I’m not a fan of New Year resolutions. Why? Three reasons:
- I stink at them.
- I feel compelled to think them up on the last day of the year, in a post-holiday coma, with no clear plan of how I’m actually going to accomplish them. (Is it any wonder that 88% of New Year resolutions fail?)
- They promise hope but deliver guilt.
So we’re 23 days into 2012—how are you doing on your New Year resolutions? Odds are you’ve slipped up a little here and there. That’s assuming you haven’t tossed the whole idea after temptation tackled your willpower in a moment of weakness and beat you back into submission.
The good news is you can start all over today (if you want to). Today is the first day of the Chinese New Year. Don’t worry though, if you need more time, you could wait until April and celebrate the Hindu New Year. After that, you’ve got Rosh Hashanah in September or even Hijri New Year in November.
You see, what you know as January 1st is actually an arbitrary date that was set by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582. That’s the year he introduced the Gregorian calendar to correct astronomical inaccuracies in the Julian calendar the Romans used. It took over 300 years for most of the world to adopt the Gregorian Calendar, but today we don’t give it a second thought.
The truth is, every day is the start of a new year.
That’s what gave me the idea for The Leap Challenge. If January 1st is essentially a random start date, then why not take January to recover from the holidays and get used to writing 2012 on everything. Starting February 1st, we could take an entire month to set ourselves up for success—refining our vision, gathering support, developing a plan, and preparing to execute it. Then on Leap Day, February 29—arguably the most astronomically arbitrary date in our calendar—we could take the leap on accomplishing not just a resolution but one of our biggest dreams.
If you’re interested, then join us for The Leap Challenge and trade in your hasty resolutions for a fighting chance at accomplishing one of your biggest dreams.
How do you feel about New Year resolutions?
