After Party
Note: For readers especially pressed for time, key takeaways, action steps, and additional resources for this post are provided at the end.
My overarching goal for this year is that we all—those of you who are reading these words, me who is writing them, and my wife and kids who say they plan to eventually read them—have our most fulfilling and meaningful year yet.
I think we can do it. I believe it will happen. And I very immodestly believe that this post can play an important part in us all achieving that inspiring result. The trick is that this entails reading through this post, which, once more, is inappropriately long.
You will have to make the call: take the extra minutes (hours? days?) to read (skim?) in order to achieve sublime familial transformation and peak parenting, or move along in and risk getting tricked into consuming more content about the Royal Family.
(At the time of publishing, the Royals are omnipresent in media. Clearly, there is something to them and something wrong with me for not getting it, but they are about seven billion people down my list of humans that are interesting, just below the Kardashians, who at least have an admirable work ethic.)
Resolution haters
Before plunging into the way in which we can all harness the newness of this year as an opportunity for personal and familial greatness, we have to address the elephant in the make-the-most-of-the-new-year room: New Year’s resolution deniers.
It has become fashionable in recent years to not only forgo the age-old practice of making—and failing to keep—New Year’s resolutions, but to respond to anyone expressing interest such a resolution tradition with disdain. When did New Year’s resolutions become triggering?
You likely have had some version of this experience. With the new year approaching, you try to make polite conversation with the person checking you out at the grocery store, ask if he/she/they will be making resolutions, only to receive a jarring response.
“Resolutions don’t work! Everyone knows that! Just go to gym on January 31 and you’ll see everyone has already given up! Besides, my therapist says we are still all building up our psychic resilience after the trauma of COVID and I shouldn’t worry about growth now! How dare you even ask me that ridiculous conversational trope! And do you want paper or g-d d-mn plastic!”
What is frustrating about these all too familiar exchanges is that it goes without saying that New Year’s resolutions don’t work. Of course, but isn’t that the point?
The process of setting New Year’s resolutions and then abandoning them within days is sort of like burning a little effigy that lets us all off the hook aspiring in the new year. We set out to do something, fail fast, and then we can move on with our lives: that is precisely why New Year’s resolutions are so great!
At least, that is the line of reasoning I should have shared in that grocery store exchange. That, and: you can clearly see that I brought my own heavy duty bag and am not the type to take paper or plastic, your super high strung grocery checkout person!!
Getting serious—if not for us, for the kids
While New Year’s resolutions are arguably absurd, the absurdity has nothing to do with what haters imagine—it is not because they don’t work, but because they are such a comically inadequate form of annual goal setting and life planning.
Zig Zigler observed that most people will put more energy into planning an upcoming vacation than they do into planning their overall lives. For most of us (and I have historically been at the top of the list), this has been true, and I suspect that many of us carry around a sense of cognitive dis-ease about this reality.
Our default mode to living is too much improvisation. Too much life whack-a-mole. It is unnerving. Many of us also know better because we work in a business or other organization where we routinely witness that a disciplined approach to goal setting and annual planning can not only work, but is almost impossible to imagine doing without.
All organizations are different, and their approaches to planning get highly detailed, but they likely all some variation of: review the past year’s performance and then, based in part on that past performance, engage in some forecasting, goal setting and resource allocation for the coming year.
We don’t find this level of discipline and intentionality odd when we are working in it. There are not, I believe, many organizational planning deniers out there; we definitely don’t expect to hear of a CEO hopping on a call with investors and say: we’re not setting targets this year; they don’t work!
The idea that most of us don’t engage in similar planning for our personal lives—planning that includes resolving to meet some goals or targets that, yes, we may in fact fail to meet—is a behavioral choice that is common and understandable, but probably not something to accept simply because intentionally pursuing goals is hard.
And even if some of us decide that it is too late for us, that we have made it this far in our lives by winging it every year and we can’t change now—this probably is not the system, or lack there of, that we want to bequeath to our kids.
My parents have, so far, done a good job of raising me (I say ‘so far’ because, while I am 57, and they are in their 80s, I don’t want them thinking their work is done. (Despite all of my graying, balding, and wrinkling, I am still not fully baked and think there is plenty of room for parenting—lessons about how to build a personal brand in 2023 would be a good place to start).
While they did plenty of good, my parents, like your parents and everyone else’s, never sat us down and suggested we review the previous year or establish goals and targets for the coming year as a powerful tool for living our most fulfilling lives. And this is one of the reasons why the whole New Year’s Resolution farce (set resolution and abandon) continues to exist.
And so I suggest to all the readers who are fellow parents: This. Stops. Now. We need to roll up our sleeves and engage with our kids in system of annual life planning as a central practice for leading an intentional, reflective life that is likely to include accomplishments that might otherwise never materialize.
Looking back to go forward
As with organizations, sensible planning for our families and selves in the new year begins with reflecting on highs and lows for the past year. A sense of what worked and didn’t in the past year helps set the course for the new year we have begun.
The biggest challenge to this type of reflection is to not simply rely on the events and achievements that first come to mind, but to put in the extra effort and go a bit deeper, because we all invariably did far more than we give ourselves credit for over the course of any past year.
For those who engage in the dying practice of writing holiday letters, this activity can serve as a place to start looking back on all that happened, while the more modern approach for this type of reflection is to start scrolling through the hundreds or thousands of photos that we all snapped in the past year to trigger more detailed recollections.
Another way of reviewing the past year is to seek out data points. In our own household, we have turned to Dreambox, the math app that one of the kids uses to see not only all of the minutes on the app (well over a thousand), but also to review all the learning standards covered. Duolingo, similarly, provided good data in the form of an annual report.
Those of us with fitness watches have relatively easy access to how much physical activity we engaged in on a weekly basis and what our average sleep looked like. And Audible sent an annual report that included shocking statistics—including the fact that members of our family pressed play (which includes telling Echo devices to play) on Audible recordings over 23,000 times in the course of listening for over 400 hours (again, this is the family as a whole).
You can also just ask your kids to do some sleuthing and compile their personal facts for the past year. They can develop a list of the books they read. Their favorite moments. The new things they tried. And for 2023, they can keep stickies or notes within their phones with running lists of these categories to make this easier in the future.
Part of what is so positive about this effort to look back is the psychic boost the whole family is likely to experience in the course of being reminded of all the good that transpired and was achieved. As I went over a list I compiled with my kids, they repeatedly had these happy oh-yeah! moments as we revisited all they had done.
(In my own case of my managing my life and self, I have recently developed a weekly practice of reviewing my wins and misses as part of planning the upcoming week, and just over the course of a week, I am repeatedly surprised by how much personal progress I would otherwise not give myself credit for.)
While the focus of looking back is mostly on successes, which in turn inspire ideas of what we want more of in the coming year, our failures and misses can be among the most helpful reflections when it comes to planning the future. This can be as simple as noting that maybe there was too much low-grade family bickering in 2022, or maybe that look at the data suggested Xbox time climbed too high.
The Power of the Blank Page
After we review the previous year, we can turn our thoughts, and those of our families, to goals and targets for the coming year. As you do, hopefully you and yours will allow yourselves to think big for a bit. And to help with that, I suggest thinking about the power of the blank page, which is a lesson provided by a favorite writing teacher.
This teacher used to encourage us to pause before starting a writing session and just consider for a moment the blank page and all the possibility it represented. There is something deceptively momentous about a blank page—we could take our writing in any direction we could imagine. It is can be too easy to get in a rut and forget how much freedom we have
While our lives, and those of our families, are subject to far more constraints than that of a fiction writer, the lesson still applies, as our lives far less bounded than we assume when caught up in simply trying to get through the day.
Once a year, then, it makes sense to push ourselves to think of the blank pages that are the upcoming days of the year. This message of possibility is all the more relevant to our kids, who really do have time on their side, and many more days and years to work with than their parents. We should make sure they do engage in this sort of blank-page, big-picture thinking.
For adults, this big thinking can be a good time to consider a topic that is every bit as potentially triggering as New Year’s resolutions, not to mention every bit as associated with failure as they are, and that of course is: bucket lists.
Bucket lists, while a touching on some level, are just so flawed in design. An ironclad rule of thumb for any sort of successful project is: don’t establish the timeline as ‘anytime up until the moment I die’. Human nature being what it is, there is a tendency to put such goals off, which clashes further with death’s annoying habit of not giving much advance notice of its arrival.
Like piñatas, bucket lists are effectively designed to fail. That is, unless we manage, when surveying the coming year and thinking about all that possibility, to commit to making at least one happen. As you read these words, does anything come to mind? Could this be the year to knock out that long simmering special something?
I was blessed to have had a midlife crisis at 22 years of age that led me to center by early adulthood around bucket-list-type pursuits and living. As such my goals are of a different flavor now, but as I have been working on this post I have had to confront the idea that at least one big aspiration does remain, which is the somewhat cliched: live in a foreign country.
And the amazing thing about possibility, as I have been working on this section, it occurred to me that I should open my thinking about what would qualify as ‘living in’, which led to the idea that renting an apartment in Oaxaca, Mexico, for a couple weeks should qualify, and like that, technology being what it is, I was reserving an apartment on Vrbo.
(Very, very serious financial obstacles loom for this plan, but I am thrilled to have taken a single step, as there have been years and years of non-progress on that dream.)
Another tool to consider when thinking about the coming year is the list of family learning standards that you may have started developing if you are an especially disciplined and loyal reader of these posts (for those who lost by this reference, check out this past post: The Power of Destinations).
These standards are the supplementary learning targets that we may all want to devise for our kids to fill in the gaps left by K-12’s slow evolution and arising our own creative thinking about we want our kids to learn (often inspired by the things we wished we’d learned) before they are emancipated into adulthood.
If my own family is serious about those standards, a number of them will need to be tackled in 2023, especially for our oldest, who is hurtling toward entering high school in the fall.
Pausing for the teachable
Hopefully, I am conveying this all well enough that you are getting a sense for how an exercise along these lines really does offer a lot of opportunity for our kids to learn valuable life lessons—about the value of being intentional about how he we live our precious lives, and the value of aiming to take on some big things, and about how reflecting on past successes and failures informs future direction.
One other teachable moment is a subtle, but powerful lesson that, to do justice to it, will likely take up an entire future post, but can be previewed here. It relates back to that powerful blank page and the fact that, when we give our kids the opportunity to think big about what they hope to experience or accomplish in the coming year, many of their minds will go as blank as a fresh sheet of printer paper.
There are a variety of reasons this happens. To begin with, young people simply lack the life experience and worldly knowledge necessary to understand and have context for all the options that exist. But there’s an even more surprising and less remarked on reality of being young that can make it challenging for kids to come up with aspirations for the future: they are all still figuring out who they are.
This may seems obvious to us adults. We are familiar with the paradox of life that, while we are all as unique and different from one another as our fingerprints, it can take years and even decades (and lifetimes) to figure who really are in the sense of what most want out of life, what we really enjoy, what really makes us thrive and shine, etc.
There is something so odd about paradox. Give the fact that we have consciousness—are aware that we are an I in these bodies—most of us as kids assumed for too long that our uniqueness is all self-evident, not realizing how much of our drives in our youth are often masked desires to please parents, to fit in with friends, to go along with or rebel against the dominant culture.
That is all a big heavy existential lesson that I am not suggesting we dump on our tykes in the dawn of a new year. Instead, we can at least treat this annual planning and future visioning as a chance for our kids to begin apprenticing in the subtle art of learning who they are and what makes them tick.
We can encourage kids to pay attention to thoughts about their lives that may seem just like a flicker of a thought. Some desire they had that seemed to come and go (maybe because they didn’t think we parents would think it was a good idea). Or we can encourage them to literally sleep on the question of what do they want try or focus more in the new year. An answer might be waiting for them first thing in the morning, thanks to the way our unconscious mind works.
Or still another way of helping our kids learn about their desires involves a hack that I have long used to better understand what my authentic self was interested in. This technique involves paying attention to moments where we feel jealous over what someone else is doing or has accomplished—because the reality is that this emotion can feel like a negative emotion—jealousy—is often simply a revelation of our own acute interest and desire for a possible turn in my own life.
If our kids report a pang of jealousy when a friend has mentioned that they are doing something new—the girl who is joining a skateboarding team, the boy volunteering at the Humane Society—this may well be that inner self waving its arms and trying to get our attention.
And if our kids are still at a loss, still struggling with the blank page of a new year, they are fortunate to have us for parents, we who are happy to take a moment early in the new year to think about their trajectory and devise some new activities, learning, or experiences that will hopefully help this process of self discovery.
Document and set in motion
Once we and our families sketch out goals for the coming year, they need to be documented, with some sort of timing for completion built into them (something other than ‘by the end of the year’), and one of the best tools for this is a calendar. Using a calendar forces the issue of getting specific as we are playing around with those new goals and aspirations.
Once a calendar is involved, an aspiration like ‘reconnect with old high school friends’ meets the question: when?
Jesse Itzler, who is an entrepreneur turned part-time lifestyle guru (focusing on helping people live bigger lives), is a proponent of using calendars to help people live their best lives—to the point that his year long coaching program is centered on a giant wall calendar that is included with the $995 cost of his program.
We can of course print out our own calendars for free. Or create a simple Google doc that lists 2023 family of goals with target dates. What is critical is that these docs not be tossed in a drawer or left in the cloud only to be recalled when counting down the final seconds of this new year.
This is the inadvertent lesson of goal-setting that my kids have been learning in school since kindergarten, particularly as their elementary school followed a practice of setting goals at fall conferences and then only looking at them again at spring conferences, with absolutely no reference to their goals in the intervening months.
To have any prayer of reaching goals, they need to be squarely in our faces. On the refrigerator, next to the bathroom mirror, written on our hands. Nothing short will work. Of course for families who take to holding family meetings, as I write about in Return of the Family Meeting, this is a great weekly topic: how are we doing on our plan for the new year?
Finally, no discussion of making annual goals is complete without, yes, reference to the role of accountability. Behavior experts always counsel us to tell others about these goals and ideally have accountability partners. Which is a golden opportunity for parents to put our kids to work.
While kids don’t always like to do what they are told, they usually love to tell their parents what to do. As such, consider tasking kids, especially little ones, with being family accountability police and keeping the annual plan on course.
This was a practice that schools took in the early 1970s back when the campaign against smoking was really gearing up. Some savvy health official managed to get schools teaching little kids about the dangers of their parents smoking and how we could help them quit.
My father, today going strong at 85, has long said how difficult it was to enjoy smoking as his cherubic kids were pleading with him not to kill himself. And that was if he could find his smokes, as we kids felt emboldened by our teachers to hide and even flush them.
Thus, in the same way that our kids made a great tool for helping us locate our cars in crowded parking lots before we had Tiles or AirTags in the glove compartment (okay, help daddy remember this: we are in Elephant Green West), they can be power tools for ensuring family goal accountability.
Unforeseen rabbit hole
This is the point at which I should be finishing this essay up (or let’s be honest, that point has passed), preferably wrapping the whole line of thinking up with a nice pretty inspiring bow and sending you on your way.
That would be nice. But my commitment to you, and other readers, and this broader effort is such that I need to confess that in my own case of going through this practice of reviewing the past year and setting targets for 2023, things spiraled totally out of control.
I am sharing this less tidy reality because I think it too offers helpful lessons, but for those understandably ready for the bow and send-off, please proceed to the next section.
The issue I encountered reminds me of a friend’s experience with his old house. He had decided to renovate the upstairs bathroom, only to have work on the bathroom uncover serious structural issues for the house that led to a renovation of the entire upstairs.
As I reflected on last year, I could see that I have done a good job helping my youngest—who is in the age range of the kids who were most set back by the pandemic and the rapid move to online learning—to remediate her learning loss and get her in a much more positive place.
Meanwhile, with my older child, I realize I have been guilty of the same thing I fault schools for doing: taking advantage of the fact that he is on solid ground, that he is performing in Lake Wobegonian prized ‘above average’ category. The problem with this is that he is not being challenged to the extent he should be; he has the potential be a racehorse, but I have been okay with him giving pony rides.
My writing, in emails and webpages, is all inspired by a fervent belief that we parents live in an increasingly golden age for supplementing school learning and addressing the gaps in what kids should learn for their future grown-up lives. As I have thought about both my kids and this new year, I am forced to see that annual goals and aspirations are not nearly detailed enough to ensure the kids experience all the supplemental learning during the years that they should.
This line of thinking reminded me that schools break time down into quarters, and then teachers are tasked with hitting targets at the month and week level; I sense that we are going to need to work toward some kind of similar granularity for our supplemental learning efforts.
That is the bathroom renovation gone awry; there is more work revealed beyond the annual planning I set out to write about. I don’t yet know what solution will make most sense, but I can see that just understanding the need for more detail is progress. (Actually, I do have a partial solution in mind that I am excited to try, and excited to share, but enough is enough for this post.)
Wrapping up, at last, with bow
Don’t let the resolution haters win. Review your year with the family; spend time brainstorming what you all would be excited to experience and achieve in 2023; document it and keep it in sight; and, for serious accountability, set your kids on the case. (And caveat emptor; realize that this exercise may in turn reveal—as I am now dealing with—the need for more granularity.)
We are, I believe, torn. We love stories of people overcoming overwhelming obstacles and managing phenomenal achievements. We also harbor a side of ourselves that views the exercise of resolving to achieve better too pollyanna, possibly even privileged.
Part of the issue surely has to do the fact of failure; life for most of us is continually making peace with the reality that every day we add to the epic, never-ending sea of things we aspired to do but ran out of time to complete or otherwise got distracted from. Every single day in the world of adults is filled with so many ways we fall short of what we intended.
And yet, we have all already come so far in life, and if we all pause right now, reflect on some achievement for our kids, or ourselves, or spouses, that we would be thrilled to have managed by year end, and put a plan in place, get serious about accountability, dig deep, it may well happen. Despite the odds. Despite all the failure.
How dramatic is that? How exciting? How lucky are we to be alive?
Take-aways, caveats, details, fine print
While New Year’s resolutions are deservedly mocked, it is not because they are bad idea; instead, it because we should go further in planning our aspirations for each year.
To gain perspective on the need for personal and familial annual planning, it can help to consider a high-level version of the annual planning that all businesses undertake—reflect on past successes and failures; set course for the coming year.
For those who feel like they have gotten by without the need for some mildly formal annual planning, and who happen to be parents, consider how beneficial the practice would be for your kids to start building.
Reviewing the prior year not only helps in prioritizing the coming year, but it is invariably a great gratitude exercise and source of mental uplift, as we have all done and achieved so much more in a year than we give ourselves credit for.
As part of looking forward, we should take steps to make sure we allow ourselves some big picture, blue sky thinking, possibly even considering if there are bucket-list-type items that we might want try taking on in the coming year.
Kids may struggle with thinking big in this way in part because—though this will be news to them—they so don’t yet understand their unique inner nature, which is another reason that this practice of endeavoring to plan can be valuable.
Documenting our goals, aspirations, and plans is critical to having a chance for making them real; calendars are one of the best tools for forcing us to lay out the timing of our annual goals and plans.
Additional best practices for making our plans happen include posting the documents around the house, discussing progress at family meetings, and tasking kids with family accountability to the plan.
Realize, for those (like the author) who are interested in getting increasingly aggressive in enhancing and supplementing the K-12 model our kids are experience, this annual planning exercise may reveal a need for far more granular planning.
There are many, many resources out there for conducting annual reviews, setting annual goals. Feel free to reach out for recommendations, should you be interested in more.