Love All, Trust a Few, Do Wrong to None....

In keeping with my challenge to myself to only use Shakespeare quotes for my blog titles, I have chosen this quote from 'All's Well That Ends Well' for my New Year's Eve post. It sounded like the sort of thing really altruistic, self-actualized people would say, and since becoming a more altruistic and self-actualized person is my New Year's resolution, it seemed appropriate.

That's actually a total lie. Becoming a more self-actualized and altruistic person is most definitely NOT my New Year's resolution. Since discovering that only 12% of people who make New Year's resolutions actually accomplish their goals, I decided that I needed to be very careful about what I resolved to do for the coming year. After all, I do not want to end up amongst the 88% of resolution-makers who will be wallowing in a sea of disappointment and failure by this time next year.

After reading that statistic I started wondering about the phenomenon of people stubbornly making the same resolutions year after year, while rarely ever accomplishing any of the things they set out to do. I figure there's probably a couple reasons, one of them being that change is hard. The other reason is that, in general, people suck at setting goals. I'm allowed to say this without being a jerk because I am one of those people who suck at setting goals. Let me give you an example. Let's say I decided I wanted to learn to paint. I would probably set a goal like "Have one of my paintings on exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario". This would be a crappy goal, mostly because I would have skipped a few steps in between; "buy paint" for example. So of course, with such a lofty goal looming over my head, I would give up before I had even begun, crushed under the crippling weight of my unattainable goal. And there would go my New Year's resolution. I think this setting of unattainable standards is the most common cause of ruin for goal-setters everywhere. So, bearing that in mind, I decided to set some achievable resolutions for myself this year.

Jennifer's 2011 Achievable New Year's Resolutions

1)Attend work for approximately 8 hours most workdays of most of the weeks this year
2)Buy groceries when there is little/no food in the house
3)Charge cell phone/laptop/iPod when battery dies
4)Pay bills somewhere within a time frame of 1 to 2 months after the due date
5)Sleep in on weekends as often as possible
6)Drink lots of coffee from Starbucks
7)Buy paint

I'm feeling pretty satisfied with these, and fairly confident that this time next year I will be sitting here with a smug smile on my face, proudly checking each and every one of these items off my 2011 To Do List. Look out New Year. I'm ready for you.


P.S. For those of you who noticed, I finally chose a name for the blog. To be honest, I forgot about my Facebook contest to have other people name my blog, and by the time I'd remembered the moment had passed. So yesterday I finally sat down and came up with my own. I'm blaming my Blog Title writer's block for why I have not posted anything since September, but I think we all know the truth(see blog post titled "Ode to Procrastination").

Happy New Year everyone!!