A fresh, clean year to mess up!

Let's get stARTed.

Listen!

Do you hear that chorus of chirpy urgent hopeful voices? It’s all the dusty journals and vision boards shouting “Let’s do this! Again! 2024 style!”

Our longings and curiosities live for this day. You know that, right?

They crave the nonjudgmental potential of a blank calendar page. And the New Year is the biggest and blankest.

So whether you call them resolutions or fresh starts or do overs…just call them. Buy the ticket, take the ride! Open the journal, start the story!

Just one ground rule: don’t sweat your past resolutions – those you forgot or faltered with.

Our startistic longings have the personalities of Golden Retrievers. They don’t care how long we’ve been away or what we forgot to finish. They’re just happy we showed up.

That’s why I defend New Years Resolutions.

I’ll admit, resolution resisters have some valid points – like the fact that most resolutions don’t get kept…that the average person abandons their resolve early in the year. Fewer than 25% of people actually stay committed to their resolutions after just 30 days, and only 8 - 20% accomplish them, I’m told.

So what are we to do with this information? Never make a new resolution? Never start a fresh start? Never vow to stop eating cheese or being the rightest person on Instagram?

On the contrary, we need to make MORE — MORE resolutions…MORE scrappy starts…MORE messy experiments.

All starts have payoffs, and we shouldn’t miss this big holy one the universe serves up for us each January 1.

On each fresh January 1 morning, we resolution makers get to design our next chapters. We restart ourselves. We decide what is important, what’s not working, and what we want more of. We decide habits and beliefs and relationships that will ignite progress – even though we may have fallen off the wagon or lost our resolve the year before.

With each decision, we are starting a new layer of ourselves. Becky 4.0 is just Becky 3.0 with new features and more of the bugs out – with a few resolutions under my belt

.You see, while you can find scores of studies on the “failure” of resolutions, there’s no data on the real value of unfinished resolutions.

• No one has studied whether a resolution made at age 20 ignites a passion that manifests in a talent at age 25.

• No one has studied whether a decision to start a welding club in January leads to soldering success in February two years later.

• No one has studied the bestsellers that were born when a failed resolution to write everyday built a writing habit of writing twice a week.

When you look back on your years of New Year’s resolutions, birthday manifestos and goal setting sessions, don’t count them as failures, or even unfinished business. Count them as big, bodacious, badass beginnings.

Eight years ago, I resolved to write a book that year. It took more like five years. But its beginning, which lives on page 24, is now a mindset I live by.

We are not the sum of our failures and missed opportunities, or our unfinished work. Nor are we made only of our big wins, the handful of things that turned out just like we wanted.

We are the sum of the imaginings we ignite and our ideas acted upon. We are the curiosities we chase and the potential that they illuminate in us.

We are the sum of our starts.

—Start More Than You Can Finish