2025 December 30 Start the year positively

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website about reimagining your life. Thanks for joining me to talk about another way to celebrate the New Year. If you like what you hear today, please leave a like, subscribe, tell your friends, and send me a message.

This week we're going to talk about New Year's and New Year's Eve, but more specifically, perhaps another way to look at the new year and some attitudes that may help you get your New Year off to a better start.

I haven't been a big New Year's Eve party sort of guy for many years. Given that the new year isn't even the new year for everyone on earth, let alone the solar system or the entire universe, it always seemed kind of silly to me, actually. The whole concept of doing all the things you say you wanted to stop doing—kind of one last big bad bash right before you change your whole life on January 1st—never seemed like an especially good approach to change to me. It's kind of like Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday in New Orleans, where you party like crazy before giving everything up that you really want to do for the Christian Lent. It seems like it kind of misses the intent a little bit when you do that.

Nonetheless, living your life in the perspective of "no" and things that you're against is not especially productive. So in the spirit of positivity and saying yes to things, I'd like to suggest some different attitudes towards switching the year on the calendar, presuming you even happen to use a Gregorian calendar.

Here's an interesting fun fact I looked up. I wanted to see what percentage of the world uses the Gregorian calendar, and of course all the typical Western-based searches say it's in the very high 90% of the world. In reality, if you dig down a little bit, many large nations have parallel calendars or special variations of the Gregorian calendar to better align with their own cultural calendars. So in truth, while the Gregorian calendar may be the civil calendar or the calendar of trade throughout most of the earth, historical or cultural calendars are actually being run in parallel to preserve local culture in very many nations. I thought that was kind of interesting.

Anyway, as I get older, I get more fascinated about how so much of what we thought was common knowledge is simply wrong. But back to the conventional New Year's—in about 28 hours from now. Probably for commercial reasons, plus marking the end of the Christmas season, New Year's and New Year's Eve have taken on this persona of a time of recreation where we put our failures of the last year behind us and write a plan for a new approach for the new year.

Conventional wisdom says that I should be talking about all the ways to most effectively recreate ourselves going into the new year. There are numerous online courses on how to do this, and of course, there are at least two approaches to it.

The first is to have started a few days or even a few weeks ago, reviewing and planning how you'll overcome all of this past year's shortcomings in the pending new year. You're getting all ready and prepped for it with goals and lists and monthly steps and monthly checklists and techniques so that at the crack of midnight, you're on track to plot a new path through the new year.

Then of course there's the after-the-fact approach where you know you want to make changes, but you've decided the changes you want to obtain are best defined and started once you're in the new year. So you don't really plan ahead, but once you're in it, you do everything about the new year in the new year.

Honestly, both approaches can work and both can be effective, but there is a third approach. We've talked about this before, and I personally advocate that the best time to start re-envisioning your life is today, no matter what day today is. It's not some future task that you have to wait for. It's simply you deciding that you want to change and tomorrow morning—or even better, right this red hot second—trying to implement those changes.

But the implementation phase is really not the first step, is it? Because before you can do something, you have to know what you want to do. You need a goal or a plan or a life vision of what you're trying to attain. We need to do some planning first, but how do we start that?

Well, one way is to look at where we felt we didn't do as well as we'd hoped in the past and make a plan for how we could get a more desirable outcome, and that's pretty effective. We wanted to save more money, for example. What can we change to help us do that? We wanted to spend more time with our families. What has to happen to make that possible? Those are all good things and very useful, but we're still missing what may be the most important point of all, and that is to review the past day, the past month, the past year, the past decade—whatever's appropriate for what you're contemplating—and do two things that are usually skipped.

First, and possibly the most important: What are you thankful for? What are you grateful for? What things were wonderful, big or small? It didn't have to be winning the Powerball lottery or something mammoth, but maybe you were selected the nicest person in your bridge club. It could be anything that brought joy into your life, and that's far too easy to overlook—all those little small things that actually make our days nicer. It doesn't have to be some sort of recognition. Maybe you forgot your wallet and the person behind you paid for your coffee and wished you a good day. Anything big or small that brought joy into your life. We need to remember those things, because that's the balance to many of life's little challenges that just naturally happen.

The second thing is: what actual wins did you have? Specifically, what did you do that worked out and helped move you towards your vision, towards your goals, towards your plans? Again, it doesn't have to be huge, although maybe it was. Very likely, either you didn't really celebrate it at the time, or maybe you didn't get around to celebrating it at all. We've generally trained ourselves such that success is nothing special and that we immediately move on to the next problem. But that's training our brain all wrong.

At the end of the year, it's worth thinking back, perhaps with a friend or someone else, about all the things that happened in your year and writing down those things that went well. Ideally you have some sort of daily routine or some good reminder jar. Remember, I talked about that a number of months ago? I have a big jar, and when something good happens, I just throw it in the jar. Then when you have a lousy day, you go through the jar and realize that yesterday wasn't all that bad. So either there's something like a good event reminder jar, a daily routine where you write down the good things that happen so you can go back and flip through the cards or through your diary or whatever.

Some way of noting down things that have gone well or made you happy. But even if you didn't do that, still take some time to reflect back on the past year, starting with the positives, and this time write them down with as much detail as you can recall. I hope this reminds you why your daily routine should in some way keep track of all the good things that happen in your day. It's a good safety net for when things seem to be particularly trying and annoying.

But the other reason is that when you look back at the things that made you happy and the things you tried to do that you actually accomplished, you're also training your brain in ways to bring happiness and success into your life. Remember, one of the normal planning steps is to review your past failures and how you could have avoided them. Equally important is to review your past successes and find out ways to make those happen more often.

As always, your brain wants to keep you safe and happy. The more examples you give it of what has been successful, the more likely it is that your brain will be able to find and create similar situations in the future. If you had a really positive experience when you took a chance—say, going to a new pickleball meetup or something you just heard about—well then maybe you'll take some other chances and go to some other new events without trying to talk yourself out of it before you even try it. Success breeds success, but only if you recognize it and nurture it.

So instead of spending all the week leading up to New Year's Day reviewing all your failures and how you're going to fix yourself and making long lists of things you should do or signing up for yet another gym membership that you'll use one time, perhaps instead spend some time looking back over the previous year for those things that brought you joy or contentment, feelings of accomplishment, success in areas that matter to you, and the other positive things that happened. Write all those things down.

Yes, you can probably think of some challenges too, and you can write those down too, but write them on a completely separate sheet of paper. The good list is for encouragement and to help train your brain to find more satisfying things and more ways to find happiness in your life.

Are there challenges and corrections? Are those things important? Well, only if taken in context. A big list of failures is not motivating. In context, if the failure really was just a learning experience as a result of a big improvement you tried to make, well, there were probably some good results along with the disappointment. So even in that case, take the good results, write them down on the success list, on the good list, and then when you look at the challenges, you can discover what aspects worked and what ones need to be worked on, and more importantly, how to balance those two against each other.

When you just have a list of challenges and failures, you're training your brain not to try and change, not to take any chances. When you look at the whole story and celebrate the wins, now you're training your brain to succeed and how to avoid the mistakes that crept in. It's a win-win situation.

So enjoy the run-up to the new year, but this year do it from a perspective of starting with your successes and good times. Document those things first, and only then do a critical review of the year, because then you'll have what you need to provide your brain with a balanced perspective and give your brain the tools it needs to truly leverage the good things and really make the year more aligned with your vision.

That's it for the evening. Your homework: Think about this past year. Remember those things that brought you joy and happiness and success. Extra points if you can write them down and add in as many details as you can as you remember them. If you also think of challenges, record those separately so you don't get focused on the negative and ignore the good that happened. Always keep them in balance.

Remember, one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. Thank you so much for joining me tonight. I wish you a wonderful new year. UKR7.com is our site that has links to help people in Ukraine. World Central Kitchen is at WCK.org. They work worldwide in areas of disasters. Both great organizations, but there are a lot of local charities and even just a simple smile to someone you meet in the street or standing next to you in line—that can change someone else's day for the better in ways that you can't even imagine.

As always, thank you for stopping by. If you found something interesting and useful, please pass it along, subscribe, hit that like button, and drop me a comment as to what you'd like to hear. Have a great week, and again, have a wonderful new year and a great year. Remember to live the life of your dreams, because that's the path to true contentment. Love and encouragement to everyone. See you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com. Thank you.