The new year is here and we’ve probably decided on a resolution to pursue for 2022. Wonderful! Maybe that resolution is to achieve a promotion or raise. Maybe it’s to finally fix that leaky sink. Whatever we resolved to focus on, those goals will remain just as far as they were last year lest we review our capability to effectively bring them into reality. New goals are nothing without the means to achieve them.
We can’t just imagine a promotion and suddenly wake up the next morning with that sparkly new position handed to us. That leaky sink just wont magically fix itself. Our goals won’t materialize without us executing a strategy in pursuit of them.
Educator Jeroen Kraaijenbrink, writing for Forbes, notes several reasons why strategy execution fails. While Kraaijenbrink refers specifically to organizational strategies, we can easily check this observations against ourselves as individuals, especially in regards to areas such as our level of commitment, available resources, and the clarity of our objective. Getting promoted isn’t exactly a clear resolution, after all. Instead, focus on what steps we need to take to get us that promotion.
While many ideas might sound great, we should only pursue those within our realm of control and ability. This is not to say that we should shy away from challenges, but that we instead acknowledge our limitations and evaluate our resources. How much time we have to work on this? How much do we know about plumbing? Can we easily find time or learn what we need to?
Entrepreneur Mark Yegge discusses in this TED Talk five steps to execute ideas and goals. Among these steps, Yegge suggests that we should develop plans that best use our available resources. If we want to learn a new skill to qualify for that promotion, we should perhaps divide that objective into weekly goals, challenging ourselves to master one aspect of that skill every week until the target deadline. If we want to fix that leak, watch tutorials on how to do it until we feel confident to tackle it.
Today, let’s review our resolutions. What steps do we need to take to achieve them? What might obstruct us? What can we do to jump over those obstructions? Once we’ve figured that out, we can saunter forward, confident that our resolutions eagerly await us.
“We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.”
— Edith Lovejoy Pierce
Author
by Faraz Gafoor
Faraz Gafoor is a content strategist, writer, and human-data aficionado. His passion for scientific analysis of everything—from the presentation of data to the way we communicate—is driven by a deep love of understanding how we process and make sense of our surroundings. His curiosity and a never-ending search for prolific and poetic perfection poignantly fit his Prism Personality of a double Scientist.
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