New Years Goals

Outer space knows nothing of our new year. Alien telescopes pointed at Earth would find no celestial cause to celebrate January 1st—it’s an arbitrary date set by us humans. And yet we treat that day like a mystical threshold. One granting newness and freshness and other nesses that wipe away the annual clutter impeding our will to improve. Or so we think. If a new lap around the sun really gave us a new start, Mercurians would enjoy a steep advantage. Theirs comes every 88 Earth days.

The winter solstice, however, actually means something. The sun sets later each day, sending northern hemispherians more cozy radiation to blast away the gloom of autumn and its days of shrinking sunlight. Sorry, southern hemisphere. It’s your turn for burgeoning darkness.

But whatever day we pick, a new start matters. After all, God commanded Israel to celebrate Passover as its new year. And though you may not be removing leaven from your home, you might be pursuing a new goal. Sounds worthwhile, right?

Except that goals are capricious little brats. They sprout wings and scatter, giggling mockery as we chase them. The swiftest of us have proposed ways to catch them, spinning off acronyms like SMART, OKR, WOOP, HARD, BSQ, BHAG, and OGSM. (Just like that, I’ve sent keyboards clacking into a search bar.) We’re urged to measure results, smacking of the capitalist mind: Outcomes! Money! Success! Earn glory in the eyes of our fellow goal chasers.

But what if we rethought our SMART goals? What if we made them… DERPY?

D=Delight
E=Endurance
R=Repeatable
P=Presence
Y=feedbackY

Delight. Learn to love the activity not for what it produces, but for the activity itself. Don’t fall in love with having big pecs. Instead, fall in love with the focus of leg-buckling bench presses. Savor the rasp of the knurling on a barbell and the thrill of pushing it past “the wall” on a weight you never lifted before.

Endurance. Start with short sessions. Ratchet up the duration a skosh each day. Give yourself time to ingrain the new habit.

Repeatable. Embed the activity into your existing routine so you don’t upheave your entire life. Remove or delay any part needing more effort than you can sustain under your current endurance level. This new thing must be repeatable under a wide variety of excuses, even if you must modify the activity itself.

Presence. Figure out how to do this activity with your awareness centered squarely on Jesus. Make it count as time spent with Him. Hard to do, but the alternative is a void that takes more from you than it gives. We can’t love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength if we don’t welcome Him in all our actions, including this one. Isn’t this the point of chasing your goal, rather than the result you’re chasing?

feedbackY. A smart human once said “practice doesn’t make perfect, it makes permanent”. I agree, so please don’t strive alone. Find someone to review your strategy, watch your technique, and smack you on the skull when you’re forming bad habits in service of the good one. Left alone, our scotoma wins and we miss flaws that are obvious to others.

What? You don’t like how “feedbacky” ends in “Y” and that it’s not even a real word? I did say this was derpy.

Notice this method doesn’t fixate on results. Those’ll come if you pick the right activities and build the endurance they require. Let that endurance recombobulate you. Endurance leads to lasting change that needs no help from a calendar. The point is transformation, not outcomes. Becoming someone new leads to results your goalsheet never listed, because dreams often start off shallow and blind. You may not know what results to chase until you’ve grown into a person able to see them.