Screw Resolutions – This Year, Just Go For It

This year, I'm challenging us to realize that the majority of our resolutions don't need 365 days of work. Most of them just need one day - one hour, even just one blazing moment - of courage.

By Heidi Priebe

Updated 9 years ago, January 3, 2016

Every Year we make a trite and tired list of New Year’s Resolutions.

Lose weight. Change careers. Find love. Save money.

And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with making the commitment to better ourselves. Some years we really do make those steady, consistent changes that bring us to better places. But we know all too well what usually happens to our New Years Resolutions.

They fall by the wayside by February 1st. The slow, consistent alterations we planned to make turn out to be too much of an inconvenience to our day-to-day routine, and so we let them slide. We keep on as we’ve been, until the next New Year’s when the whole process repeats itself.

This year, I’m challenging us all to break the cycle.

This year, I’m challenging us to realize that the majority of our resolutions don’t need 365 days of work. Most of them just need one day – one hour, even just one blazing moment – of courage.

The sixty seconds that it takes to quit the job that’s wrong for you. The ten seconds it takes you to confess your feelings to that person you want to spend your year with. The moment it takes you to click ‘purchase’ on those plane tickets you’ve been meaning to buy for so long.

We like to think that it takes a full year for things to turn around but the truth is, it very often doesn’t. So many of our greatest changes occur within the span of a millisecond – even if all that millisecond brings is the firm, indisputable decision that you cannot go on this way any longer.

So this year, I hope that you just go for it – whatever ‘it’ happens to be.

Your dream job. Your dream person. Your dream lifestyle. I hope this is the year that you stop making excuses for yourself and finally decide that what you want is worth putting it all on the line for.

I hope this is the year when you cast aside the bullshit. When you stop telling yourself that you can’t have what you want because you aren’t smart enough or rich enough or thin enough or lucky enough. I hope it’s the year you refuse your limitations and decide that arbitrary rules you have always so diligently followed don’t have to be adhered to. Not this year. Not for you.

I hope by the time we count down to midnight on December 31st, 2016, you look back on the year and cannot believe how much has changed. How much is different. How much your life turned around because of the choices you made this year.

Not because you meditated four times a week or wrote your grocery budget down in a notebook, but because you tried. Because you battened down the hatches, cancelled your pity parade, honed in on exactly what you wanted and took actual, concrete action on it. No matter how scary it was. No matter how insecure you felt along the way. No matter how many times you had to fail along the way to achieving it. I hope that you never stop trying this year, because you owe that much to yourself.

You owe it to yourself to pursue the life you’d be living if fear were not a factor.

So in 2016, I hope that you just go for whatever it is that this post made you think of. That thing you’re scared to acknowledge, but that you know is there. Because that thing is what you truly want.

That is the thing you’ve let too many years stand in the way of.

But not this year. Not for you.

2016 is the year where you finally fucking go for it. And no year is going to ever be the same after that.