Failed Your Japanese New Year’s Resolution Already?
It’s that time of year again where hope is in the air. New Year’s? Nope. 2 weeks after New Years. In the air? Yes, because it is definitely not in you anymore. This is the time when most New Year’s resolutions reach their swift and untimely demise (if they’ve even come this far). Welcome to New Year’s resolution fail day. Or just fail day.
I know you’ve read all of the never-ending supply of New Year’s resolution motivation and action articles. How to actually make it work. How to create an effective New Year’s strategy. Stop. Enough.
Then you’ve read all the anti-New Year’s resolution sentiment. Why wait until New Year’s? Make every day your new year. You don’t need some special day to change your life. Stop. Enough.
It doesn’t matter whether you make a resolution to do something on a special day or any day. It suffers from one major flaw:
You aren’t doing it yet.
People who talk about their New Year’s resolution days or weeks before New Year’s often say they are waiting for New Year’s to start. People who decide that tomorrow or even today will be the day that they start something. They still aren’t doing that thing they want to start.
People are doing the number one thing that kills all self-progress:
Waiting.
Planning a resolution that will take place any time in the future is already one step closer to failure.
No New Year’s day. No any day can be New Year’s Day.
What do you want?
A New Year’s moment.
But lets drop the unnecessary New Year’s language.
You want a New You Moment.
Resolutions fail because they are future moments. Regardless if that future moment starts next week, tomorrow, or even later day, it is not now. And people live in the now.
Why do people continually do actions they regret? Why do they take the pleasurable moment despite the known repercussions?
Because while you can visualize the future, the now is what is real and what matters most to you.
Creating a New You Moment
In deciding you want to change something, if you want to give it the best chance of success, you need to start it the exact moment you decide it. Don’t even take a bathroom break.
Right now you want this. Right now you have the motivation and inspiration. Right now is giving you the highest probability in the world that you are going to start this. Every moment after now, your chances of doing it will slowly decline.
The fast track to habits
The only way to create a habit is by starting that habit. Think about it all you want, but until you do it, it isn’t on the the small journey it takes to be a firmly engrained part of you.
It doesn’t matter how small your start is. Want to finish RTK? Start by doing 5 cards. Want to write in more Japanese? Open up Twitter right now and tweet something. Want to improve your listening ability? Watch something!
This new start can be as small as you want it to be. I know, sometimes it can be hard to start a goal right this second. It doesn’t matter how big the goal is. Start with the first tiny step. Until you take the first physical action (not just a thought) towards accomplishing it, a goal is nothing more than a fleeting daydream.
Fail. Fail again. Fail some more.
Your New You Moments will fail. Decided to add 20 new J-E sentences a day until You get to 1000? You started right now. Tomorrow, something came up. You’ve already failed. Now what?
So what? Start again. Right now.
Enough New You Moments will overcome any number of failures. You will fail. You have to fail. You need to fail. Every failure makes your next decisive moment slightly stronger.
Success isn’t about something special happening. It’s about just not failing one more time.
Finish reading this article and decided on something you want to do right now? Do it. Now!
Founder of Jalup. iOS Software Engineer. Former attorney, translator, and interpreter. Still watching 月曜から夜ふかし weekly since 2013.
“Don’t even take a bathroom break.”
もう我慢できない！
http://www.unicharm.co.jp/lifree/index.html
？？？ なぜリンクされたのこれ？
彼の独特なユーモアってやつかな？
それを使うと我慢出来なくても、勉強続ける。
あざっすｗｗｗ
我慢しろ！
トレイにも勉強ができるでしょうか
だから、トレイに行ってもいいけど、休んじゃダメ！
ナイスアイディ！トイレ中でも勉強を欠かさない。
片手の挑戦！どっちも綺麗に出来るかな？^^
We have two siblings at our daycare who whenever it’s time to clean up, they claim they have to go to the bathroom.
That is mankind’s escape route. All of the sudden your bladder will act up when you need to do some in order to give you an excuse. Just bring the Japanese with you in the bathroom to counteract it.
Good tip, that’s what I started doing! I read manga that way I can do even more!
Interesting concept of the toilet being an escape excuse.
Plaster the walls with kanji?
Great post. Creating a new habit is hard. Two things that really helped me:
– Starting really really small. When I started working on my Kanji with Heisig, I started with only one card per day for the first few days. Why? Because just to set up everything in order to be able to practice that first card (Finding a deck, importing in anki, starting Anki, having a pen and paper ready, etc…) was not easy at the beginning. After a few days like that, I practiced more and more cards everyday.
– Don’t try to learn more than one habit at a time. Start only one new habit, focus on it, after a few weeks when you start having the hang of it, you can start thinking about another habit.
Trying to change too fast is a recipe for failure. It’s much better to focus on having, everyday, many small wins.
Agreed. Creating one habit is already a challenge. Trying to create multiple habits at once returns a higher failure rate.
I purposely avoided such errors by starting my new years resolution December 17th. And then actually doing it. Small steps at a time. Still going strong!
I like to hear this. Keep the progress going smoothly!
I really wanted to do a new years resolution for my Japanese. When I did one for switching to a J-J dictionary, it worked so well! But, I just couldn’t think of a resolution. I guess it’s not something you can force either.
You are probably busy working on your regular goals which is why you don’t need a special day to tell you to set goals.