Forget Resolutions. In 2025 I’m Getting an A

Forget Resolutions. In 2025 I’m Getting an A

I react to the arrival of a new year like a Pavlovian dog. I hear “new year” and think “time for resolutions.” Knowing I’ve been there before, with little to show for it, doesn’t dissuade me from the impulse at the start of each year to craft some commitments that I’m convinced will make me a better/smarter/healthier person in the 12 months that lie ahead.

But this year I am taking a different approach. Instead of looking forward, I’m transporting myself to the end of the year and then looking back.

My inspiration comes from Benjamin Zander and Rosamund Stone Zander in their essential book, first published in 2000, The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life.

Giving an A is one of the empowering practices the Zanders recommend.

The idea emerged from Benjamin Zander’s experience teaching a class on the art of musical performance to a group of expert young musicians. He observed that these talented graduate students arrived in his classroom anxious about what they had to do to get a good grade.

He knew this anxiety was going to hold them back from doing their best work. So he tried a bold experiment. He announced that each of them was going to get an A in his class—with one condition. To earn the A, they had to write a letter to him, dated the end of the semester, that explained what they had done to earn this exceptional grade. The letter had to be written in past tense and couldn’t include any phrases like “I hope” or “I will.” He urged them to focus on the person they had become by the end of the class.

The assignment was transformative. It allowed students to envision the future and think about what they had done to deserve a top grade. And in the class they played their hearts out.

I wondered. If it worked for them, why couldn’t it work for me? I decided to give it a try, to give myself an A, and write a letter to myself explaining how I earned it.

I opened a blank sheet on my computer and wrote “December 31, 2025” at the top. The first paragraph was a breeze. “Wow. You really did it. You earned an A.” ?The sentences that followed were a lot tougher to write

Still, I persisted, and now I have a letter with a vision I aspire to live into.

To make sure the letter doesn’t collect dust on my desk, I wrote that in 2025 I carved out time every month to ask myself five questions:

1. Am I on track with the actions that are worthy of an exceptional grade?
2. Am I having fun?
3. What have I learned?
4. What new questions are emerging for me?
5. How is the work I am doing delivering benefit to others?

Completing this assignment, I learned a few lessons worth sharing.

It’s very powerful to be required to write in past tense. It provokes a deeper level of reflection than what is typically needed for writing a list of resolutions. You have to imagine a future reality, not just identify a series of actions that don’t necessarily have a clear and cohesive endpoint.

Imagining myself living into a future reality led me to an even more challenging question: Why? I envisioned what I wanted to accomplish, but that vision felt empty. I realized I had missed a step. I hadn’t interrogated why I wanted to move in the direction I described. So I asked myself: How would getting that A benefit me? How would it benefit others? My work largely rests on helping others develop their own potential to lead positive change in the world. I was forced to ask myself whether getting the A for the reasons I cited really supported this work. Answering that question required further reflection and revisions.

I ended up writing some bullet points that looked very much like a list of resolutions. However, what distinguished these bullets was that they weren’t aspirations or pledges I was making to myself; they were accomplishments (all written in past tense) that explained what I had done to earn this grade. It felt like a deeper level of commitment.

Finally, I realized that the only way I can truly earn an A for myself is to give As to others. That act is at the core of mastering the art of possibility. As the Zanders explain, “An A can be given to anyone in any walk of life – to a waitress, to your employer, to your mother-in-law, to the members of the opposite team, to the other drivers in traffic. When you give an A, you find yourself speaking to people not from a place of measuring how they stack up against your standards, but from a place of respect that gives them room to realize themselves.”

When you put it that way, I think giving more As in 2025 seems like a resolution worth making.