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5 Essential Steps Toward a Prosperous New Year
These are the resolutions that can make the most difference.
Posted December 23, 2021 Reviewed by Jessica Schrader
Key points
- The most effective strategies for better living are often free.
- A focus on self-improvement and personal control can be powerful ingredients for positive change.
- The biggest harm of modern media may be that it makes us a passenger to outside forces instead of the driver of our own lives.
December and January frequently prompt reflection; both on the year past and on the potential of the year ahead. Whether or not you are among the tens of millions of Americans who make New Year’s resolutions, there is a good chance that you are exposed this time of year to people and products offering you solutions to problems in your present or for reaching your future goals. Almost invariably, this latter messaging involves a purchase. A Peloton membership or personal trainer for the fitness-oriented. A new diet or home meal delivery service for those looking to upgrade their nutrition. And innumerable products and services promising to make you happier, wealthier, and more successful.
What is typically lost in this annual advertisement campaign is the long-known truth that the most important tools for a better life cost no money at all. Instead, they involve changes in our habits and philosophy. These changes improve our lives by helping us escape the exhausting cycle of responding to external events and replacing this cycle with a path based on personal priorities and a focus on factors under our direct control.
1. Take 100% responsibility for your life.
Many people today feel buffeted by factors beyond their control. Political drama and natural disasters that once captured our attention only during the evening news are now fed to our phones and computers around the clock. And every event is now skillfully portrayed to maximize emotional responses, with the result being that life feels like a never-ending crisis. The worst effect of all, however, is neither the frequency nor emotional intensity of this messaging. It is instead the sense that the quality of our lives depends on other people and external events. Those familiar with the Serenity Prayer know the importance of focusing on the domains of life under our control and minimizing the remainder. Yet this idea—that a high-quality life depends on our ability to attend to our personal sphere of control—is far older than the Serenity Prayer (penned in the 1930s), dating back at least to the Stoic philosopher, Epictetus, who said, ”Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle. Some things are within your control and some things are not.”
Especially in the face of the modern non-stop media cycle, it is critical to remind ourselves that we remain responsible for our opinions, our choices, our goals, and our habits. Amidst a culture of blaming and litigating, double down on the commitment to leading your own life. The greater we focus on refining the quality of our personal beliefs and actions, the greater the sense of fulfillment, contribution, and meaning we will enjoy. As a convenient side effect, we will also usually enjoy greater outer success in our careers and relationships as well.
2. Create a values hierarchy.
A common reason for stress and unhappiness in the modern world is that people unconsciously live their lives according to other people’s values. As children, we are born into families and cultures that imprint certain values and expectations on us. Lacking the capacity for critical thinking in our youth or the experience to suggest alternative views, we can blindly adopt the views of the groups to which we belong while sacrificing our individuality. The result, in the words of Henry David Thoreau, is that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” This seems no less true for us today in the 21st century than Thoreau observed in the 19th century. Like Neo in The Matrix, many people have a nagging sense that something is wrong but lack the Morpheus-like guide to wake them up to the reality that they living artificial lives designed by others.
One of the most powerful and rewarding therapy exercises in my experience is to develop a values hierarchy. This works like a personal navigation system, revealing—with study and reflection—what is most important and helping us redesign our lives around the values that resonate most strongly inside us. Although we may all share certain cultural ideas, we are not clones. Replacing an existence of "quiet desperation" with one of fulfillment requires that we learn to integrate our unique natures and live in harmony with our individual values.
3. Make convenience your friend instead of your enemy.
The endocrinologist and anti-sugar advocate, Robert Lustig, recently authored a book titled The Hacking of the American Mind. He argues that the food industry and social media have weaponized neuroscience to create irresistible foods and addictive smartphones. Behind the technical and chemical wizardry of Apple, Coca-Cola, and Google, however, is a simple formula: design products for maximum convenience. The human brain is wired for convenience; we innately seek the path of least resistance. Although some New York Times columnists may decry this native quality in articles such as “The Tyranny of Convenience (1),” the truth is that our biological preference for convenience was an essential ingredient to our progressing as a species from hunter-gatherer tribes to advanced societies. Convenience isn’t a flaw in our nature, it is a feature instrumental to our success.
Rather than fighting against convenience, or demonizing companies for the ways they exploit our brain’s convenience circuit, it is more constructive to make intentional use of convenience for yourself and design it into your personal goals. If people inside the fast food and television industries can figure out how to make hamburgers and home entertainment convenient then it is possible for you to make nutritious food, exercise, reading, or family activities more convenient, while making the behaviors that are harming your health or happiness less convenient.
4. Upgrade your social influences.
In The Art of Living, Epictetus offers a practical recommendation for better living: “The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best.” The motivational speaker Jim Rohn more recently shared a similar insight, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” Since the earlier times that these philosophers observed the power of social contagion, science has repeatedly documented the same effect. As social animals, we are strongly influenced by the attitudes, ideas, language, and behaviors of the people around us. The science of social influence also tells us that most people are unaware of the degree to which they are affected by others (sometimes denying this effect even in the face of overwhelming evidence).
Epictetus and Jim Rohn would be amazed by how much the sphere of social influence has expanded since their times. In the 21st century, our choices are shaped not only by the people in our immediate physical environments but also by people from around the world through technology, and by people both real and fictional through movies and social media. This makes it more important than ever that we critically examine our relationships and viewing habits to consider how they may be influencing our lives for the better or worse. Perhaps counterintuitively, one of the best ways to change unhealthy relationships isn’t by ending the relationship or even demanding change from the other person(s). As or more often, we will get better results by changing ourselves, using the power of social influence to our advantage to become a source of positive influence in our family, friends, and co-worker relationships.
5. Become an expert in what matters most to you.
Although everyone wants to be healthy and happy, people differ widely in what they mean by these virtues. Some people, for example, define happiness by love and family, wealth and achievement, contribution and helping activities, or excitement and adventure. There is no single formula. Yet in whatever way a person may define the specifics of a better life for themselves, it is to their advantage to develop expertise in these domains. If you wish to be healthy, master the fundamentals of nutrition, sleep, and exercise. If you wish to be wealthy, absorb the essentials of finance and investing. Even more abstract virtues such as love, connection, and parenting now have small libraries of books and videos created by leading experts from which we can learn. For most people, there is a surprisingly large gap between their knowledge about their careers and their knowledge about the fundamentals of successful living. We’ll spend years, for instance, committed to coursework to obtain a college degree for a job yet frequently dedicate no serious study to the areas of life that usually matter far more.
We need to get our priorities straight to have the lives we say we want. Become an expert in what matters the most to you. Be a student and creator of your own life, not a follower of others. Take advantage of the extraordinary educational resources available to us—many that are free of charge and accessible in video or audio-recorded form—so that you can become an architect of a great life instead of a resident in somebody else's plans.
