Resolutions vs Goals

I was chatting with a friend who asked me what my New Year’s resolutions were. I replied that I don’t have resolutions - I have goals.

My Goals are set using data that I already know about myself. They might sound very similar to resolutions but there is a key difference. I’ll illustrate with an example.

A classic New Year’s resolution is wanting to get healthy. Most people have a general idea of how to do that - by eating right, exercising, and getting more sleep. My New Years' goal is very similar. I just add some numbers to it - eat carbs less than 5 times a month, run 10 miles a week, increase total push-ups every week, and sleep at least 7 hours every night.

I have 5-10 years' worth of data about myself in Druck. It’s easy to look at what a good year, month, week, and day look like. These insights provide me the numbers I need to set specific goals to try and make the incoming new year better than the outgoing one. I can’t control everything in the world. Shit happens, as we all know too well. But I’ve found that setting specific goals with numbers to back them, gives me a higher chance of attaining them, rather than just saying "I’d like to do such and such", which never seemed to quite stick for me.