as physically fit and I was in high school when I was an athlete — and there was a reason for this resolution I will get to very soon. I started 2019 at 185 pounds, and toward the tail end I have been at a steady 170. But the resolution wasn’t about weight; I wanted to be as fit at 47 as I was at 17. So I ran. I ran at 4 am in the pitch black, I ran in the snow-covered trails of Frisco, Colorado in sub-zero weather at 10,000 feet altitude. I did sprints on the track until I made myself sick. And on Friday, September 13, 2019, at 47 years old I ran a timed mile at 5 minutes and 56 seconds. This was the first time I had run a sub-six minute mile since high school. I had hit my resolution 9 months and 13 days into the year.
Here is what I learned. It is simple — there doesn’t need to be a complex process to get there. In fact, we make it too complex. If you research “how to keep a New Year’s Resolution,” you can find hundreds of articles with 8 to 12 bullet point tactics, often very similar to one another, like “keep a daily journal” or “set specific, measurable goals,” etc. I tried these. My doctorate research was on goal-setting; of course I tried these! They didn’t work. Because I shouldn’t have needed them. What I needed was a WHY. And maybe one more piece of internal messaging. Two things is all.
The only way to guarantee failure is to quit. Say that every single day, for 365 days, each morning in the mirror. Because it is true. But it will also remind you of the simple depth behind the truth. There is your goal. No one can take it from you but you. Take. Fucking. Ownership. Own your resolution. The only thing that can guarantee failure is you giving up. Here’s an example that plays out, likely, hundreds of thousands of times a year. Super Bowl Sunday. Per research here 45% of people make New Year’s Resolutions to lose weight. But I promise you that on Super Bowl Sunday there is a lot of hedging already going on. “It’s just a day — I can give myself this one excuse” is what we say in our minds. But how in any reality is that a real reason to abjectly jettison your goal? The Super Bowl has nothing to do with you. You are already guaranteeing failure by quitting that day. By giving in to an external force that doesn’t even exist — you are allowing something external to take over YOUR goal. And if you do it then, you will do it again. That is the opposite of taking ownership. So I will repeat it one more time, which is pretty easy for me to do since I have to myself almost 365 times: The only way to guarantee failure is for you to quit.
You need a “why,” and that “why” better be about YOU. I wish I could express this in powerful enough words, but if I can’t I can at least borrow them, here. Read the words written by Harry Browne to his daughter in 1966. No one owes you anything. Here is what is amazing to me. I didn't read that article last year. I read it two days ago. But that was always my WHY this year. I woke up on January 1, 2019, and it was a weird day that followed a weird year of being disappointed with myself toward the end of the year. That morning I was hit by the same realization that Browne wrote about with so much love, and so much more eloquently in 1966 to his daughter. No one owed me a resolution, nor was it ever going happen until I learned the simplest of truths, that I owed it to myself. My why, that only I could do what I vowed I would, and that only I could sabotage it, was the resolution. Fitness was not even the real goal, it was just a way to measure it. I really needed to prove to myself that life couldn't dictate my outcomes. It was all up to me, and I knew that once I committed. I had good days, I had bad days, I had a number of overstraining injuries. But I never lost sight of the fact that it was always on me. And its always will be.
One final thought on all of this. Which again is about you. And I think it can be beautiful — which incidentally means your resolution can be beautiful.
Your life is your message to the world and you really do control that. Make it an inspiring one!
I wish you all the very best year in 2020,
Mike Spivey