The New Year has begun and we are almost 3 months through it already! A common topic introduced as the clock slowly turns to midnight on New Year’s Eve every year is The New Year's Resolution. Think back to that night two months ago. Have you kept your goals in mind throughout the weeks since? Have you accomplished or even partaken in the action of trying to accomplish your goal? Do you even remember what your goal was? For me, as well as thousands of other people around the world, I have not even thought to begin that goal I set one night months ago when I was hardly busy and not in such a tiring stage of my life. That though is no excuse.

You may be thinking things like “no one ever keeps their resolution” or “what a waste of time” or even “yeah I’ll never accomplish that goal once again that I set 10 years and still haven’t started”. A New Year’s Resolution doesn’t have to be some huge spectacular life altering goal. It can be as simple as remembering to do your homework on time or wear your retainer. I know I have even have trouble with those simplest of tasks. My goal for this year wasn’t anything to fancy. It wasn’t anything out of reach or something I felt I was incapable of doing. I think of this goal all the time, yet I’ve barely taken the time to plan the time to actually work towards fulfilling this goal.

When setting a long term goal, like a New Year’s Resolution, that you have a year or longer to accomplish a person tends to get lazy about it. You can either wait till the last week of those 365 days to try and hurry up and actually accomplish something for once, or you can slowly work towards the goal. Even if it’s small gestures like doing it once or twice a week. Setting small goals and progressing through them is one way to take action and make sure you are able to reach the main goal in the end. For example, if you’re trying to run more than start out by doing it once a week as opposed to everyday. You’ll get burnt out quickly and end up quitting before you’ve even begun.

It’s not about accomplishing something ridiculously fast with no appreciation for what you just accomplished, it’s about enjoying the journey and the time you spent putting into reaching your goals. If you don’t happen to succeed with your goal by the end of the year due to lack of care and preparation for it, then you have no reason to be upset with yourself for not accomplishing it. That was your own fault. Nothing is impossible, it’s the small steps that count. You can’t just wake up one day try and run a marathon then get discouraged when you can’t do it. That isn’t how it works, unfortunately. In order to accomplish the goal you must first accomplish the sub-goals to get there. You can run that marathon, you can get that degree, but only after you run that 5K or you finish that first year of school.

The word can’t doesn’t exist, it’s a word made up by those who don’t want to try any longer and want to blame it on their minds or abilities. By that logic you’re still saying you can’t do that task because you just don’t want to. You can do whatever you want, but in the end it was you who said you couldn’t do it. Were only 2 months into the year. You still have time to get out there and improve, or finish, one thing in your life. This is just a reminder before it gets to the last week of December when everyone else is setting their new goals for next year and you still didn’t accomplish yours.