New Year Resolutions

According to Dr. Stephen Kraus, a Harvard-trained social
psychologist who has done extensive research on resolutions,
only 15 percent of people who make resolutions adhere to
them over the long-term. Of the 85 percent who abandon
their resolutions, says Kraus, 20 percent break them
within a week.If you want to improve yourself, the best
time to start is immediately.

If 85 percent of people abandon their New Year's
resolutions, that means 15 percent complete them.
And when those people succeed, they feel good about
themselves. And they put themselves in a position
to set and achieve higher-level goals.
Studies show that people who set goals achieve more
in life than those who don't. Those same studies
confirm that when people write down their goals
and refer to them regularly they achieve even more.

To believe that by increasing my knowledge,
developing my skills, sharpening my thinking,
and ruling my emotions, I can accomplish a great
deal. And the only way I know of to do that is
to set goals and pursue them, one small step at a time.

It's like building a sand castle. If you amass just
enough sand to sustain a single onrush of waves, it
will be gone in a few hours. But if you build a
larger castle - make the walls higher and thicker
and stronger - then you'll have something to build
on the next day.
It won't look like much in the beginning. Just the
half-wrecked foundation of a wall. But with every
passing day, it will become more substantial.
Eventually, it will be a massive structure - taller,
wider, and stronger, by far, than all the other
sand castles people have tried to build around it.
And yet, it will have been built by a person of
equal talents using the same tools. The only
difference: the extra effort it took to add
something new and better every day.