New Year resolutions - hacking your failure
Taking advantage of last hours of this year end, it's little time to look at New Year resolutions story...
Today, at design phase, we are full of faith that they are like SMART goals. Reachable.
That is fine attitude, although closer to wishful thinking that counting chances for success. On the left hand, we have our skills, determination and projected income, on the right hand, we have future, unknown, with little knowledge about it.
Are these facts should discourage us to define and execute New Year resolutions? Absolutely not!
But how to success and reach next end of the year with desired outcome? Little hacking will help.
Consider your future as set of doors, that will open in specific time, but not sooner or later, like opportunity. To go though them you need to have key - experience and bravery to open it.
What if you could do this whenever you want? What if you could have skeleton key, or even better, set of skeleton keys?
Going strict to the point:
1. Awareness - you may think, that knowledge is everything you need. First skeleton key is about hacking that statement into detailed conditions: more important is to rather have knowledge about conditions HOW and WHEN to use gathered knowledge, than having desire to collect all available knowledge. Such approach is simply mindset that even you already occupy peak of Mount Stupid, you may prepare to fall down into Valley of Despair, as having trouble is matter of WHEN rather IF. First skeleton key is the same as awareness of imminent failure, and preparation to recover from it. If you are programmed to success, but not prepared for failure, you have good view from Mount Stupid.
Workout failure, and proceed with plan to recover from it, will give you strength to approach to your goal with baby steps.
See all, on one picture:
2. Behavior - this is easy, all New Year resolutions are about changing behavior. We are an experts with trial and errors. We are feeling strong and motivated on January, then realize cost/effort and ROI along the year. Simply energy economics is baseline for second skeleton key - behavior model, perfectly defined and described by B.J. Fogg. Simply, be ready to dynamically play both: motivation and ability to keep yourself in enabling zone. Tip here is where your motivation is dropping, take advantage of your energy cost reduction with new habit, and realize your skills has increased and enable you to reach the same goal, easier, meaning with less cost.
When have crisis with your behavior change project, remember that you need all three: motivation, ability and prompt at the same moment. This will work for long run, when you will put all of these as minimal, as required to meet "Action line". Everything more is simply waste of resources. If you need to have example to illustrate that idea, consider how opportunity makes a thief. All about, you have here on this picture:
3. Failure factors are the last knowledge you may think about. In contrary, these are crucial for your success. They are composing third skeleton key. Mostly we are living in high complex world of behavior and information environments, where people make decisions based on information context we can't learn. In such conditions, it is easy to blame someone else for team failure. It is also source for ours excuses of failure of New Year resolution. Even we know that we are ultimately responsible for success or failure, we still transferring that reasons to even unrealistic bad luck. This is short and sad story of our New Year resolution failure, that most cases we turn into success of maintain "status quo" in challenging world we don't understand. To avoid excuses approach, we need to look closely to failure reasons.
Third skeleton key is about learning from failures. Our failures. It is about identification of internal (our) and external (environmental) failure factors. Some great work in that field were provided by aviation industry. Here you have some additional analysis of factors, that may ruin your plans alone, but never exist as single factor. If you would like to succeed, find the way to identify as many as you can for your case, then counter act them. All you need, you have on this picture:
Now you are well equipped to set your course to success. Be an 2020 phoenix, always recover from failure and reach your plans.
Good luck!