New Dragon Year resolutions

People are unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered. Love them anyway.

If you do good, people may accuse you of selfish motives. Do good anyway.

If you are successful, you may win false friends, and true enemies. Succeed anyway.

The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway.

Honesty and transparency make you vulnerable. Be honest and transparent anyway.

What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway.

People who really want help may attack you if you help them. Help them anyway.

Give the world the best you have and you may get hurt. Give the world your best anyway.

The world is full of conflict. Choose peace of mind anyway.

The anonymously written passage above captures the most daunting challenges you could possibly encounter. The declarations present powerful notions that should be considered every start or end of the year. In the Chinese calendar, today is the start of a brand-new year, an auspicious time for self-renewal, rebirth and resolution that can help make your performance and accomplishments better compared to the year that just passed. You may declare readiness for new confrontations, prospects and risks, generate excitement or fear about the entry of the Water Dragon, or have a clear view of where you are now, and where you want to head in the next 12 months. You may arm yourself with a roadmap that can hopefully lead you to the fulfillment of your professional or personal goals, and have the mechanisms to gauge if your performance is a win or a crash.

Open the year of the Water Dragon with a clear sense of what you want to do, what you want to accomplish, and how to accomplish them. The power to effect a difference, to move you into great action, and to realize your dream is in your hands. You can either crush it or make it soar.

It is a tired issue, but at the start of each New Year, you make a secret or openly declared list of things you want to change or attempt to change. The list can range from the unreasonable to the ridiculously easy: lose weight, exercise, be less crabby, quit smoking, get a life, spend wisely, save money, make more money, relax more, adopt a healthy lifestyle, start a business, study harder, work more competently, change careers, get more sleep, or get involved in charity work. Your resolutions can stand firm for weeks, and then you slide back to your old ways. Making an inventory is the easy part, but keeping it requires firm resolve. If broken, your list can return, haunt you, and eventually put you in a state of guilt and failure.

How then can you see your resolutions through? Don’t make a long list. Just aim for one or two major concerns. Write them down, the better to remind yourself that you owe it to yourself to be able to make your list happen. Stick it on the fridge, the computer monitor, in the closet, on the bathroom door or the car dashboard. Add to the existing inventory a few more “to do’s” after you are able to achieve the first ones. Make a roadmap on how to achieve them. Don’t endeavor to finish everything in one go. Do some phasing. Take the longer, more carefully and efficiently implemented route. You may just be able to do it. Create an affirmation mantra. Recite it as often as you can, so the temptation to turn away from the resolutions will go away. Here are New Year musings you may want to consider. You may have read or heard them before, but there’s no harm reading or hearing them again.

• Be better, not bitter. You may have high emotional quotient scores by the way you feel inside, while others may be ahead in material things accumulated through the years, in physical appearance enhanced by science and in fame generated by great exposure. You may try to strike a balance between your internal achievement and your external fulfillment, or settle your individual marks in every aspect of your life by comparison or describe yourself as the sum of what you possess or have created, but as Desiderata warns, there will always be others better, wealthier, more attractive or more popular than you are. You are encouraged to be better, not bitter when pitted against colleagues.

• Don’t force it. Internal success requires no apparent gain. You will just feel it without trying too hard. Try dwelling on a personal advocacy. It might just provide you the elusive joy that you have been running after for years. Teach illiterates to read and write; talk, dance with, and care for old people longing for some love and attention; play with hearing-impaired children; laugh till you drop with blind people; secretly pick up litter (start with your own); give money and things away, they will all come back to you with interest; learn a new craft, share your acquired skill with somebody; serve in church; bathe babies in an orphanage; do something for environmental custody. The list can go on and on. There is no scorecard doing all or any of these, but the feeling of inner prosperity can be overwhelming.

• Never take a shortcut. Authentic victory in life is not what you achieve. It is measured by the quality of your journeys and experiences, as you work to turn your goals into realities. As actor/director Woody Allen once remarked, 90 percent of life is showing up, and the other 10 percent is how we show up, which can make all the difference in the world. There are no shortcuts when it comes to building success, but there is enormous gratification in showing up each day with a healthy sense of pride, commitment and respect for the work, or volunteer work you get involved in.

• Find your story and tell it well. You have a number of good stories that bring out who you truly are. Discover those stories — some you may have been forgotten, ignored or overlooked. Unearth them and tell them well. You may seek help from someone who knows you well to provide dimensions and perspectives.

• Embrace what you do best. If you do many things, or too many seemingly unrelated things, you will discover you cannot do any of them well. Determine why you matter. This introspection is significant. You must not merely answer what makes you different, but how what you do makes a difference for others. Write down your answer and share it with people whose opinion you value. Ask them if your response is clear, simple, focused and inspirational.

• Aim to be enviable. Are you a person that others envy? If not, ask why not. Apply that to whatever you are projecting and then to yourself. Ask, “If not, why not? And what can I do to change that?”

• Nurture your strengths as you work on your weaknesses. You can only improve your strengths so much, if at all. And even if you improve them, there’s a good chance it might not get noticed; slight improvements are hard to spot. What people do notice are your weaknesses; if you can check them, your improvement can be dramatic, and visible to everyone.

• Constantly seek opinions from others. The more people who can enlighten you on your challenges, the better the chances of your prevailing over them. Don’t be embarrassed to ask; it is better to seek advice and answers to your questions than to act carrying dangerous assumptions. People can dispute them, and by doing that, it will direct you towards more informed choices.

• Attract a mentor. Don’t seek the person. Instead, focus on doing the things that might pull a mentor towards you. If you find one, make sure you have others. Mentors are people, people are fallible and even gifted doctors can make a wrong diagnosis. Fortunately, in many of those cases, the patient sought second and third opinions. You should, too.

• Pursue success. It is out there and you have to run after it. Sometimes you achieve it through sheer luck, which goes by fast and hits you. Travel the road less traveled. Get in luck’s way.

• Keep moving and dancing. Assume that each day there is more you can do to get enriched and harvest your gains. As one poet says, “Live the problems, and do not worry when they persist.” The solution will surely be there to get you out of the rut. “Reach out and seize life,” Thoreau invites. Dance the dance of life. Life is a marvel, lived in a flash. Savor it.

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