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If you’ve already missed one of your New Year’s Resolutions, welcome to the club!

Late January is when most people have already bailed on their goals for the year.

Yep, even though those goals were written with a special pen in a cool planner, and scheduled on calendars, and with the best of intentions.

Luckily, this is amazing news and an unbelievable learning opportunity…

If you have the courage to see it!

Be good, not perfect.

In East of Eden, Jon Steinbeck delivers a quote that has always stuck with me.

Maybe you:

• Missed a workout because you were sick
• Fell off the wagon with your diet because work had a Taco Tuesday celebration
• Had to skip 5K training because your kid has been stuck inside due to unbearably cold temperatures.

Now that you don’t have the pressure and expectation of being perfect, we can get to work on being good enough in an imperfect world.

Life will never go according to plan, because that’s precisely what life does best: surprise us. Sick kids or chaos at work or polar vortexes or unexpected identity theft.

This is what makes a philosophy like Wabi-sabi so powerful: it embraces and appreciates the imperfect beauty of life:

• nothing lasts forever
• nothing will ever be perfect
• nothing stays the same

Once we accept this reality, we can get to work on being good enough. Here’s precisely how I do that.

Today still counts.

I have a top-secret workout strategy that I’ve used for 24 years of training.

It’s a secret they don’t want you to know about. (Who is “they?” Don’t worry about it!)

Whenever I miss a workout for whatever reason, I don’t beat myself up. I don’t send myself on a guilt-trip. I don’t wait until next month.

I follow a “Never 2 in a Row” rule and just…do the thing the next day.

My muscles have no idea how to read a calendar. There’s no “workout police” coming for me (this would be kinda funny if there was).

One missed day is barely a speedbump.

But two missed days can quickly become a missed week. And after a week, a missed month (or year) is right around the corner.

If you miss a workout, the month isn’t ruined.

Just do the thing the next day.

Momentum secured.

Pivot and Restart.

Already bailed on your diet?

Congrats for finding a diet that doesn’t work for you right now. Now, let’s pick some more sustainable changes instead, shall we?

Already bailed on your training for a 5K?

Congrats on being able to cross off a type of exercise that doesn’t work for you right now. Let’s pick a different type of exercise, shall we? Maybe even exercise that we…gasp…like?

If you’ve already bailed on your goals, there’s a big-ass life lesson that is screaming at you right now…if you’re willing to listen.

The secret to long-term success is iteration:

1. Try something.
2. See what works and what doesn’t.
3. Adjust your strategy.
4. Try again.
5. Repeat steps 1-4 until the sun burns out.

This quote from David Guy Powers’s 1953 book “How to Say a Few Words” always stuck with me:

What have you learned so far from your New Years Resolutions:

• What worked and what didn’t?
• Where can you be “good enough” instead of perfect?
• How will you try again differently with this next attempt?

As long as you try differently, that counts as progress!

-Steve​
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