"There's Aways Next Year": Why We Need to Shift from Making Resolutions to Making Habits!

"There's always next year."

These four little words breathe life into nearly every sports fan on an annual basis. As a lifelong FSU Seminoles fan (and alumnus), I admit that I have clung hard to these words over the past several years as nearly every impressive record for the FSU football team was broken (and not in the good way, sigh). In this way, hope remains despite present despair (unless you, like me are also a Cleveland Browns fan, in which case, despair constantly threatens to take over!)

Part of what adds oxygen to the fire of such hope is a discrete change that can be noted as the key to what will make next year "different." For football fans, it might be the hiring of a new coach, or coordinator, or the promise of a new five-star recruit, etc. Such material transformations allow one to "justify" their hope in "next year" because it provides seeming evidence that one's hope is well placed.

Albert Einstein is credited with having said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and yet expecting different results. So, athletic directors will hire the new coach or fire the old one in order to stress that they are doing things differently in the expectation of better days ahead.

However, often allowing our hope to be grounded in such material transformations can cover over the fact that nothing essential has changed. For example, a new coach only matters if she or he can bring a new culture to a team. A new player only makes a difference if she or he is allowed to make their own contributions to the team, rather than simply being another version of the player that they have replaced.

True transformation is not achieved in each external ways--even if those ways cost as much as the recent coaching change at FSU (a $17 million buy out! - talk about a soft landing to getting fired, sheesh).

Rather, true transformation requires a different way of being oneself.

This basic realization is key to why some coaches seem to have success wherever they are. They understand that it is not about them, but about the selves that they invite others to become. They create a new normal by making habitual a new way of moving forward.

On this first day of a new year, and a new decade, I am struck by the fact that every year millions of people make "new year's resolutions" such that this year will be better than the last year. Yet, making such resolutions is similar to hiring a new coach, they are external manifestations of desire and hope, but not worth very much unless they are the impetus to an internal transformation.

Yet . . .

• Buying a gym membership won't get one in shape.
• Making a resolution won't change one's life.
• Continuing to hope won't bring one's hopes to fruition.

What is required is not an external marker for change, but a tireless commitment to enacting such change in practice. Rather than making resolutions, we must make habits. When something becomes a habit, it becomes normal such that we no longer have to "work at it" with such intensity. Instead, our new normal identity is comprised of such work because it has simply become who we are.

This basic philosophical realization is actually quite old. It is an Aristotelian idea.

Aristotle rightly realized that one does not become virtuous by doing the right thing in a specific case. Instead, you become virtuous by becoming the person who habitually, without significant effort, does what is right. The goal is not the external act, but the internal identity.

In simple terms, Aristotle's point is that . . .

You are who you are becoming!

As such, you can't wait to be who you hope to become.

In this way, habits are seductive because they work best when they go unnoticed. If I still have to make myself get out of bed every morning to go to the gym, then it is not yet a habit. I am still the person who really doesn't want to go, but forces himself to do so because I am still driven by hope, rather than habit. When I wake up at 5am to go to the gym even on days when the gym is closed, then it is not that I am hoping to become someone who is healthy, it is because the healthy habit now defines who I am.

In football, it is often said that a team has to "get used to winning" in order to have the right mindset. What that means is that the team has to make a habit of winning and expecting to win. This expectation doesn't excuse complacency or arrogance, but instead resists the temptation to give up when things get difficult.

Sometimes new coaches are needed (bye Willie Taggart!).

Sometimes resolutions are important first steps.

But, what Aristotle and every long-time winning coach understands is that unless we move from resolutions to habits, we will never become the people that we desire to be. When we settle or hope, rather than working for habit, we excuse our failure by falling back on the escape hatch: "There's always next year."

Now, look, without hope, habit has no direction. As such, we should always remember that creating habits is hard and failure is frequent. "There's always next year," can sometimes be the reminder that life is longer than our current situation. Tomorrow remains because hope continues.

However, we must strive to avoid becoming intoxicated with the promise that it will eventually get better and instead day in and day out do the work required to make things better here and now such that tomorrow is the way that we hope it will be.

One of my favorite songs is by Donovan Woods and it is simply titled "Next Year." It is worth a few minutes to take a listen.

In the song, Woods tells several stories about how "We'll do it next year" becomes the excuse for living into a future where regret dominates one's identity.

• Rather than letting yourself think that you will do it next year, ask yourself what can be done today?
• Instead of throwing up your hands in resignation while saying "there's always next year," remind yourself that next year is likely to look exactly like this year if we don't make significant changes here and now.

So, make resolutions, but don't stop with them. Tomorrow begins today.

Go FSU!

And, to my fellow Browns fans . . . There's always next year!

See also some of my other recent articles:

The Job of a Lifetime: The True Task of "Real World Experience"

Exam Week: Lessons for the Workplace

Living Under the Influence: On Being Marked By Others

An Existentialist's Guide to Investing

What Moves You?: On Direction, Orientation, and Being Without Limit

Finding Pauses in the Music of Life

Leadership as a Way of Life

Loving Truth More than Being Right

Be What You Desire: Leading Through Vulnerable Example