Shouting from my shed

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New Year’s Resolution

Jaipur

Research confirms that the best way of forcing yourself to get something done is by committing it to writing and by declaring your intentions to people whose opinion you value.

You may not value my opinion, nor those of the people who read this blog. But there is something about the public declaration of a goal that makes it exceedingly difficult to back down from.

Therefore I am looking for people who are willing to make a public New Year’s Resolution here on my blog. And seeing as January 1 is a terrible date for making resolutions you will actually stick to, we are going to start today.
Don’t just think big at midnight as the fireworks boom in the frosty sky and you lean down and kiss your girl, half-drunk on optimism and cheap champagne, and fool yourself that this is the year, this is THE year, this is the year that things will be different, this is the year you will kick-start your life, chase your dreams, make stuff happen. This is the trap I always fall into!

Because, once the sweet lipstick and frisson of excitement has faded into the rainy grey hangover of the morning, you will go back to being exactly who you were last year. Nothing will change. Nothing will happen. New Year’s Resolutions are futile. Nothing but a brief glimpse of who and what you would like to be, before you slip back down to being the same mildly disappointing person who you were last year. You could have been a contender. You could have been somebody. Don’t worry: I share your pain!

So how about you stop dreaming big and acting small? Do you have the guts to make a public resolution? Not only that: to make a resolution knowing that I’mm going to email you in six months’ time to ask how you are getting on. And then to publish your progress here on this blog.

This then is my challenge to you. If you are serious that 2013 will be the year that you take steps to do what you really want to do with your life, why not start right now?

Declare your resolution (adventurous stranger) here. I will publish a selection of them for all the world to read. And, not only that, I will email you in six months for a progress report. And I will publish your progress here on the site.

It’s a bold thing, to make such a public declaration. Therefore I will reward the first 100 people to sign up with a copy of the mappazine I produced about my India walk (which was, for me, my own bold public declaration offering myself up to ridicule and scorn).

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