NEW YEAR. SAME SAME.
Every New Year kicks off with a hustle of great intent and the making of many plans. That moment when one year becomes the next is a good time to look back, plan forward and think about doing things differently.
But the thing is, most of us won’t. 80% of resolutions are ditched before Feb. So to help with the planning of things. Here’s my take on three things we know for sure.
New technology will appear.
New technology is awesome. It drives us to look at the way we do stuff and see how we can make it better. It also spawns a flurry of factually dubious social posts about how the new tech will change the world. It’s a fun game.
This year’s new entrant is Chat-GTP. If you haven’t met it yet, it’s a widget that can answer questions in coherent language to save us the trouble of writing stuff. Essentially it’s an evolution of the spider bots or webcrawlers that power search engines and digital assistants. It’s handy for people who want to write lots of stuff, fast. Its drawback is that there aren’t many people who want to read lots of stuff collated by a robot.
Like every innovation it will find its groove and someone in Silicon Valley will make a lot of cash. And next year something new will “disrupt everything”.
WE will ALL think about starting something.
Another dead-cert prediction is that all of us will think about starting something new. A new hobby, a new job or side-hustle, a stuff-this-let’s-try-a-new-country. Many of us will think it. Some of us will plan it. Next to nobody will actually do it.
Psychology calls this the intention-action-gap. It’s also known as the value-action gap, the knowledge-attitudes-practice gap, or the turns-out-I-didn’t-give-a-crap gap. Science aside, the big difference between thinking about something and doing it is actually doing it.
Luckily there’s a stack of support online for those of us stuck in inertia. Just open your Instagram and look for poorly art directed motivational quotes with sayings like “Seize the day”, “Just do it”. These can also be printed and pinned to vision boards. Or, just do stuff.
We WILL ALL wonder where the year went.
This will happen too. Come December, all of us will say it. And the older we get, the faster this whips around. The best way to beat it is to stop making plans for tomorrow and start making moments in today.
The family stuff. The fun stuff. The catch ups with friends for the sake of catching up and the stuff-it-let’s-do-it adventure stuff - whatever that might be.
Because, despite new tech, big plans and our passion to fit into last year’s jeans, most of us will land the year fatter, not fitter. Tech will do what tech will do and by the time we’ve heard of it, they will already be inventing the next big thing.
So, unless you’ve got a specific plan to leap the intention-action gap and genuinely change your world, it’s likely that the best of the year will be measured in the memories you make on the way. So look up, take a moment and have some fun.
That’s what I reckon, what do you think.