New Year, New You?!?
Resolutions Fail. Try “Radical Doability”
I am not a neurophysiologist, motivational speaker or therapist, so this week’s blog is just my paraphrase of a great WSJ article on being better in 2025.
“New Year, New You”: The traditional slogan encapsulates both the promise and the hopelessness of our annual attempt at personal transformation. On the one hand, January 1 feels feels full of potential for a fresh start, a reboot, a decisive repudiation of all the botched efforts and missteps of the past. On the other hand, if any of that really worked, there would be far fewer people in the market for a new beginning, year after year.
Many of us are familiar with the experience of making New Year’s resolutions to boost our physical fitness, get on top of the to-do list, grow your practice while spending more time enjoying life, and so on. What keeps us from accomplishing those things is rarely a lack of self-discipline, or needing a more efficient system for building healthier habits. More often, it’s the very attempt to make sweeping changes—to “become unrecognizable,” in the parlance of contemporary self-help—that stands in the way of a different, happier and more meaningful life.
It unfolds like this. You want the benefits you think you’d get from, say, learning to place implants, so you resolve to become a implant expert. You buy the implant equipment, find the best implant manufacturer and enroll in a week-long implants course. Maybe you even get as far as planning a few implants.
But then something goes wrong. Perhaps the prospect of executing the complex procedures at the highest level every day for the rest of your career suddenly strikes you as intolerably stressful. Or perhaps the idea of implant training seems so time-consuming that you tell yourself it’s best to wait a few years, until various other commitments are out of the way, so you can give it the attention it deserves.
The truth is that the appeal of a “New You” doesn’t have to do with exercising more, making more money or accomplishing any other concrete change. Rather, it’s about obtaining a sense of security and control over life. With a new year beginning, we want to finally feel that we’re in the driver’s seat when it comes to our practice, health, finances, and so on.
But change demands that you embark on new ventures with no real confidence that you know what you’re doing. When we think about changing our lives, we want to imagine ourselves as the captain of a superyacht, calmly programming our future destination into the ship’s navigational systems, then confidently sitting back to watch our plans become reality.
In reality, life as a finite human is better understood as piloting a little one-person kayak down an unpredictable river. We don’t get to know what’s coming next—when the peaceful or challenging or terrifying periods might arise. Everything rests on our capacity to navigate from moment to moment, making the best decisions we can, and not allowing ourselves to be disheartened by the ways in which our journey doesn’t exactly map the plans we might have had for it. In this situation, the only action that really matters is the one you take right now.
Freedom lies not in this futile struggle to become someone else but in consciously accepting who we really are and starting from there. Instead of “becoming unrecognizable,” the New Year should be a time to commit to “radical doability.” This means:
having the guts to engage in new habits “dailyish,” and not so wedded to rigid consistency that a few missed sessions knock you entirely off track.
embracing the pleasure of an easily reachable goal.
focusing on a limited number of goals at a time.
daring to ask what you’d actually enjoy doing differently in life, not just how you think you ought to change.
Above all, effective change requires understanding that real security and control—the feeling of being on top of things once and for all—was never in the cards. There will always be too much to do, because the incoming supply of to-dos is effectively infinite. You’ll never feel perfectly confident about your practice, health, or anything else, because the future is always uncertain.
Once you grasp that this vision of the future is a mirage, you get to stop postponing the real meaning of life to a subsequent date and plunge into it right now. From the perspective of “radical doability”, the most thrilling plans you could imagine mean nothing, compared with the extraordinary power of actually doing something, however imperfect.
Let 2025 be the year when you finally stop trying to become a different kind of person and instead start doing a few things differently: one message to a friend, one implant, one workout. Not later, but right now, in the only lifetime any of us ever get.
Happy 2025 from JNG Advisors!
If you are ready to embrace “radical doability” and looking for practice advice on achieving that next step, schedule a consultation with JNG Advisors today to learn more about our advisory services.