Goals vs. Resolutions

Four days into the new year - how's your New Year's Resolution looking?

Did you set a concrete goal - like losing 20 pounds this year as opposed to abstractly saying "lose a lot of weight"?

Did you set a reasonable goal? This goes a long way in how hard you decide to go forth with a resolution.

I think a lot of times, New Year's Resolutions are people setting goals that they have no intention on meeting. It is procrastination at its finest.

Why are people compelled to make goals at the beginning of the year moreso than any other time of the year? Do they feel the need to change with the change of the year?

As with any change in life, you have to want to do it, not force yourself to do it because the calendar year changes.

Saying you are going to change something in your life on June 21st is just as good as saying it on January 1st. There's no reason to delay these major changes for the beginning of years.

If you want to run a marathon, you don't expect to just run one without some training. You have to build up to that goal over a set of monthly goals. Likewise, with other goals, you need to pace yourself with accomplishing some things.

I've learned that if I set unreasonable goals or goals I'm not really committed to, much of this short-term work to accomplish it will go to waste.

Just because you don't accomplish a goal doesn't make it a failure either. If you set out to lose a certain amount of weight and you lose 5 less than that in say a 6 month period, that's not to say you can't keep at it and try readjusting goals.

My Own Goals

Not all of them are important or life-changing goals.

1. 100+ blogs again - I'd like to keep my writing sharp and keep getting better at my craft. I'd like to write about variety of topics, although I'm sure I'll continue to weigh in more on sports topics.
2. 3000 Tweets & Gain 50 Followers (Go over 100): I had 1022 Tweets in 7 months last year & got 58 followers, so the goal is 4022 total Tweets and 108 followers by the end of the year. The reason for these goals is to gain a larger following for my blogs and like the blog goal, to keep my mind fresh. (It's @BrianBolek, to keep pushing this)
3. Get a Mac Computer & Become Solid at Final Cut Pro again:  I want to get back into video editing. I already know of one editing project that I have to do - editing the pre-video of pictures/music for my brother's wedding. I'm hoping this leads me to get back into editing other videos and uploading some videos that get me some notice.
4. Listen to all 4500+ songs on my I-Pod at some point this year: I have yet to accomplish this in the several years I've had my I-Pods. Usually what happens is I end up skipping songs. I'll see how long I can go without skipping songs. So far, through 22 of 4506. Currently listening to Lucky Boys Confusion "Mr. Wilmington".
5. Learn to design a website: I need to market myself more. Even if it doesn't help with finding a job in video editing or whatever, it can't hurt to have some self-created content (a la these blogs, YouTube videos, etc). I'm not sure how easy it will be to do this, but I will put forth effort to learn at some point.
6. Keep getting better/more knowledgeable about sports gambling:  As much as I'd love to become a professional gambler, I know that I can't handle the ups and downs of it. To see whether this goal is going well, I suppose I'd look at profit - or perhaps this is one of those subjective goals that is more about gaining knowledge than actual profit. Over the past couple years, I've gotten better at staying disciplined as a gambler, knowing my limits & executing research before placing most of my bets.

I hope you're able to achieve your New Year's Resolutions, but make sure you're constantly making reasonable goals throughout the year, not just saving it for January 1, 2013.

Good night to you all.

Blog about NFL General Managers/Coaches and Playoff picks to come either tomorrow or Friday.