Resolutions: It’s All About Today
This is the time of the year when everybody’s thoughts turn to New Year’s resolutions.

According to an article earlier this year in the Miami Herald, almost 97 percent of New Year’s resolutions are never executed. Statistics also show that you should still make that resolution anyway. Why? Because those people that make a resolution are more likely to meet their goal than those people who don’t make one at all. Even if it were only three percent, wouldn’t you rather be one of those three percent? (Maybe the three percent are the three percent that wrote it down…and 97 percent didn’t!)

A New Year’s resolution is like any other goal in life. In order to achieve it, you have to have a plan. What are you going to do to reach your goal? What steps are you going to take? How are you going to track your progress? If you have no plan, then you should plan to fail.

So once you have a concrete, actionable plan in place for your resolution, what’s next? Now comes the tough stuff: hard work. That’s right, the only way to reach your goal is to throw everything you have into it…day, after day, after day, after day. Whatever it takes.

When I was in business school in college, I started to write the business plan for Zimmerman. My goals in the business plan were to build a great local agency, a great regional agency, and then a great national agency that would be built on a business solutions platform. That was a BIG goal. So how did I go about accomplishing it? The first step was investing my life savings of $10,000 into my goal. This business plan allowed me to eventually build Zimmerman, the 14th largest ad agency in the country that now does close to $3 billion in billings each year. It took a BIG goal to build Zimmerman. It meant risking everything I had. But it paid off. Today, if I asked you for $10,000 and told you I would turn it into a $3 billion annual business, you’d probably believe me. That’s all because of the power of goals.

Jordanism: It’s all about today.

Oscar Wilde once said, “A New Year’s resolution is something that goes in one year and out another.” I say there are 365 ‘todays’ in a year, so every day is another year. There’s no time like the present to make a resolution, to set a new goal. What’s going to be the fate of your New Year’s resolution this year? Are you going to forget about it or give up? Or are you going to treat this as the perfect opportunity to set a goal and work towards accomplishing that goal? Take this chance to set the stage for wild, unheard of success in 2011!!

Just in case you’re still not convinced, stay tuned: this post is the first in a three-part series about New Year’s resolutions. So start thinking about your business goals for 2011 – that’s up next.

LINK:
Miami Herald – New Year’s resolutions are useful, even when they fail