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.

MAKE IT EASY ON YOURSELF [377]

I have made no new year’s resolutions for 2023, having realised that creating a slogan to encapsulate your hopes could be far more effective. Unsurprisingly, this comes from listening to “My Brother, My Brother and Me” [talked about in loving detail here: link], whose first episode of each year has become an hour-plus record of brainstorming. Previous highlights include “Twenty Grift-Teen, The Con is On”, “Frankenstein-Teen: Become the Monster” and 2013’s “Twenty-Dirt: Dig It up, Get It Out”. Each slogan has come to inform the tone of that year’s episodes and live shows, and is a perfect way to focus your mind on what kind of year you want.

“Twenty Twenty Free: You Have Arrived at Your Destination” is a slogan I arrived at very quickly, though a long time passed before accepting that my first idea was the best one. The only acceptable goals are achievable ones, otherwise you are constantly setting yourself up to fail, so if you really need to resolve anything in 2023, make it something you will give yourself a chance to achieve.

The age-old adage in advertising that “you don’t sell the sausage, you sell the sizzle” is what you are looking for – you are effectively selling your own possibilities to yourself. Thomas Watson coined “Think” in 1911 as the slogan for what would become IBM as he wanted his salesman to take everything into consideration, not just do what is expected in their role. Their eventual computer competitor, Apple, effectively replied with “Think different”, tying it to images of people who did just that, like Thomas Edison, Amelia Earhart and Alfred Hitchcock. Instead of the closed question posed by resolutions – you either achieve them, or you do not – the possibilities posed to yourself could inspire bigger achievements, or at least that should be the hope.

For obvious reasons, New Year’s resolutions were far harder to follow and achieve in 2020 and 2021, and 2022 has its own set of concerns. In the UK, the economic forecast is turbulent, with both inflation and energy bills to remain high, productivity weak, and consumer spending and business investment falling – no growth in the UK economy is expected until 2024. This is partially coming from Russia’s war in Ukraine, but also inflation that has led to strikes over pay taking place across the NHS, train companies and Royal Mail among others. No General Election is expected in the US or UK until 2024, unless the current British Prime Minister decides to hold it earlier, which is, depending on your political leaning, either a welcome relief or a missed opportunity.

Reading this gave me the impression that 2023 will effectively be overlooked in the grand scheme of things, a fallow year that will have to be worked past somehow. This isn’t really good enough, especially when I have previously talked about how the “Roaring Twenties” still haven’t really got started [link]. The year 2023 will really be what you make of it, and what better way to add charge to that journey by applying a slogan to it? Happy new year, everyone.