Get Your Pen And Jotter, It’s New Year Resolution Time

When a ritual is performed year after year after year, without the desired goal or results, the participant is apt to get discouraged and despondent. After a few more years, the ritual might become abandoned, rejected and discarded, even despised by an erstwhile participant. This scenario describes the experience of many who had been participants in the ritual of making new year resolutions. They make elaborate rituals of attending crossover services, listening to motivational speakers, reading up social media influencer’s pages, all to psyche themselves up for that moment when they will hear, “Are you ready now? Pick your pens and get your jotters. It’s time to write down your new year’s resolution. You know what you want. This is your year. This is the time to put it all down!”. And they had put it down for years after years, yet those words never leapt off the pages of their jotters into their lives and human experience.

In case you are new to all this, and you need a briefing, a new year resolution describes a personal promise or goal, made at the start of a new year, to improve in one aspect of life or the other i.e financially, economically, health-wise, dietary, socially, spiritually, et cetera, cetera. It is a tradition with very ancient roots, using the start of a new year as motivation for self-improvement. The practice dates back to over 4,000 years to ancient Babylonians and Romans.

What most practitioners tend to forget however is that after stripping away the emotional baggage and the spiritual atmosphere that enveloped the participant while putting pen to jotter, a new year resolution is nothing more than a hope, a desire and a wish. If nothing further is done, it remains just that, a hope, a desire and a wish. And as the saying goes, if wishes were horses, beggars will ride! But wishes are not horses, there is a need to back up your wishes with plans and prayers. Monthly, weekly and daily plans. Plans that demand daily actions, and actions watered by prayers.

It is quite simple. Break down whatever needs to be done to achieve your new year resolution(s) into monthly, weekly and daily actions. Don’t overreach, but don’t make it too easy on yourself either, those who do not leave their comfort zones never grow.

Let’s get practical. You want to grow financially and economically in 2026? You start by listing which assets or skills you have that you can monetize. You may be able to list up to ten or five. Choose two or three that you are absolutely best at and make a list of individuals or people who will be willing to pay for each one. For example, if you are good with babies and you have plenty of free time, you could make money offering baby sitting services to Gen Z, alpha mothers; or maybe you are a teacher in a school and you’re not being paid much, you could maximize your skills by reaching and teaching many more students via a remote teaching arrangement. Or maybe you own a neat desirable car and your evenings are free, there are many cab hailing services that you can earn extra cash on. The possibilities are endless. You however need to decide on and make the effort to get a target number of clients and customers per month, which you will break down into a particular number per week and a smaller number per day. If you are good at what you do, by the second year, you will have many more new clients by referral than by your direct prospecting. However, you may be above all that, you earn well over what you and your family need per month. Good. Invest, in shares, in real estate, in government bonds. Use an expert if you are not personally savvy enough. And make sure you monitor your monthly, weekly and daily targets like a monitor lizard.

The same goes for other resolutions, even the most mundane ones like wanting a six-pack stomach by December 2026! You will need to read up on six-pack stomachs and write out the daily exercise regimen you will need to get there. How many sit-ups per day? How many leg raises per day? How many bottles of beer you should reject! You will also need to decide on if you need a partner to encourage and motivate you or if you can go it alone. What applies to physical conditioning also applies to spiritual conditioning. Daily devotions and prayers, weekly worship services, et cetera.

So, hopefully by this time in 2027, God Willing, you are a richer, wealthier and healthier person than you are right now. You are more physically fit and your walk with God is more direct and purposeful. You are in all ramifications a better and happier person than you are right now. This is the essence of making a new year resolutions.  Now, you can go and get that pen and jotter, if you haven’t already.