2024: How do I keep my resolution?

The most important conversations you’ll ever have are the ones you’ll have with yourself.

-       David Goggins

I love the new year! A time to renew, refocus, and revalue.

Resolutions explode! Gyms fill up! The health food shelves are swept clean!

Time to learn a skill, lose weight, and reinvent ourselves!

Right?

According to the Fishers College of Business, 9% of Americans make New Year’s resolutions. 23% quit the resolution before the end of the first week. 43% bail by the end of January.

Time Magazine states that 80% of resolutions are broken by February. By the end of February, well, you can see where this is going.

Why? It’s the New Year, isn’t it? Why so bleak?

I’ll tell you why.

Because nothing in the world changes. Not one damn thing. Only the date. Everything stays exactly the same as it was the day before. All the same problems, all the same reasons you haven’t done whatever it is you set out to do in the first place. Nothing about a new date will bump up your success.

Hell, the holiday itself was manufactured by people! Nothing magical happens, folks! All the ads, marketing, and messages are geared to make you believe something magical occurs on New Year’s Day and you should spend your money on superfluous stuff. Stuff that, more often than not, you toss into a closet or a spare room and never use again.

So what’s a person to do? How do you win?

Here’s how – you accept that there’s nothing special about the date of January 1st and set an intention to establish consistency.

Consistency.

Regardless of the date. Regardless of gimmicky holidays and ads. Regardless of how you feel.

Build consistency.

Here’s what I want you to do:

Pick a new thing. Nothing big, just something new that is in line with what you know you need to do. As an example, if you want to start exercising – commit to doing 10 pushups a day, every day.

Do it every day! If you can’t do 10 pushups all at once, do them in sets; 2 at a time if that’s all you can do, but complete the 10!

There’s no rule that you can’t do more than 10 pushups a day, you can do whatever you want, but you must do at least 10 pushups a day, every day.

If you can keep it up for 30 days, you’ll complete 300 pushups! Do it for the entire year and you’ll knock out 3,650 pushups! Tell me that’s not a step in the right direction!

Building consistency is the secret. As my man, Chadd Wright said on a recent episode of Truck Talk, if you don’t learn to build in consistency, you’re guaranteed failure.

Consistency in anything you do is the secret weapon, folks. It’s the silver bullet.

If fitness is your goal, then the very next thing you need to do is hop online, find a 5k near you and sign up for that damn thing! DO it! Nothing will bolster your effort to grow consistent like knowing you have something coming up that you must train consistently for!

Your effort, your choice, your life!

David Odle is a trainer, fitness enthusiast, and author. He spent seven years in the military, primarily in the U.S. Marine Corps. He is a Spartan Race competitor, an avid fitness fan, and a 5k enthusiast. David's mission is to help people transform into better versions of themselves by tapping into their dormant capability. If you’d like to reach out to David, you can find him at www.davidodle.com.