Stick to your goals this New Year

Hey, it’s 2015! By this point, we should have hoverboards and Michael J. Fox should be a teenager again, right? I don’t know, I didn’t see Back to the Future Part 2.

What I do know is that it’s the time of year when people make a lot of New Year’s Resolutions, and then end up forgetting about them a few weeks later. Well you know what? Stop it. If you want to commit yourself to something, then DO IT. Stop making excuses!

Ironically, making excuses is something I do more than the average person, so I’m going to stop doing that. This semester, I’m going to try and do a variety of things.

First and foremost, I’m going to get fit, because being fat is a giant pain in the ass, and I want to get jacked so I can brag about my gains and shame people for skipping leg day.

Second, I’m going to get good at Magic the Gathering, because I’m going to Las Vegas in May to play in a huge tournament, and winning $10,000 would be really nice (that pays for about ¼ of a semester of college).

In all seriousness, it’s nice to have goals. It keeps you motivated and takes attention away from the not-so-nice things in your life. If people didn’t have goals, nobody would have the drive to do anything.

I tried living life goal-free for a couple years, and it ended up with me sitting on my ass playing Minecraft until everything looked like pixels. It’s not good to live life in a bubble, holed up in your room, waiting for the C Store to open so you can feed your addiction of buffalo chicken flatbread sandwiches (please bring them back, I’m having withdrawals).

I won’t lie, I’ve tried to hold myself to goals in the past, but if I stuck to them, I probably wouldn’t be in the position I am now. But hey, when you’re at the bottom, the only place to go is up. So go ahead and stick to your goals.

If you do, really cool things could happen to you. I don’t know what you’re goals are, but I’m sure that they will end up benefiting you in some way, unless your goal is to do absolutely nothing at all, which is a pretty bad goal.

I know you’ve probably heard every single motivational thing in the book, and then some. People can tell you to get motivated every single day, and it won’t do a single thing. Well, I’m not the shining example of optimism 90 percent of the time, but even I can say things will get better. But you have to take the first steps. The best time to plant a tree was  20 years ago. The second best time is right now.

Follow Richard on twitter: @hey_itsrichard