When you’re a creative, inspiration can come from almost anywhere. Part of our job is to be a receiver, with all of our senses set to input at all times so we can experience things going on around us. And, so often, we take inspiration from those things, especially when it comes from newsletters and blog posts.

And so it is with today’s post, and inspiration has come from author, political journalist and broadcaster Ian Dunt (excuse his language, which might not suit everyone):

https://iandunt.substack.com/p/happy-new-year-now-sort-your-fucking

“Resonate” is one of those words, whose meaning is clear, but flexible, and is often overused in attempts to sound clever. But – in not in any remote way an attempt to sound clever – this blog post resonated with me. It’s the sort of piece I wish I had written.

One quote (talking about waking early with stress and anxiety):

This happens to me whenever I can’t control something. I have dealt with big, serious problems without any sense of anxiety, simply because they’ve been in my control. But as soon as something affects me but is decided elsewhere, by other people, who may or may not be competent, I experience anxiety: a broiling sense of internal turnover, like someone’s kneading my soul.

These matters must be prioritised. It doesn’t matter how petty they are. Break them down, find solutions, implement, achieve progress, no matter how slow. 

Those last six words are most powerful, and indicate the problems with New Year Resolutions. In my experience, they are either:

a) too tightly focussed on achieving a specific outcome (e.g. stop smoking, begin volunteering, finally get that spare room decorated) which only have a binary outcome – success or failure

b) too wishy-washy to create the drive necessary to move away from current behaviours (e.g. drink less, lose weight)

This looks to be an inherently impossible conundrum – provide enough focus to create drive and desire, but not aim at a binary outcome. In engineering, we have a term called “inertia”, which often gets confused with “momentum” when, in fact, they’re (sort of) almost opposite terms.

Inertia is the resistance to begin moving from a stationary position (we sometimes referred to it as “stiction” – friction causing stickiness, which means you need to apply more force to ‘get it going’ that you do to ‘keep it going’). It’s why when you move off in a car, you begin with a low gear, which delivers more power to the tyres, which helps the car overcome inertia.

Momentum is the resistance to slow down or stop from a dynamic, or moving, position. Momentum is the force which keeps your car going forward when you take your foot off the accelerator. Your car begins to slow down as a result of air pressure on the front, as well as various resistance forces on movement. And, eventually, it slows down more rapidly when you put your foot on the brakes, because of the friction between your static brake pads and the discs rotating with your wheels.

What does all this have to do with resolutions? It is simply that inertia needs more of an effort to overcome than the effort required to maintain momentum. In other words, it’s more difficult to move away from existing habits and create new ones. Once you have created the new habits, it’s far easier to maintain them.

Let’s consider losing weight (something I need to do). It’s very easy for me to continue the eating and drinking I’m doing, which has created my weight problem, than it is to move away from them and develop new, healthier habits. Some of the things I love to eat aren’t conducive to weight loss. I don’t eat them them because I like staying fat. I eat them because I enjoy them. So I need to make an effort, a substantial one, to begin creating new, healthier habits. Once I have developed them, they will be easier to maintain, because they become my new norm.

So, we come back to the 6-word phrase:

achieve progress, no matter how slow

Considering weight loss for a moment (not than I’m fixated on food and feeling hungry right now), a lasting weight loss will not happen overnight, no matter how often I weigh myself and try to cheat the scales (anyone else do that – sway my body on the scales a bit to get the lowest reading? No? Just me then).

But when progress towards our goal (e.g. losing weight) is slow, it’s easy to lose that impetus, that drive, which is needed to move forward. We want to lose weight, we haven’t lost weight, what’s the point?

And the point is: we are making progress towards our goal. If we are changing our habits, changing the things we have done in the past, we are winning. The targets will be achieved as we develop the new habits necessary to achieve them.

Change is good, and not to be feared. Embrace the changes we’re making, to allow us to move forward. That goal, that target, will come.

And (finally) to writers: you may be wanting to write that novel or memoir you’ve promised yourself. How to do that when you haven’t been able to achieve this previously?

Simply – change your habits in order to make progress.

I’ve always asked: do you think you would write a page of a paperback novel per day (that’s around 250 words)? Could you find time in a day? Maybe skip a soap opera. Maybe get up half an hour earlier. Do something which changes your habits. If you can do this, by this time next year (when, once again, you may be lamenting the fact that you were unable to achieve what you said you wanted to do a year previously) you WILL have written that book.

Start now, change habits, even in a small way, and make progress. Once you begin to make progress, you can change gears, and continue forward with less effort.