Chinese New Year's Resolutions

I have a complicated relationship with New Year's Resolutions (as many of us do).

Some years, I lay out very specific, quantitative goals that last until maybe March on a good year. Other years I just avoid the whole thing and end up making vague attempts to improve myself for the first few weeks of January before I forget all about it.

This year, I decided that I really wanted to get back on the Resolution train, with only one small problem: it was about January 4th when I reached that conclusion. Normally I wouldn’t be overly concerned about being a few days late, but the real problem is that I hadn’t even begun thinking about  what kind of goals I should set, a process which usually occupies my whole December. I was about to call it quits and just take the L for 2020, when I realized I had another chance: Lunar New Year!

That might sound like a cheap excuse for buying myself a few extra weeks, and back in 2016 I would have agreed with you, but having lived in Hong Kong for a couple years and being firmly steeped in the cultural phenomenon that is Lunar New Year there, I no longer feel that way. In Asia, Lunar New Year is the single largest holiday of the year, utterly dwarfing everything except the second-place Mid-Autumn Festival. Seriously, it’s a big deal. And, if I’m being honest, it probably means more to me now than the conventional new year on January 1st. I love everything about it—the decorations, sights, sounds, smells, and traditional foods (except Poon Choi. That stuff is Nasty with a capital N).

Here are some actual, really good foods I got to try on Lunar New Year in 2019 (not Poon Choi)

So here I am making Lunar New Year’s resolutions, transplanting a tradition of Western culture into an Eastern holiday. Not that you can’t just make goals anytime, but I find that when beginning a significant undertaking, it’s handy to use something to ceremonialize it, like a holiday.

As I’ve taken time to think, I’ve had some ideas about how I approach goals. I’m not going to lay out all the specifics, for a few reasons. The first is that posting about your resolutions before you begin has actually been shown to produce a false sense of gratification which can decrease your motivation to continue, resulting in even more empty gyms by February. The second is that I favor small-scale accountability, so I’d rather only a few family members and friends be aware of my goals and progress. The third is that I find that reading other people’s ambitious goals can lead me to think “Wow, my goals suck; what am I doing with my life?”

I don’t want to do that to any of you, so instead I’m going to share this year’s approach for creating goals, which is probably much more helpful.

I had trouble determining whether I had more success with quantified, small-scale goals or larger, long-term ones. Many people have recently advocated “process” goals rather than “product” goals, meaning success is defined as trying rather than arriving at a perfect destination. On the other hand, I really like having one big destination goal to aspire to. I often find it tedious to do the small things, and I need to think big in order to motivate myself. So I’m gonna do both.

That's me way out on a rock in Shek O in Hong Kong, around this time last year.

This year I’ll be handling goals in three main categories, namely Physical Health, Emotional/Spiritual Health, and Productivity, and these will be split into two levels: Vision and Habit. These are defined more on a time scale than a process-vs-product distinction, as follows:

Vision goals are what I hope to arrive at by the end of the year. They’re big, awesome ideas that I want to work toward. These are the things you put on a bulletin board above your desk so you can stare at them every day and get pumped up.

Habit goals are for the short-term. Basically, these are things you would set a daily notification for on your phone. They can kind of be either “product” or “process,” meaning the goal could represent a checklist of items to complete, or a rating of how much effort you gave. The main point is that they should point you in the direction of the Vision, and help you to build constructive habits that will get you there.

In a few months I’ll return to this topic to let you know how this grand experiment is going—hopefully with some good results! Also, if any of you are in the same camp as me and either forgot to make any goals or have already failed, start again! Chinese New Year is several days long!

Hic Manebimus Optime!

P.S. I don’t mean to offend anyone out there who loves Poon Choi. I just have a thing against boiled pig skin with hairs still attached.

I Promise I'm Not Dead

So what even happened to 2019? I'm sure a few of my regular readers were a little bewildered that I was negligent enough to only post three times during the entire year, and yes, that is entirely on me. Here's what happened:

Remember that awful math class I talked about back in September? The one I was panicking trying to review calculus II for so I could pass the pretest to even stay in the class? Well, truth be told it never got much better than that. I suppose it was a little stupid to take a class that was two high-level math courses smashed into one, especially after a two-year hiatus from all math. The schedule was brutal, and combined with the rest of my classes I had little time to do anything aside from homework, eating and sleeping, and most of my other hobbies went out the window for a couple months (along with, occasionally, eating and sleeping).

The good news: I did pass! That math class was without a doubt the hardest academic battle I've ever endured (which is saying something, if you remember how statics went freshman year). By the end of the semester, I was calculating how well I would have to do on the final exam to pass the class. I felt pretty secure in my ability to score 12% and end up with a D-, however I only have a small buffer of allowable D credits and I wanted to save that for future emergencies. I would need to get 46% on the final to squeak out with a C- and preserve my buffer of permissible D's, and that was legitimately cause for concern. I had actual doubts about being able to get 46%, which I think given my academic reputation is more of a commentary on the flaws of the Math Department's methods than anything else. I could rant about that to no end, but fortunately I don't have to because I got a whopping 50%, earning myself a flat C.

This was the lowest final grade I've received in my life, and I shed tears. Of joy.

It's remarkable the kind of perspective shift that happens when your goals change. In high school and even into freshman year of college, when I still needed to apply to my program, the only acceptable result was perfection, and anything less than an A would be considered disastrous. Now, safely in my program, the goal was to simply pass this hellish class, and if I got a C- that would be gravy. A pure C was better than I had even hoped, and as a result I was ecstatic--despite the fact that it's the worst grade I've ever had. Perspective is lovely that way; it lets you be happy with what you have. I need to work on applying that idea more consistently, but I take victories where I can get them.

Thus endeth the year, and the decade. Now is the time when you're probably expecting to hear all the mushy, nostalgic decade-in-review stuff or optimistic dreams and goals for the new year, but the fact is I don't have all that ready yet. Something about being in a stress-fueled death spiral for a few months really saps your creative energy, you know? So next time, I promise. Until then, I'm just happy with my C.

Hic Manebimus Optime!