Finding a New Year’s Resolution for Your Life

Written By Eric Nielsen

How are your New Years Resolutions going so far? Maybe you were happy to hear this question because so far you have been successful in them so far. Or maybe it is a cruel reminder, incurring memories of recent failure. This was the first year I totally neglected a New Years celebration. Sadly, I was in bed watching the clock tick midnight on my iphone just as I was falling asleep. And I didn’t make any New Year’s resolutions. So New Year’s Day, I felt guilty. “How can I really make the most of the new year if I haven’t made any resolutions?” But then I remembered a resolution I have been working on recently with my wife which is bigger than any New Year’s resolution: a resolution for our lives.

Writing a mission statement for my life was introduced to me before by friends. On a recent weekend getaway with my wife Val, we both decided that a mission statement for our life was exactly what we need. It is too easy to float in life, to wake up years later and realize you have wasted far more time than you imagined. Many companies begin with a mission statement for their existence. Today, some of the most successful companies in the world would not have been so if they didn’t have a huge vision and purposeful mission statement focusing their existence.

As Val and I have been thinking about our life mission statement we have found that there are no shortcuts. To think seriously about a mission statement for your life requires thinking seriously about the meaning of life, the ultimate purpose for our existence. To do otherwise would be to try to live in a virtual reality, disconnected from what is real and what we have been made for.

Would you make a mission statement for your life?

If you decide to do this, I commend you! As you are crafting it, these two questions will be important to ask yourself:

Is it attainable? To want to be the Prime Minister of Canada if I am a 70 year old who hated social studies in school and has no political experience is fun to dream about, but will never happen. No matter how much positive thinking we’ve been told to have, some things will never happen. I remember hearing a professor of mine recently sharing about a friend of his who was quite happy and all of a sudden became depressed. No one could understand why. Later on, this man finally explained why to my professor. He woke up one morning and realized that in his current life situation, a dream he had for a long time was simply not going to happen, it was no longer attainable.

Is it breakable? If one day you attain what you set out for in your life mission statement but that same thing can be taken from you or fail to satisfy you, then you have invested your life in something which is breakable. This is the danger we must be aware of in considering our life purpose.

If you put your hope in a career, approval from others, a relationship, or children, then if you don’t get the job offer, a close friend rejects you, the relationship is crumbling, or you can’t have kids, how secure really is what you most want in life?

I’m working now on my life mission statement. Do you know yours?

Tags: Eric Nielsen, Mycravings, new year's resolutions, purpose