Why We Make New Year Resolutions and Fail: A Half-Assed Attempt at Psychology to Understand What’s Really Behind This Dumb-Ass Ritual.

Alright, resolutions. First off, I have to complain. I will go on a short tirade before I pump out all the data. I am not fond of resolutions, yet I make them or think about doing them every single year. I guess it’s all well and necessary to set goals for myself at the start of every year, and then reflect at the end if I got stuff done, or if I’m any different or if I’m a better person. Why do we wait till a new year comes around to make self-promises? Why can’t we make them during some boring day in August (nothing ever happens in August), or on really ordinary days while we’re wasting time sitting on the crapper? Why romanticize and attach the idea of a fresh start to a fresh set of desk calendars? Why commit when the general average of resolutions getting done is 17%?

Are we really that fond of shooting ourselves in the foot that we’d do it annually?

I just find the whole idea weirdly fascinating.

Let’s try to get to the bottom of this… if there is a bottom to this.

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Harris Interactive (www.harrisinteractive.com) conducted a survey commissioned by Dorthy.com (www.dorthy.com) that came up with some interesting and (ho-hum) expected numbers:

• Women (74%) are more likely to make New Year’s Resolutions than men (54%) among adults who have ever made resolutions;
• Men (22%) are more likely to keep their resolutions than women (14%)
• Out of 2,256 respondents, only 1,495 (66%) have ever made a New Year’s resolution.
• Out of the 1,495 resolution-makers, only 17% always or often keep them. That’s more or less 256 changed lives. (Remains to be seen if those were changed for the better. Let’s talk again in 2011.)

Seems bleak, no? Have I talked you out of losing all that extra weight yet? Hang on, we’re not done yet. FranklinCovey Products (www.franklinplanner.com) also came up with their own survey that yielded these wonderful statistics:

Top 10 resolutions from last year (2009):

1. Get out of debt or save money
2. Lose weight
3. Develop a healthy lifestyle or healthy habit (eat better, exercise)
4. Get organized
5. Spend more time with family and friends
6. Develop a new skill or talent
7. Work less, play more
8. Other
9. Break an unhealthy habit (smoking, drinking, overeating)
10. Change employment

FranklinCovey Products’ survey further dashes your hopes – 75% of the respondents broke their resolutions in 3 months, and around one-third break them by the end of January.

Sad stuff, really.

But wait; let’s put all these ball-busting stats in perspective. The success behind pulling off these self-commitments lies not in the numbers – there is only you. Yes, you get to be a hero.

Wait – I’m only getting to the perspective part. You being responsible to your success depend on a few things: Self-control or Self-Efficacy, awareness of Comfort and Control, and understanding Choice and Commitment.

Self-Control/Self-Efficacy

I shouldn’t even be talking about this, nor am I qualified, because I have so little of it. Yet with whatever little ounce of it I have, I can still proudly say that I’ve had some sort of success with most of the resolutions I made in the last three years. I’ve basically reinvented myself in the last three years. (Yet I cannot for the life of me figure out why I still write the same way.)

The point is this – It’s how you see yourself and how much you hold yourself capable. Resolutions are goals. You can treat your resolution of cutting back on the midnight ice cream binges the same way you commit to paying off your credit card bill on the 5^th of every month. These are all just data in the brain, but the way you deal with these things is what matters – they call it cognition or some other weird word, and let’s not get into that.

But what I’d do like to get into is this – our effectiveness in accomplishing any sort of goal is determined by our commitment to a choice. It’s a choice to keep paying our credit card bill on time so that we can keep a good credit rating, or so that we can maintain our nasty buying impulses. It is also a choice to double down on an ice cream pint when you promised yourself 20 scoops ago that you’d only have one. You made the choice to stuff your face rather than lose the pounds. So that’s basically how self-efficacy contributes to your success (or in the examples above, loser-level failure.)

Dr. John M. Grohol on his blog mentions it like this –

…individuals with high self-efficacy attribute failure to insufficient effort, while individuals with low self-efficacy attribute failure to deficient ability. Higher self-efficacy generally is correlated with a greater likelihood of achieving one’s goals.

So where does all this self-efficacy bullshit show up in life, anyway? I thought you’d never ask.

Comfort and Control

We are crazy creatures of habit. Why crazy? Because we are beings who hate being bored, hate the idea of sitting 2 hours in traffic, and just hate to sit still. And yet we go to the same coffee place, eat the same bad food, and walk the same routes to work. We continue to do the same boring shit day after day after day. I’m getting bored already just talking about it.

We are all about comfort and control. (Alright, maybe not ALL about comfort and control. We’re mostly about it? 70%? 80? I don’t know. Somebody needs to come up with a survey.) We repeat our daily experiences because we want to be in control of the outcome, and we pre-empt acceptance of the outcome, good or bad. We visit our usual coffee place and drink the worst-tasting coffee there is and complain about it all day, but we go anyway because it’s the only coffee place you pass by on the way to work. At these moments, we’ve already made a choice and accepted our fate.

Yet in between these moments there are opportunities for change. They come in the form of life-altering events, or the New Year. They come in the form of epiphanies. They come in the form of odd-shaped coffee-latte swirls and potato chips. Don’t even get me started on cloud formations. You get to come up with the things that you want to do differently. They may be life-altering things, or they maybe something as simple as putting your pants on before your socks when you’ve always been a socks-before-pants kind of guy.

Choice and Commitment

How do we get things done, really? Most anything that we do is preempted by a choice. And we get them done when we commit to those choices. How do we commit? We find value in whatever it is that we are choosing to do. So lose weight because you want to get healthy, not because you’re getting too fat. Save money not because you want to pay off your debts, but because you want to be financially secure and responsible. Get more organized so you can be more efficient, not so that you can spend more hours drinking with friends. All these things will become available to you anyway as long you keep within the process.

And resolutions are a process. That is the most important part of this whole thing. I guess that’s why 75% fail at it is because they do not understand that. It is lather, rinse, repeat. You have to decide to commit to that change, and you have to form a plan around it, just like all the other routines we do in life. If you decide to quite smoking, you have to quit every day. Lather, rinse, repeat. This is then where all that self-efficacy weirdness comes into play. Let’s see how effective you are about it.

The moment you step out of that routine, the moment you let go of a little bit of that control, you are presented with an opportunity to do things differently. You make the choice. Add all this with a commitment to change and finding value in whatever it is you are doing, and I guarantee a way higher probability of success than 17%. If not, then I was wrong. I’m no psychologist, after all.

Resources:

Google.

Links to this article:

The Psychology of New Year’s Resolutions:

http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2008/12/28/the-psychology-of-new-years-resolutions/

Business Wire: Dorthy.com New Year’s Resolutions Survey Findings:

http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20081229005180&newsLang=en

http://eon.businesswire.com/news/eon/20081218005288/en/7-Habits/FranklinCovey/FranklinCovey-Products

Sweet New Toys from Canon (50D) and Nikon (D90)

Photokina 2008 is barely a month away, and camera giants Nikon and Canon (or Canon and Nikon, for my latter-biased friends ) have started pumping out new babies to hungry photography enthusiasts the world over.

Canon is said to be releasing the EOS 50D, a sister model of last year’s popular release, the 40D. Nikon, on the other hand, is set to release the D90, the world’s first DSLR with Movie Mode (at a sweet 720p HDTV quality, albeit forgettable Mono sound quality, so that they can still say, “hey, at least we still bothered.”).

I’m a Nikon user, and I love my D70s (which is now in danger of being replaced and moved into a DSLR nursing home if there ever was one), but I can appreciate what both brands have to offer.  If I had assimilated myself into the Canon family first, I would probably still be using the brand until now. I’ll let other people defend their brand advocacies and just nod along to each argument.

So here’s a quick look at some readily comparable features available in the upcoming Canon 50D and Nikon D90:

	Nikon D90	Canon EOS 50D
Effective pixels	12.2 mp	15.1mp
AF Points	11 points	9 points
LCD Monitor	3.0″ TFT LCD	3.0″ TFT LCD
ISO	ISO 200 to 3200	ISO 100 to 1600
Continuous Shooting	4.5 fps	6.3 / 3.0 fps, 60/90 frames
Damage to Bank Account	$1299 with 18-105 VR kit lens (or roughly around Php 60k)	$1599 with 18-200 IS lens (or roughly around Php 72k)

If you need more facts and specs so you can brag about how great the new Nikon is to your Canon-toting friends (or vice-versa), visit both hands-on previews at the ever-reliable Dpreview website (Or straight here for the EOS 50D review, and here for the Nikon D90 review).

Restless Wander Nominated for Best Travel Blog

The Philippine Blog Awards 2008

I had to interrupt my daily routine (of doing nothing) to deliver really important news — My good friend Trish Morente’s travel blog Restless Wander, has been nominated for Best Travel Blog for the 2008 Philippine Blog Awards! Way to go Trish! Everybody’s proud of you and rooting for you to get shortlisted among the finalists And although this isn’t as newsworthy, I’ve also added you onto my Blogroll (Now there’s two of you in there )! Woohoo! You’re not only being nominated for awards, you’re being added onto people’s blogrolls! You’re on a winning streak!

They’re posting the finalists soon, so I’ll be sure to check back, and I expect to see your fine blog in there, because you deserve it! Good luck!

Update: Another friend of mine’s blog, karlo rules the world without strobes, has also been nominated under the Best Photography Blog category. Congrats Karlo! Pa-Outback burger ka naman!

POTD – Waiting for Someone to Buy a Drink for

The bar is open... and so am I!

I was browsing through my hard drive for pictures that I could send to my friends for fun, and I dug this one up. This is my friend from way back in high school and best friend, Nathaniel (if he asks, tell him I didn’t use his full name), sitting at the bar, during one of our friend’s gigs at Dayo Bar in Quezon City.

So why post this? 2 things –

1.) I’m convincing Nat2x(as we shall call Nathaniel from now on) to use this on Facebook as his profile picture as a symbolism of his singlehood. Since he’s looking to be dating, why not advertise it right? So here you go, a complimentary bump for you on the photoblog.

2.) I’m trying to generate questions and conversation on the pictures that I post, and this one just made a host of questions run through my mind when I looked at it. If it does the same for you, please do share it I’m hoping to share this with Nat2x later on, and intend to have a good laugh over it.

Also, Every photo or series that I post will be called Picture of the Day (Hence the acronym in this post’s title) or Series of the Day. It just seemed cooler to be naming things this way, don’t you think? Later all -D-

Update: Nat2x just saw me putting this on the blog, and he approves of this message.

River

River, the Beach Lab.

This is River. He’s the star of the San Juan Surf Resort in Urbiztondo, La Union, aside from Luke Landrigan, of course, the other La Union women’s attraction and surf star (a shoutout to Luke and the good people of Billabong Surf School at the resort! See you guys soon!). This lazy, irresistable lab is the epitome of the surfer’s lifestyle. If this dog could talk, he’d sound like stoned surfer Jeff Spicoli (Sean Penn in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”), whose portrayal just stereotyped surfers everywhere (Surfers aren’t stoners duuude. Nooot coool.)

River here, however, has that same surfers’ demeanor. He just loves to hang out at the beach, loves the water, loves all the love and attention that the ladies give him. But to answer the lingering question in your mind, NO, the dog can’t surf. At least, not to my knowledge. I’ll be sure to watch out for that the next time I go back.

But he sure can sunbathe like he’s being paid to do it. Awesome.

There Are No Accidents…

… but there is this photoblog. Hi! My name is Don Manganar, and I am a freelance photographer and writer. This here is my first photoblogproject. I have blogged before, and have been shooting for 2 years, so I can’t really say that this is something new to me, but I can tell you for sure that I am very excited about this project. Let’s just say that I’ve made a commitment with myself to keep being immersed in the very things that I love doing — writing, photography, and the Internets.

The challenge in the past has always been to keep the blog interesting and updated, but now most of my excitement comes from the fact that I have lots of photos that I want to share with you, both old, current, and new (wait, I said both. Sorry.) No use for all my pictures to lay wasted in my hard drive. Might as well post them, and maybe you can tell me how the heck I got the shot to come out like it did.

I really hope to make the site user-friendly, interactive, and fun. I hope to see lots of discussion, criticism (constructive or otherwise), and advice, that will help me, and all other photographers or writers out there. So expect this site to be constantly evolving, as I also hope to evolve into a better photographer-slash-writer through our interactions.

I’m really looking forward to this! And I hope you are too See you in the next post!

Cheers,

Don