Let's Make Next Year Great

To A Great Year

Make 2012 Our Best Year Ever

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. - Eleanor Roosevelt

As I reflect on this past year, I realized that 2011 has not been one of my best. It’s funny, because I'm usually more positive when I'm being reflective. In my life, my years typically seem to get better and better. And so I reflected on what made this past year less than great. I have a job, a pretty good job, while many don't - I have the money and the time to feed my passion for travel and play. But, there still exists those nagging thoughts lurking in the back of my mind.

My thoughts turned to how I could leverage the issues of the past year against the successes of years past for future improvement. I’d like to share some things I’ve learned about those past years, (great and less than great) and how we might be able to use them to make this next year our greatest year yet. Obviously, we need to play, travel and enjoy life more and here is how we can do it.

One Goal

One goal. This will sound crazy to many of you who have so many goals you’d like to accomplish. And trust me, I know how that feels. I started out 2011 with a whole bunch of goals, but I only accomplished about half of them. I didn’t realize how things would change for me during the year, and anyway, 9 goals is too many.

I’ve said this before, but it’s so important I’m going to repeat it: we're at our most powerful if we focus on one thing at a time. If we have 10 goals, we’ll spread our focus thinly. But if we have one goal, we’ll be able to focus our energy and attention completely on that one goal. And that’s one of the secrets of success.

We might have 10 goals to achieve over a lifetime. If so, choose just one to accomplish this year. And focus completely on that this year. We might have shorter-term sub-goals to achieve in a month or two, but those should lead to our One Goal for 2012.

Put your goal on your wall, on you computer desktop. Make it your mantra. Keep it your focus for 2009-2010, and you’ll not only achieve it, but you’ll feel great for doing so.

New Habit

Create a new habit. Goals are achieved by habits. What habit can we develop this month to help achieve our One Goal for this year?

Once we’ve identified that goal, we’ll need to commit ourselves, hold ourselves accountable to a group of people, and focus completely on that habit for a month. I recommend the Zen Habits January Challenge. It’s the perfect way to create a habit and lead to the achievement of your One Goal.

Remember … The journey of thousand miles starts with a single step. – Chinese Proverb

Take Action

Take action now. It’s all good and well to set goals or resolutions, but the best plans are worthless if we don’t act on them. Action is everything. Take action today to make our goal come true. Tomorrow, take another action. In fact, take one action toward our One Goal every day, first thing in the day, and make it the most important thing we do every day. If we do that, there’s almost no way that we won’t achieve that goal.

The actions can be small things: making a list, making a call, doing some research (”find five possible venues for our social gatherings”). But take action.

Simplify

Simplify. As you might have figured out by now, I’m all about simplicity. So this will sound redundant. But if we take the time to simplify our lives, in some way, this month, our year will be much better. When we have too much going on in our lives, it overwhelms us. It spreads us thin. It makes us ineffective. Simplifying things helps keep us sane, and makes us more powerful. Take some time to identify the 4-5 things that are most important in our lives, then simplify your commitments (and goals and to-do list) so that they fall in line with those 4-5 priorities.

Choose Happiness

Choose happiness. It sounds corny, but if we make our happiness become our choice, we’ll be happier. It’s really that simple, or at least, it has been for me. What makes you happy? That should be the focus and your choice. This year, let's make happiness our priority. Then do the things necessary to make it a reality.

I shut my eyes so I can see. - artist Paul Gauguin

Schedule Time

Schedule time for ourselves. If these two things are in our top 4-5 important things (see above), we might consider revising the list. At least one thing on our short list of 4-5 things should be something we love to do. At least one other should be spending time in some way with people you love to spend time with. For me, that’s my dog, students, friends, kids, and playing, reading and writing. Actually, that sentence describes my entire short list: spend time with those I want to spend time with, read, write, and play. Everything else is superfluous.

Spending time with ourselves, doing something we love to do, will give us time for reflection. It will make us happier, and give us time to decompress. Don’t have time? Make time.

Spending time with friends and loved ones, connecting with them, is in my opinion absolutely essential to happiness. Make it a priority.

Focus

Learn to focus. This goes back to what was said above about One Goal and simplifying, but it’s important not only on those macro levels, but on a day-to-day basis as well. It’s easy to get caught up in things that come our way, in the daily crises that derail our plans, in distractions and email and phone calls and Twitter. Very easy. If we allow ourselves to lose focus, we’ll have a very difficult time accomplishing our goals.

To make this our best year ever, learn to focus. Make it one of our monthly habits. Start by identifying our One Goal and our 4-5 priorities. Then, every day, focus ourselves on those things. Each morning (or the night before), make a list of the 3 Most Important Things (MITs) that we want to accomplish today. Then start on the first one, first thing, instead of getting distracted by email or any of the other things that take away our attention. Shut everything off except what we need for that task. Clear our desks and turn off the phone and any notifications on our computers. Then focus on that one thing, trying our utmost to complete the task.

When we’re done, we will take a break and reward ourselves. Then focus on the next task. Working like this, there’s nothing we can’t accomplish.

We are all of us living in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. - Oscar Wilde