A Better New Year Resolution

No New Year Celebration is complete without a New Year Resolution but few New Year Resolutions are completed. In some sense this is an example of two typical human behaviors, one gift and one curse. We want to be better. So, we take a New Year Resolution. But we are lazy. So we fail. Year after year, millions of people resolve to be better. And they fail.

The inherent failure of your New Year Resolution is not because you are lazy. You know you might be a lot of time. But you are not lazy always. People with low self-discipline fail at their New Year Resolutions. So do people with high self-discipline. In fact, it does not matter how old you are, what your profession is or where you live. You are bound to fail at your New Year Resolution. Everyone fails. But everyone cannot be lazy all at once. This means there must be a fundamental flaw in New Year Resolutions.

In fact, there is. Let us consider a fairly common New Year Resolution, going to the gym. Simple, just go to the gym for the next 365 days. Thousands of people go to the gym everyday, you can do it too. So its Jan 1. You've taken the Gym membership and you are ready for some action. You set the alarm to 6 AM. You wake up, go to the gym, work out and come home. Great! You are on your way to having an awesome body. You keep on going. You are starting to have some body pain. Not much. You keep going. A week passes. Two weeks pass. You are feeling good. But one day you are not feeling like it. You decide to take a break. The next day there is that football game. The day after that, you are instructed to turn in some urgent work. You stop going. A week passes. Two week. Your 1 month gym membership expires. Very soon you forget you had a gym membership. Two months later one of your friend asks how your New Year Resolution is going and you can't even remember what it was.

Let me clear something upfront. You are not lazy. New Year Resolutions are hard. Because becoming better is hard. It takes sweat, work, dedication and discipline. So, when our internal motivation starts to decrease and the pains increase, we tend to switch off that alarm clock and go back to sleep.

So are we doomed? Not quite. There is a better way to take a New Year Resolution. It may not benefit you directly but eventually it will. Let us say instead of taking a Resolution to make yourself better, you resolve to make someone else better. That someone else could be anyone whom you genuinely care about. It could be your parents/ siblings/ spouse/ friend/ boyfriend/ girlfriend or a colleague. If you are a teacher, it could be a weak student. If you are a doctor, it could be a patient that needs your help. But it has to be someone about whom you really care about. Then you will take a New Year Resolution for them. At this point it is very essential that you know the person well enough to know that they will actually benefit from that resolution. Otherwise, you may end up wasting your time or worse, harming them. Once you decide upon your Resolution To Help, you may have to employ a variety of methods to make your chosen person actually complete your resolution. 

Let us say you see your friend struggling with his health. You decide to help your friend in going to the gym. Now, going to gym will remain difficult and painful for him. So you may have to use different ways to make him go to gym. You may have to motivate him, bribe him, threaten him or something else. Unless he starts going to the gym regularly on his own, you may have to keep irritating him if he does not. And even if he starts going, you cannot rest easy. You have to keep checking on him. It may be best to not let him know that you have taken a New Year Resolution to make him go to the gym. Because if he knows, he may ask you not to pester him and leave him alone. Therefore, it is all the more necessary to take a resolution about someone whom you really care about. You should know them well enough to know what is best for them, even if they don't realize it themselves.

This is better than taking resolutions about yourself because now you only have the motivation but no pain. It is very difficult not to shut down the alarm clock when you are feeling sleepy. It is your instinct for immediate relief that overpowers your long-term rational concern for a healthier life. With convincing the other person, there is only the second part. And if the person getting better is someone you care about, you will feel good about it. But not only that. This will actually make you a better person!

So, what is your Resolution to Help going to be?

Thanks to Shivaraj and Yamini for reading drafts of this post.