By: Jesse Stewart, Staff Writer
One of the greatest days of my life came when I was quite young, sitting in science class. I was always a good student, but had trouble when assignments grew into multi-day or multi-week endeavors. The stress of a science fair project felt like an elephant sitting on my chest: daunting and impossible to know where to start. The Dumbos of my youth were gone, and this new pachyderm packed quite a punch.
As a child you assume that the world is either entirely orderly or pure chaos; growing older and understanding that neither is particularly true can be a demoralizing and paralyzing recognition of the challenging mountain each of us must climb. But the day I first learned about the relationship between potential and kinetic energy, in the form of Newton's First Law of Motion, I saw the peaks before me shift into ramps so that I may fly, if I flapped my wings consistently (I also had big ears, which helped).
Newton’s First Law of Motion describes ‘inertia’, the natural law that states an object in motion tends to stay in motion and an object at rest tends to stay at rest, also known as ‘momentum.’ The morning I learned that such a succinct force governed the universe, and therefore my little life as well, was the day I learned how to transform my mountains into ramps: pebble by pebble, and feeding the elephant only one peanut at a time.
One of the most annoying tidbits passed around every Christmastime is the that gym memberships increase by about twelve percent each January, as the population attempts their “New Year’s Resolutions,” with these figures dropping off only a month or two later. I was a pedantic child, who grew up to be a very pedantic man, so at literally no point have I felt anything other than dumbfounded shock that people assign self-improvement to something so arbitrary as the calendar, probably lecturing some adults at a Christmas party, “Santa Claus is definitely real, the Easter Bunny is my best friend, and the TV says that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction…but I wasn’t born yesterday: you dorks are lazy.”
Losing weight, reading more books, and pursuing any form of self-improvement is an obviously noble goal…but what happens if you fail? How quickly and how easily will you revert to confirmation bias when you bite off more than you can chew, doze off before you finish the chapter, or grow weary of the pursuit by St. Patrick’s Day? No one will punish you for making, breaking, and then ignoring a promise you made to yourself, but to then reach another New Years and again lie, “This is my time, this is the year I do it” is an exercise in insanity, is it not?
One of the root words of ‘Resolution’ is ‘resolve,’ which is a very strong and misunderstood concept; the reason that so many New Year’s Resolutions fail is that the consequences of breaking a promise to oneself are not only unconsidered but never drafted in the first place.
When seeking self-improvement, the first rule is to not assign it to something as arbitrary as the date. Start today. Want to get into shape? Give yourself one task, like doing a single sit-up; tease the elephant a single peanut and you’ll be surprised how fast that formidable foe can move. But drop a tiny mouse behind it, give yourself a small ultimatum: if you miss a day of pursuing your resolution, you’re not allowed to indulge in your favorite food or drink for a week.
The next day, increase your measurement by one: two sit-ups. The elephant might struggle to eat two peanuts at once, but it certainly won’t want to be caught by the slightly bigger mouse you drop behind it. You will climb your mountain, because you’re only focusing on one pebble at a time and maintaining a rhythm that will enforce itself; by focusing on the momentum carried toward a goal rather than the speed, you will develop a habit, which is infinitely less stupid than a ‘resolution’ as it has a rather compelling enforcement mechanism: your happiness and state of mind.
If you start with a single sit-up and increase this action by one with each new square on your calendar, rather than each new page, in less than three years you and your elephant will be a couple of lunatics who can do a thousand sit-ups in a day and feel unhappy about missing a workout. The Grand Canyon didn’t ‘resolve’ to carve itself into something so spectacular, it did it drop-by-drop over the course of time, with the threat of not reaching the ocean as motivation.
The reason why it can be so difficult to grow up, mature, and improve is because we request results all at once and activate our attempts so abruptly. You cannot simply install an improvement into your life, it must be adopted, grown, and maintained.
Pick any improvement you seek and break it into 1% increments: in just over three months you’ll achieve it. It’s exactly that easy and exactly that difficult. But as you achieve momentum, it will be quite difficult for you to slow down or stop; setting a slow but steady rhythm of advancement will slowly transform your resolution into a trait, one which will be hard to peel from your identity. It took a long time to build Rome and a long time for it to fade; anything built brick-by-brick cannot decay any other way.
New Year’s Resolutions so often fail or fade because they exist without balance: the hope of improvement must be propelled by a consequence of failure. Never again wait until the Januarys of your life to address the elephant in your room. It’s not sitting on your chest, it’s nudging you. Scratch it behind the ears, hop on the saddle, scale the mountains before you, and prance over the edge. No matter how heavy it seems, you have my (and Newton’s) word: anything with a running start can fly.