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Hi Reader,

“New beginnings are not necessarily clean.”

Unknown Author

What if, instead of making New Year’s resolutions, we focused on New Year’s life lessons?

Learning from our past is just as important as setting goals for the future. In fact, it’s hard to have one without the other.

For example, if you have set a New Year’s resolution to get in shape, what if you reflected on what has helped you feel strong before? Or instead of resolving to eat better, what if you looked back at the foods that actually made your body feel good?

Then you could even ask why past resolutions didn’t stick. Was it the workout environments you chose, the exercise type, or the endless cycle of fad diets?

Shifting the focus to life lessons rather than goals might be what finally helps those intentions last.

(This approach also has the added bonus of saving you money on yet another fancy gym membership, or a freezer full of diet food that you’ll never eat.)

Research shows that most New Year's resolutions fade quickly. According to U.S News and World Report, nearly 80 percent fail, with many people losing motivation by mid-February.

As a heads up, that’s only a month away from today.

So how do we change the outcome this time?

Technical lessons learned

I’ve been reflecting on the lessons I’ve learned from managing large, complex technical projects over the years. Much like trying to lose a few pounds, anyone who has led one of these projects knows how hard it can be to build momentum.

The real question to ask is this: what has worked for you before?

For me, it always starts with people and I focus heavily on building trust. Without trust, stakeholders won’t follow your lead. And without stakeholder support, a project is stalled before it even begins.

From there, I move to clarity of purpose. What exactly are we building, and what does success look like? I’ve learned that ‘requirements-gathering-on-the-fly’ is a poor way to manage a technical project. When left unchecked, it almost always leads to an outcome we didn’t intend, but still have to manage.

Honestly, this is a lot like New Year’s resolutions.

A stalled project? That’s an unused gym membership. A vague plan? That’s a freezer full of diet food you never touch.

The pattern is the same: without trust, clarity, and a plan that’s worked before, momentum goes out the window.

New Year's opportunities

Maybe this is the real opportunity of a new year. Not to promise ourselves a perfect future, but to carry forward what we already know works.

Life lessons remind us that progress is rarely a clean slate. It is built from experience, mistakes, trust, clarity, and small course corrections along the way.

So instead of asking, What do I want to change this year?

Try asking, What have I already learned that can guide me forward?

Because new beginnings are not about starting over.

They are about starting wiser.

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