Most people are familiar with New Year’s resolutions. It’s something you intend to change about yourself, like wanting to lose weight, save money or get more rest.
I enjoy resolutions because I believe in fresh starts. Personally, I have made many resolutions and haven’t kept them. I have always been focused on myself in these resolutions, and I never explicitly stated them to my friends or family. If I did, I might have succeeded in keeping them.
In a 2015 Statistic Brain study, 41 percent of respondents said they regularly make New Year’s resolutions. Beyond that, only 58.4 percent keep the resolution alive after the first month. While this number does not seem promising, the idea of resolutions is not a recipe for failure, but rather a chance to incite change in your lifestyle.
The same study points out that people are 10 times more likely to succeed at keeping and achieving their resolutions if they explicitly state them. Logically, if each person who made a resolution shared their plans with their families and friends, more people would succeed at completing them.
Imagine this: instead of keeping a centralized goal to yourself, you spread the same goal to the minds of those close to you, starting a chain reaction of people wanting to achieve the same goal you have in mind.
For example, I make a resolution to be more kind to others. Then, I tell my closest friends about my resolution, and they decide to want to be more kind, too. They share the same idea with their friends, and before I know it, there are 50 people out there who have shared their common goals for the upcoming year: to be more kind.
This is a strange way of thinking about resolutions, right? It is nearly impossible to make a change in another person, but making a change in yourself is very doable. The greater the number of people who want to be better, the greater the number of people there will be in the world doing better.
Now more than ever people are hopeful for a great year. With events in 2016 wrecking society, such as shootings and the crazy U.S. election, I am hopeful, too. Division has rapidly infiltrated our current world. We can sew it back together by enthusiastically and tirelessly working together. It may sound cliché, but we can make the world a better place.
Whether you want to lose weight, save money, learn a new skill or be more kind, take someone along with you. Adding people to your resolution will increase the number of people looking to better themselves and others exponentially, which will then make resolutions a circular activity instead of a linear, isolated one.
In addition to increasing the number of people eager to improve, including people in your resolution trail adds to your satisfaction when completing or working towards this goal. This person may have positive encouragements to offer, or may see things differently than you. In this way, we can become more understanding and helpful to each other instead of constantly competing and tearing each other down.
I know it is an abstract idea, but a life well-lived is also an abstract concept. It is messy, things get confusing, and if we all band together to help each other through self-improvement, this may just be the thing we need to permanently leave the dumpster fire of 2016 behind and move forward going into humankind’s best year yet.
Myia Hambrick is a 21-year-old mass communication junior from Temple, Georgia.