Make Your New Year's Resolution an Adventure

It’s a tale as old as time. You set a New Year’s Resolution, you get over your hangover on January 1st and work hard to succeed, by February you’ve given up.

What’s going on?

The biggest problem people have in reaching their New Year’s Resolutions is that they are looking at it the wrong way. They pick difficult goals that require white-knuckle willpower and drastic changes that don’t fit their life system.

There are proven and effective ways to hit the gym consistently, lose weight, quit smoking, and read more books. Whatever your typical New Year’s Resolution, there is a solution. But that’s not even the real problem.

The real problem is what you’re resolving to do in the first place.

What if, instead, you made a resolution that ignites your sense of adventure? What if you stopped trying to make yourself “better” and instead made your life better?

Those kinds of resolutions still deliver big, positive changes to your life — but they do it in the most exciting way possible.

With this approach, next year could be the best one so far.

Thinking Like Indiana Jones

Adventure doesn’t have to mean roaming through a distant land on the hunt for the ruins of a lost city. Adventure is more about the way you go about things, and not so much what you go about doing.

Have you ever noticed how some people love road trips and others can’t stand being in the car for more than half an hour? That’s because some people see the actual trip as an opportunity to experience new things. They actually experience the old adage: it’s the journey not the destination.

When you set a goal, you know you’ll get there if you like the activities it will take to accomplish it. So find a goal that gets you to do something you really enjoy and have experiences (preferably new ones) that you look forward to.

Let’s say you want to lose weight. That’s a goal that has very little adventure. One imagines logging calories and saying no to all that delicious bread in the window of the bakery on your walk to work.

But if you love to cook, what if you decided to try a new healthy recipe every week? Or if you love a certain sport, your resolution could be to play in an intramural group in your city.

See how these become adventures?

When Work Is Fun, We Call It Play

Imagine two people who want to become artists. One person loves painting, they’d do it for free their whole lives because applying paint on the canvas and evoking emotion is just so much fun. The other person really wants to have painted great works. They want to be invited to upscale artworld parties and appear in big time galleries. Which one is going to actually become a great artist and find success?

The first person every time.

By creating resolutions around a sense of adventure, you transform the process of reaching your goals from drudgery and self-denial into a process that you look forward to getting back to.