Editor’s note: This article was first published in December 2016, and was written for the end of 2016 with the aim of a better 2017.
You don’t have to wait for New Year to set yourself new resolutions and improve your life (and, incidentally, those resolutions usually fail), but if you haven’t done your homework over the year, it’s still not too late. Even so, we should always be growing and make a habit of reviewing our progress: our life, our happiness, our growth.
Here are some things you can do for yourself, and for yourself alone:
1. Let go of everything that doesn’t make you happy or help you grow
It doesn’t matter what it is. If it isn’t adding to your life, it’s subtracting from it, whether we’re talking about relationships, friendships, work or anything else. Change all those things you know you need to change and probably haven’t yet found the courage to change. Remember: life is for enjoying, not for suffering.
2. Leave the past behind
Drop the weight of that backpack from the past. Move away from past traumas and from the people who belong to a painful past. Walk looking forward, not back. It doesn’t matter who or what you were. Today you can be something completely different. It’s normal for a 95-year-old to live on, remember and feed off stories from the past, but what you need to do is keep writing your story, not remembering it. Try to adopt the mindset that your best days are not behind you but still to come, and to get there you need to travel light.
3. Let go of your fear of taking risks
It’s hard to make changes without leaving your comfort zone. You will have to take risks to change your situation, whatever it is. Only those who take risks get to find out how far they can go. See: 10 quotes that will help you take more risks.
4. Don’t avoid your current problems
You can’t change what you refuse to face. We shouldn’t focus on problems, except to solve the ones we can solve. The ones that have no solution, we let go.
5. Drop the excuses
Over the years you hear all kinds of excuses in every area of people’s lives, both personal and professional. And so many excuses get tiring at times. Admit it: you know you make excuses so you don’t have to do all the things you know you should be doing. Full stop. Do you want to do something? Do it. Don’t know how? Learn. Don’t have time? Stop wasting so much of it. Can’t see the ideal moment to get started? That’s because you’re not looking for it. Motivation appears when we make a conscious decision to do something, the road opens up when we start walking, and as for the resources we don’t have, once we start reaching milestones we realise that, with a little creativity, we didn’t need many of them. Drop the excuses.
6. Let go of the idea that it’s too late to start again
It’s never too late to do what you’re not doing because you think it’s too late. It’s always better to be at the bottom of the ladder you want to climb than at the top of a ladder you don’t want to be on. At the bottom you find an objective, a goal, a purpose in life. At the top of the one you don’t want to be on, you find… probably a fall, sooner or later.
7. Stop complaining
Complaining is a habit that seems harmless, but it isn’t. T. Harv Eker considered this harmless-looking habit one of those that would lead you to a life that is poor in every sense. From a practical point of view, complaining gets you nowhere. All it does is remind you of what is wrong (whatever we’re complaining about), but it brings no solutions. It’s throwing energy in the bin.
See also: What leads you to poverty, according to T. Harv Eker, author of Secrets of the Millionaire Mind
8. Let go of the idea that you have a lot to lose if you try something
The difference between people who succeed and people who fail is that, when faced with an opportunity, those who fail analyse everything they could lose if it goes wrong. Winners think about everything they could gain. Each focuses on one thing, and what you focus on is, as a rule, what you end up getting. Besides, as the saying goes, one day you’ll regret the things you didn’t do more than the things you did. All those “what ifs…?” hurt a lot when we look back.
9. Stop worrying about what people will say
Look in the mirror. That’s what you are: what you see, not what others see. Look at your future; that’s what you’ll be. Whatever you are willing to achieve, not what others expect you to achieve. You are the lead character in your own life, so write your own story and don’t let someone else write it.
10. Stop believing that our destiny is set in advance
I respect people who believe in destiny, but I refuse to believe that someone is born destined to be a pothead, a drunk, someone others treat as an object, a poor person or a bitter person. You got to all of that through your own actions, and as soon as you change the actions and behaviour that brought you there, you will change the outcome, and so you will have changed your destiny. You are responsible for your destiny.
11. Stop wishing and start working
Desire without action is an illusion. In this life you don’t get what you wish for, but what you work for. That’s why the law of attraction doesn’t work. The law of action, however, does. However much you want something, however much you think about how much you want it, and however hard you wish for it, I’m sorry to tell you the universe is not going to drop it into your hands. You’ll have to draw up a plan and work hard to achieve it. Never underestimate a person who works very hard: they may lack the talent you have, but by working hard they will crush you.
12. Stop thinking your case is unique
Most of the people who have tried to convince me that they are having a hard time, and that I can’t know what they’re going through because their case is very particular, tell me the same story I have heard from lots of other people, the vast majority of whom got through it stoically. Your problems are not unique, and your particular case is exactly the same as the one thousands of people on the planet have overcome. I’m sorry to spoil those minutes in the spotlight sometimes, but they’re no excuse. Whatever it is, your case is not unique, or you would have been interviewed on television.
Your divorce may be more painful than hunger in the developing world, and losing your job may be more painful than the attack on the Twin Towers, but you and I both know (because deep down you know it) that you are having a problem managing your emotions or a problem of focus: concentrating on the past, on a problem you can no longer fix, or complaining instead of putting that energy into looking for a solution. Either way, there are no unique cases. Do what the people who got through it did.
These small things are a good place to start. By turning these changes into a habit, and not just at the end of the year, our lives will be less likely to go off track and more likely to improve.
Further reading: 17 money tips to improve your personal finances in 2017
Featured image: NPS Photo / Emily Mesner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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