WE ARE HERE TO GO [524]

Have you set any New Year’s resolutions for 2026?

Have any goals been set for the year ahead?

What rewards have you planned for when you achieve your Key Performance Indicators?

I have too often set myself up for failure by imposing targets on the organic flow of time, and too often have been disappointed when events didn’t work out as I hoped.

I have therefore been hesitant to risk further failure, but also unable to resist the post-Christmas, pre-New Year opportunity to, for once, switch off my attention.

The hopes of a single year can also be rendered trivial by considering in what “era” you may be residing. I have recently listened to a 2024 BBC radio essay series by Naomi Alderman, titled “The Third Information Crisis”, which led to her 2025 book “Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today”. Alderman posits that, following the advent of writing and printing, the internet has placed us into a tumult that “we will be in for the rest of our lives, changing us psychologically, socially and emotionally in ways that cannot be reversed.” With individuals no longer seeing eye to eye, Alderman implores us to step back from confrontation, but not to retreat from it, and “try not to burn anyone at the stake today.”

Always hoping for a clear horizon, being told instead how to deal with an unending choppy sea is not what I would rather be doing – I would rather move than acclimatise. Forming a New Year’s resolution then became a distraction from action. All I could think of was “break programming”, whether that be my own, or expectations or edicts imposed from outside, and to make sure the new plan sticks, to “get going”.

I then realised that “break programming, get going” was all I truly needed. Every resolution is a potential action that is given purposeful direction. I need not boil it down further, or add further ingredients, for breakfast is already served.

My use of “programming” is literal. Have you fallen into a routine either of someone’s or your own making, at work or elsewhere? Once you break the programme, and are you prepared for the time it will take to implement a new one? Do you have the knowledge to rewrite the code, or do you know how or where to find it?

“Get going” sounds chiding, especially if you decide to add an exclamation mark, but it is positively emphatic: make plans, but more importantly make a start and, most of all, keep going, regardless of any stumble. I also happen to prefer “get going” to “you got this”, something I hear in the instant I’m sure I haven’t got “this”.

Most importantly, whatever you want to do, no-one will tell you how to do that. Ease in, get started, and if it doesn’t work, make changes. If that works, make sure it doesn’t become too much of a routine, one you resolve to change at the next New Year. Onwards, and so on.