Why I don’t much care for New Year’s resolutions

By Greg Turnquist

Greg is a member of the Spring team, an author of several books on Spring Boot, conference speaker, and the lead for Spring Data JPA.

January 2, 2014

Every year, I hear about people committing to some sort of New Year’s resolution. I’ve never been much of a fan and here’s why. If you have some new commitment you want to make, why wait and make it during the New Year?

When I found out about duoLingo, I decided to dive in head first and work on my German. That was over two weeks ago.

When I sold my previous house back in May and had a large pool of cash, I decided to buy a big position in VNR stock and use the monthly distributions to pay off the HELOC. Again, why wait until now to think about something like that?

People seem to take on nebulous resolutions like losing weight or being nice, and there seems to be a high rate of people not carrying through. Well I prefer something much more concrete.

Back in July, I decided to try an experiment and not drink anymore soda on the day of my daughter’s fourth birthday. To this day, I’ve only drunk some Diet Sprite when I had a stomach virus back in November and needed SOMETHING that wouldn’t make me throw up. I have been drinking mostly water and tea, as well as black coffee. It’s been great. And it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. Is it a big difference. Not really. But I feel like it’s a good one.

I only discovered recently that my wife decided to stop drinking soda as well. I hadn’t noticed!

Bottom line: if you have something you want to change, go ahead and do it! Don’t make it some “New Year” resolution. At least, that my $0.02.

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