Setting goals vs. resolutions, football is awesome, cubes

Current mood: satisfied

I am not a big fan of New Year’s Resolutions. People often make promises they can’t keep and some of them don’t even try. I have never been a resolution kind of person. If I want to do something, I don’t need the first of the year to do it. I do find that having goals is a fairly important part of being successful in anything you do. After all, if you’re not shooting for something, what are you doing? I would say you’re treading water.

The mistake that a lot of people make is making goals too hard to reach. This is doubly negative. In addition to them being nearly impossible to achieve, you end up beating yourself up about it. Rather than say you want to lose 25 pounds, how about setting a goal of losing a single pound in a week. Seems easy enough to do, right? Well then, if you can lose one pound, why not set the same goal at the end of that week for the next week? By this logic, it’s possible you could lose 25 pounds in 25 weeks, and you won’t be deterred if you miss a single week here or there. Yet, if you set the goal of losing 25 pounds and you have a bad week, you may be inclined to stop altogether. Sure, this is pretty much a purely mental distinction, but it’s this approach to goals (i.e. making sure they’re realistic) that gets you somewhere.

Let me give you another example. If you have a room full of crap and it appears as if it will take you hours and/or days to clean it up, you probably won’t even try. But how about this method instead: work on the room for one hour a week, or more if you can. And you’ll see it start to work itself out.

The first time I heard of this philosophy was in my Eastern Religion class in college. My professor told us of a famous Buddhist saying, “a 10,000 mile journey begins with just one step.” This makes total sense to me. See if you can apply it to anything you’re trying to accomplish. Now, the DISCIPLINE to do all this? Well, that’s a story for another day.

I have no idea how many of you watch football or even like it at all, but if you do, I hope you have watched some this weekend. These games are some of the best I’ve seen in awhile, and I’m sorry to say I had to miss two of the best ones yesterday. Regardless, there are only 3 games left in this NFL season, so you better make the most of it (and yes, I am not including the Pro Bowl because it doesn’t count). I did hear that they’re moving the Pro Bowl from Hawaii next year and it will be played the week before the Superbowl in the same stadium. I think this is a good idea, but a better one would be to play the Superbowl first (and get rid of the pointless bye week) and THEN the Pro Bowl. But then the NFL machine wouldn’t be able to cash in on an additional week of merchandise sales. Ah well, so much for that good idea.

Finally, an update to my goal (not resolution) to solving Rubik’s cubes. I have, with the help of some youtube videos and websites, been able to solve the 2x2x2 cube and the 3x3x3 cube. I have started to learn the intricacies of the mathematics that goes into one of these things, and I feel like I’m back in school. Of course, my brain feels like oatmeal, so any sort of activity like this has to be helping. Next up is the 4x4x4 cube. We’ll see how that goes. And then there’s the 5x5x5 all the way up to the 7x7x7. I’ll keep you posted (as if anyone was interested).

Finally, for those of you who have seen or received our holiday letter, fear not, it’s coming. It’s just turned into a “new year letter.” And hey, better late than never, right?

Rob FU, out.