Making and Keeping Your New Year's Resolution

As we enter the new year, many of us are deciding whether we make and how we keep our New Year’s Resolutions. As we aim to exercise more, eat better, save more, or spend more time with loved ones, we are continuing a tradition that is over 4000 years old. It is believed that the Babylonians started the practice to remain in good favor with their gods as part of their yearly 12-day Festival of Akitu.  Babylonian resolutions typically involved returning borrowed objects or repaying debts. Further, the Romans began each year by making promises to the god Janus who had two faces – one that could look backward and the other forward, signifying the end of one year and the beginning of another. In 153 BC, the Romans declared that January 1st would signal the start of the New Year, naming the month after Janus.

Four thousand years later, more than 58% of us continue the tradition by making New Year’s Resolutions, though now the purpose is more for the sake of self-improvement than pleasing the gods. We all make our resolutions with good intentions, yet only one-third of us don’t make it past the end of January and only 9% of us actually maintain our resolution throughout the year. This is due to the fact that we often make unrealistic resolutions, we lose focus over the course of the months and we don’t create the new habits we need in order to maintain our resolutions. The New York Times published great advice for setting and keeping New Year’s resolutions and Tech Crunch published an article about the top apps to help you track your progress.

As for me, my resolution is to stay in better contact with my friends, family, former colleagues and contacts near and far in 2018. Now that I’ve spent the better part of my professional career in three world-class cities – San Francisco, Seattle, and now New York, I recently realized that I have collected a large number of friends and colleagues, not only on both coasts but everywhere between and around the world. I’ve found that over the years of focusing on high-intensity jobs with large responsibility and raising two young kids, keeping in touch with people has been challenging. What better place than LinkedIn to proclaim my intentions, where I’m connected to so many fantastic current and former colleagues, friends and family. I invite you to help me keep my resolution – let me know how you are, when you might be in New York next and what is going in in your life. I will be among the 9% who succeed in keeping my New Year’s Resolution in 2018, and I challenge you to do the same!