Practical Tao

It is currently October. Some may think this article is way too early, but my local store is already selling Christmas wreaths. A few people may already have their new years resolution lined up. Come December 31st, most people will. Come January 30th, most people will have quit. There’s a number of articles out there that will tell you that you need a purpose behind your resolutions or someone to hold you accountable. While that may slightly help, I believe they serve as nothing more than

Why a year? We have a convention to make resolutions for a year. You may say “This year, I will exercise.” Well, what about the year after that? No one makes resolutions every decade for ten years and no one makes resolutions every month for a month. Now, the reasons for this don’t concern us as we are concerned with practicality here. So practically, the resolution we make is generally intended for a lifetime. No one thinks to themselves “In 2026, I will exercise, then in 2027, I will stop exercising.” But, if you tell yourself this every year, then you never stop exercising! The issue is, most people won’t even make it past the first month. Committing to something for a year is quite difficult. I mean, let’s say you are trying to quit alcohol. On day 1, you will tell yourself you have 364 days remaining, on day 2, 363. Even if you somehow make it 30 days, you will tell yourself you have 335 days left. Given how hard the first 30 days were, this is extremely demoralizing.

Now another approach could be this: since people quit after 2 weeks, I’m going to make a resolution every 2 weeks: Jan 1, Jan 15, Feb 1, Feb 15, Mar 1, etc… This is not unintelligent, but this approach is unlikely to work as intended. That is because come Jan 15, you will want to change resolutions. You’re gonna tell yourself “I just did this for 2 weeks, I don’t want to do this again.”. Totally fair.

See, I find that the solution to breaking a bad habit or starting a new, positive habit is to accept that you will fail – tomorrow. Wake up on January 1st (or even tomorrow!) and tell yourself “Today, I will exercise, and that’s it! Tomorrow, I can go back to not exercising” or “Today I will eat healthy, and tomorrow, I’m gonna eat a Big Mac!”. Now, the trick is to really convince yourself that tomorrow, you will allow yourself to give up your resolution. You may think “I can’t fool myself that easily!”. Oh but you can! We are masters in procrastination. Don’t we always tell ourselves we’ll do something tomorrow and then a week, a month, perhaps even a year goes by before we take care of it, if at all? We need to use our skill in procrastination to procrastinate breaking our resolution! About to go to McDonalds and demolish a big mac? tell yourself you’ll go tomorrow. Really believe this. Forget a year, forget a month, forget a week, how about just one day? Today. Stick to your resolution just today, and tomorrow you can go crazy – drink, skip the workout, eat fast food, vape. You see, one of the curious properties of tomorrow is that it never comes.

Hope you enjoyed!