Getting Off The Nail
EPISODE 058: GETTING OFF THE NAIL
Only 2 months ago about 190 million Americans made New Year's resolutions in hopes of introducing changes to their lives. Only 8% will accomplish these changes and most of us will have quit the effort by January 08, designated Quitter's Day. This does not mean change is impossible, it means we might not want it badly enough, and are probably going about it the wrong way when we do. Let's talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
I began writing this episode last month, on January 08, which, it turns out, was Quitter's Day. I thought Quitter's Day was everyday, but, well, I guess they quit doing that. So-named by Strava, the social media and fitness tracking app for athletes, Quitter's Day differs every year but is based on the analysis of some 822 million data points uploaded by Strava-users like me who are cycling, running, and swimming their way through the year. In 2020 Quitter's Day was January 19, a full 11 days later than it was this year, so clearly we're all heading in the wrong direction where our fitness goals are concerned. Quitter's Day is the day most people will give up on their New Year's Resolutions.
As this airs it's the middle of February, so I'm a little late to warn you off and to give you a heads-up about the whole thing. It's a little late for a show about New Year's Resolutions, too. I guess there's always next year. Nothing to do now but sit around and wait the 300-and-something days until we get another crack at January 01 again. One more chance–the only meaningful chance in the year, apparently–to turn over new leaves, and make needed changes in our lives.
What is it, I wonder, about the first day of the new year that makes us all clamour to make resolutions that statistically we will never keep? And not just once but over and over again. Every year millions of us try. And most of us quit.
In terms of the vague statistics of which the internet is filled, 190 million Americans made resolutions this last January 01 and only 8% will accomplish them. That's a whole lot of change that's not happening. I don't have statistics for Canada or the rest of the world, but I'm guessing they're similar, at least in places where New Years resolutions are a thing. So generally speaking we've all got what? A 92% chance of flunking out on the change we had hoped to see in our lives?
Maybe the one thing we should all consider quitting is making resolutions on New Year's Eve. It's clearly not working. But that does not mean we should give up on change itself. I just wonder if the whole thing isn't a fundamentally flawed idea and if there isn't a better way to look at change, and progress, and forward momentum–one that doesn't revolve around the turning of one very specific page on our calendars once a year. And I wonder if a change in the way we thought about change, might trickle into our creative lives and give us a better shot at getting out from whatever ruts we might have been relying on January 1st to pry us loose from. I'm David duChemin and this is episode 58 of A Beautiful Anarchy, let's talk about it.
Music / Intro
The desire for change and the hope that a new year brings us a new page on which to write those changes, untarnished by past failures, is not a recent act of optimism. 4000 years ago the Babylonians were doing it, vowing to pay debts and return borrowed items as part of new year celebrations. In the year 46 of the Common Era, Julius Caesar implemented a new calendar, making January the start of the new year, and Romans would make pledges to Janus, the two-faced god for whom January is named. And we've been doing it in some form ever since: that fresh new year laid out in front of us, without so much as a mark on the blank tablet before us, no wrong moves, nothing yet to suggest a flawed trajectory. Nothing, it seems, but possibility. As if we're starting all over and nothing is impossible.
It's an intoxicating idea. And like anything intoxicating it has a way of making things look like better ideas than they really are, and makes us forgetful of the past. But it's not optimism that makes our resolutions so bound to fail, I for one am a big fan of hope and the promise of do-overs. It's just that the year into which so many of us step so boldly and full of hope, really doesn't exist anywhere but on the calendar page.
We do not live in years. A year is just too big. We memorialize years, to be sure, especially looking back. And we plan our years looking forward. The year is a 365-day folder in which we place events of the past and future; a useful shoebox into which we place memories, and plans, a way of bundling things together kind of like a zip-folder.
But in the experiences of which those years are filled, we live in smaller moments. We live in hours, maybe days. A decision to do or not do something, to go to the gym, to get into the pool, to eat or drink–or not–the thing we said we'd abstain from, or to finally put the pen to paper, or sit down at the keyboard again, these are decisions of the moment, not the year. Daily decisions at the most, and none of them depend on what year it is, or how close we might be to the beginning.
A year is too large a block of time. It contains within it a hundred thousand choices and emotions and circumstances, and it is these that we make decisions about, and in these smaller units of time that we make them, not the year-long vessel that will, only one day, and in hindsight, be the single labeled box into which we place them.
A resolution for the year ahead is a declaration of intent, nothing more. It's a recognition of the need and desire for change. Or at least the sense of obligation that we ought to change. But it is only a desired destination, not a road map. Don’t get me wrong, I want to be in the best shape of my life by the end of this year. I turn 50 on December 24 and I plan to be trimmer, more agile, and healthier than I've been since I hit my 30s and still thought I was immortal. But a resolution to getter healthier in 2021 is meaningless next to, and instead of, my daily resolve to get into the pool and put the time in to swim a mile, and the very specific plan to do so. Your resolution to finally write that book or make that album, is necessary. But it's insufficient.
A resolution for the year is the wrong tool for a job to which we must show up every day. A resolution is an intent, but it is not a plan; it assumes that the motivation–and probably the champagne –that you had when you made it will still be there on the 1st day of March when you've forgotten all about it, so long ago was Quitter's Day.
Making a resolution is a recognition that we're in a rut, but it is not a plan to get out of that rut. It might at one point have been a groove, but now it's a rut and we're stuck, no matter how much we spin our wheels. And ruts are not easily escaped. They have on their side the power of habits long entrenched in our daily lives. They are, despite wanting more from–and for–ourselves, comfortable. They work for us. Perhaps not in the long term, but on a daily basis, our inaction and stasis works and is preferable to the alternative; they are more comfortable to us than the action that would be required to change them.
In her book, The Art of Asking, Amanda Palmer tells a story that I think applies here. A farmer sits on his porch as a friend walks up to say hello, and as this friend approaches he hears an awful yelping, squealing sound coming from inside the house.
“What’s that terrifying sound?” asks the friend.
“It’s my dog,” said the farmer. “He’s sittin’ on a nail.”
“Why doesn’t he just sit up and get off it?” asks the friend.
The farmer deliberates on this and replies: “Doesn’t hurt enough yet.”
We make change when it hurts enough that the change, however uncomfortable, is finally preferable to sitting on the nail; when we really want what is outside the rut more than what is inside the rut, which until now has been familiar, a known commodity in our lives.
This is what we're up against when we make that well-intentioned resolution out of a sense of obligation or guilt or "I really should...." It's got to hurt enough to motivate the change, and we often make resolutions before we actually want to change. And getting off the nail is not the same as staying off the nail.
We, like everything else, are subject to inertia, the resistance to change in our velocity. "A body at rest, stays at rest," said Sir Isaac Newton, one of the very few things I remember from high school physics which, like Math, I passed only on a technicality. What I tend to forget is the second part of that idea. What Newton said was that a body at rest stays at rest unless external forces act upon it and that a body in motion remains in motion, so long as external forces do not act upon it.
So we're subject not only to inertia but also to momentum. And this is where I find some hope that we can change. That we can not only get off the nail once it starts to hurt badly enough, but that we can stay off the nail. Not because we said we would at the beginning of the year in one not-so-sober moment of optimism, because that's probably not an external force powerful enough to act upon our inertia, but because there is power in momentum - not big changes made once and for all but small changes made daily. And small changes made with the consistency of habit are what we need to counteract the external forces that would otherwise act against us and the possibility of momentum.
When I think about momentum and the power of daily habit to change behaviours, I think about a story I heard about Jerry Seinfeld. I'm alone in my circle of friends in thinking The Seinfeld Show was just about the most painful show that television ever foisted upon us–though anything with Rocky Gervais in it comes close for me–but I also think as a standup comics go, Jerry Seinfeld is one of the most brilliant comedians working today, and his stand-up should not be mistaken for the show. None of which is the point, but the story goes that a young comic bumped into Jerry backstage and asked him for some advice about writing better jokes. Jerry replied that the secret to writing better jokes was to write more jokes, and to write daily. He suggested the young comic get a big wall calendar and mark an X on everyday he wrote, creating a chain of Xs, and told him: "your only job is to not break the chain."
Not breaking the chain is not a one-time resolution. It is a day-to-day decision to sit down and write. It is not a resolution, but resolve. It's manageable. It is momentum. It's something that can be ticked off on your daily list of things to do. It is, in one word, about habit. It's about breaking old habits by replacing them with new habits, new challenges, daily. Seinfeld didn't say write brilliant jokes. He didn't say write refined jokes. He said write, and don't break the chain.
Everyone wants the big win. That's what a resolution is about: the big goal at the end. But it's only the small wins that accumulate to make the big win. It's the unbroken chain of small wins and the more specific the steps toward those wins, the better. For example, "lose 20 pounds this year" is more specific than "get in shape" which is pretty vague and ignores the old gag that round is also a shape. It also ignores that "get in shape" or even "lose 20 pounds" isn't a plan. It's barely more than a wish.
But "swim every day" is way more actionable and specific, and "swim 1 mile every day at 3pm" is much more specific still. It provides parameters. I use this example because it's what is working for me. It leaves no questions, no opportunities for interpretation and requires only that I put it on my calendar and do it. Every day. Sometimes I do more, and crank out 2km instead of the 1600m that represents one mile. But I don't do less. Of course, I didn't start there either. I started back in March and my first swim was 10 laps, or 200 meters, before I was completely wiped out. My resolve wasn't remotely "swim a mile every day" at the beginning, it was enough that I just got showed up, found the courage to appear in public in my swimsuit, and got into the pool. Every day. And every day I'd swim just a little more. And yesterday I swam two and a half kilometres in an hour, my longest and fastest swim yet.
What could you do if you replaced larger resolutions with smaller, more specific goals? If you focused on a plan that was actionable and assumed you could get just 1% better every day? If all you had to do was show up and chase the small, truly achievable wins? I know it sounds like I'm talking about swimming, but I'm not. I'm talking about change. Of any kind.
Change is possible. Not just small change, either, but life-altering, significant, holy-shit-I-can't-believe-I-did-it change. But it doesn't happen once in a 365-day chunk, powered by one resolution, because we don't live in chunks that large, that's not our experience. Decisions are made in the sliver of time it takes to decide whether we will get to work this morning, and put our ass in the chair and write, or get into the studio to paint, today, right now. Not to write that novel but to write the first sentence. And then another, and to return tomorrow, not to finish the novel, but to keep the chain unbroken.
January 01 is a liar. A con. It makes promises it can't keep. New year. Blank slate. This year it'll be different. Bullshit. The only thing that can be different, living forward and not in hindsight, is today. Not according to a resolution, but with resolve. Not to make big overwhelming changes but to show up for the small wins, which is hard at first, and though it's helped by the fact that–finally– it just hurts too much to sit back on the nail, the beauty of these small incremental changes is that they become visible to us as they accumulate, and eventually–slowly, but inevitably–you don't stay off the nail only because it hurts too much, but because it feels too good to stay off. It feels too good to see that change and momentum is possible, that Quitter's Day is optional, and that ruts do not have to become graves.
Thanks so much for joining me. If this is a conversation that's important to you and you're hungry for change, and don't know where to start, I wrote my last book, Start Ugly, The Unexpected Path to Everyday Creativity, for you. You can download a sample chapter and start reading now at StartUglyBook.com. And if this podcast is becoming a valued part of your creative life, and you're not already getting it, I'd love to send you On The Make which is like an emailed version of the podcast sent directly to your inbox on the one week in four that A Beautiful Anarchy isn't published. Just go to StartUglyBook.com, scroll to the bottom and tell me where to send it. Thanks again for being part of this, for making your work and having the courage to put it out into the world. I'm honoured that you would include me in that. We'll talk soon. In the meantime, go make something beautiful.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0