We’re not only nearing the end of a year; we’re about to start an entirely new decade. We can treat the end of December as we would the end of any ordinary month—and the end of the year as if it’s no big deal.
But we would be wasting a huge opportunity to boost our ability to create the changes we want to make.
According to research conducted at the University of Pennsylvania in 2014, temporal landmarks (such as the beginning of a new year), demarcate the passage of time, thereby creating “new mental accounting periods.”
The fresh start effect applies to many different temporal landmarks, including birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, school years and semesters, and even the beginning of a new week.
At such times, past imperfections are relegated to a previous time period, and we are induced to take a big-picture perspective of our lives. As a result, we’re motivated to take action to achieve our aspirations.
Self-Improvement Is Not Aspirational
Those of us who respond to temporal landmarks, especially the beginning of a new year, tend to go into “fix-me” hyper-drive by creating an ambitious list of New Year’s Resolutions—essentially massive to-do lists. The Babylonians were doing it 4,000 years ago, and it’s still a common practice today, despite the notoriously high failure rate for all these good intentions.
The majority of “fix me” intentions and resolutions are bound to fail for a variety of reasons, some of which I wrote about nearly four years ago. Generating them is worse than a waste of the fresh start effect. If that’s all we ever aim for when presented with a significant motivational opportunity, we’re actually training our brain to ignore such occasions and to maintain the status quo.
As the researchers at the University of Pennsylvania reported:
High-level, big picture thinking has important implications for goal motivation. When induced to take a high-level view of a situation, people are more likely to evaluate their actions based on the desirability of the end state (or goal) they hope to achieve [the desired outcome] rather than the time and effort required to achieve it. As a result, high-level thinking leads people to make choices that are more oriented toward goal achievement.
Stop Trying to Fix and Start Creating
Instead of focusing our attention on fixing what we perceive to be wrong about ourselves, we could focus instead on what we want to create in the coming months, year, and decade. We can still notice what is, but we can also ask ourselves what if?
This is something humans are uniquely qualified to do. As David Eagleman writes in The Runaway Species:
We are masters at generating alternative realities, taking what is and transforming it into a panoply of what-ifs.
In my Wake Your Imagination Up! workshop, I use a three-part exercise to investigate the landscape of a situation, a problem, or a creative dilemma. It requires a pen and some lined notebook paper.
Write each of the following three questions at the top of one of the pages. Starting with the first question, try to fill the page with one answer after another. Then do the same for the other questions.
- What’s So? What are the facts?
- What If? What are the questions?
- Why Not? What are the possibilities?
Rather than focus on your entire life, it’s most fruitful to complete the series of questions for one area at a time.
Maybe you already know what you want to create, maybe you have a vague idea, or maybe you have no idea at all. Your starting point isn’t important. What matters is asking questions about what you want to create instead of identifying what you want to fix.