John-Paul Flintoff on New Year's Resolutions

Are you thinking of making a new year's resolution? If so, why not consider making a late-December resolution instead?

The only good reason for waiting till the beginning of January is to make a resolution that is specific to January: such as (perhaps) resolving to eat and drink more modestly after a Christmas of excess. If your resolution is not specific to January, why wait?

When it comes to the really big issues facing us, there can be no time like the present to do what is most important to us.

That's partly because we never know how long we have got. In the months before he died, last week, Christopher Hitchens wrote and stated frequently that the inevitability of death focuses the mind on what is important. (Steve Jobs, who died not long before him, did the same.) Buddhists teach us to consider that every day may be our last, and to base our conduct on that insight – while also bearing in mind the contradictory idea that we may live for quite a long time. If we hold both those ideas in mind at once, we learn to plan for the long term, which is important, but also to focus on what we can do now.

Big issues are too big to fix all at once. The only way to tackle them is to break them down into small steps. Every great achievement of the past was completed that way: building Stonehenge, painting the Mona Lisa, landing on the moon.

So: don't wait till January but start working on those small steps at once. Because if you can't manage a small step in the next day or so, what makes you think you ever will?

John-Paul Flintoff is a faculty member of The School of Life and will be teaching our How to Make a Difference class on Saturday 14^th January 2012, for more information and to book tickets please click here.

Comments

[Jez]

I agree with the premise in this piece. I started practising in November what I would otherwise have called my new year resolutions.

Every day is valuable to me so it seemed sensible to start when I had the ideas instead of waiting for the traditional time for trying new practices.