Did You Break Your Resolution Already?
If you’re one of the roughly 150 million Americans who made a New Year’s resolution this year, then today is a big day. Why? Because today, January 17, is how long the average New Year’s resolution lasts — just past the midway point of month one. We’re fairly pathetic, really, in keeping our New Year’s resolutions. In fact, if you gave up already, you’re hardly alone — over 80% of us fail to achieve our New Year’s resolutions.
It’s somewhat understandable though. Resolutions are meant to be big things. Goals or behavior changes that are not easily accomplished. If they were, we wouldn’t need to “resolve” to do them, declaring them publicly to our family and friends. Another characteristic that makes resolutions hard to achieve is they tend to be long-term. You can’t just check them off your to-do list in a day.
As you might expect, (particularly if, like me, you over-indulged during the holidays), the most popular resolutions deal with weight loss. Of the top 10 New Year’s Resolutions, the first three are all related to losing weight:
Diet or eat healthier (71 percent)
Exercise more (65 percent)
Lose weight (54 percent)
Many people probably named all three of those resolutions since they’re inter-related.
As someone who recently turned 50, I consider myself in reasonably decent shape for someone my age. A friend asked me recently, “what’s your secret?” To which I replied, “a scale.” As the venerable venture capitalist John Doerr preaches, you have to Measure What Matters. How can you lose weight if you don’t weigh yourself every day?
Nobody makes a resolution to lose one pound. But you can’t lose 20 pounds over night either. Maintaining your resolve until the 20 pounds are lost is hard. But anyone can have willpower for a day. If you measure your progress on a daily interval, and adjust your behavior in that day accordingly to eat less or exercise more, and then do that in consecutive days in a row, hitting weekly or monthly milestones, then achieving your goal is much more attainable. You’ve broken your large goal into several smaller goals.
Obviously, the same is true in business. Big goals — the ones that matter to your business, like revenue growth, or major product releases — are hard to achieve. They can’t be done overnight. They require concerted time and effort. Oftentimes, you may have no idea how to actually achieve a goal you’ve set. But if you break it up into mini-goals, you’re on your way.
An alternative approach to New Year’s Resolutions, apparently espoused by Melinda Gates among others, is to avoid setting yourself up for disappointment by selecting a New Year’s word, such as “Clarity” or “Grace”, rather than an actual goal. With all due respect, that’s bullshit. If a resolution is just a word, a hope, nothing more than a self-gratifying sentimental direction, how do you know if you’ve achieved it? That’s not to say that mindset and motivation aren’t important — just that they need to be paired with metrics.
So during this time of 2020 business planning, set your quarterly and annual goals, or “Objectives,” and establish your milestones and metrics, or “Key Results” and figuratively “weigh” yourself every day. By breaking big goals into tangible, bite-size, near-term sub-goals, you may just hold that resolution longer than today.