An Imperfect Approach to New Year’s Resolutions

“Be ye therefore perfect,” taught Jesus (Matthew 5:48), as if Christianity’s Great Exemplar himself was demonstrating how to write an unachievable New Year’s resolution.

As I often do, when I encounter something in scripture that makes me twitchy, I checked that reference in Bible Hub to see if it was translated right, hoping that word, perfect, was just the King James translation being too King Jamesy again. But even the most hipster Bible translations agree with stuffy King James about Matthew 5:48. As I scrolled through the list of alternate translations in Bible Hub, I saw that anxiety-inducing word repeated over and over again: perfect, perfect, perfect.

Luckily, Book of Mormon prophet Moroni threw me a bone by tossing Jesus’s call for perfection back into Jesus’s court: “Yea, come unto Christ, and be perfected in him. …His grace sufficient for you, that by his grace ye may be perfect in Christ,” said Moroni (Moroni 10:32). We cannot become perfect on our own, no matter how diligent we are at keeping our New Year’s resolutions, but our Savior completes us.

I prefer the goal to be complete over the goal of perfection. In the LDS youth program, we teach young people to set well-rounded goals, following the example of Jesus in His youth: “Jesus increased in wisdom [intellectually] and stature [physically], and in favor with God [spiritually] and man [socially].” (Luke 2:52). A holistic approach like this helps us begin the process of completing ourselves. And then we can rely on our Savior to pick up where we left off.

With other language, this approach works across faith traditions. Whatever we call the God we worship, we can leave the rest to Them. Or we can let other humans pick up some of the slack, because we don’t have to do and be everything on our own. Or we can even just let some things slide, because they were never that important anyway.

I realized how ubiquitous the tradition of writing New Year’s resolutions really is at my first job after graduating from college. I was working for the Department of Health in the smoking cessation program, and every year on New Year’s Day, we had a big spike in people calling the Tobacco Quit Line, looking for help with their goal to quit smoking. What a wonderful thing for so many people of different faiths to be united on one day of the year in resolving to better ourselves.

Another thing I learned from that job: virtually no one successfully quits smoking on their first attempt. But they absolutely must make attempts, usually several attempts, in order to quit smoking. An attempt is not a failure, it’s a necessary part of the process. The more attempts you make, the more likely you are to achieve your goal.

Over the past several weeks, I participated in a goal-setting workshop sponsored by my current employer. One of the first things they taught us was to throw out the word goal and replace it with the word experiment. We were encouraged to choose something we wanted to change—yeah, that sounds a lot like a goal—but instead of seeing it as a goal to achieve or fail we were supposed to examine the data from our attempts with the curiosity and unemotional detachment of a scientist. That was some interesting data I gathered last week! So many new data points that could be useful to explain why I don’t exercise or practice piano or eat my vegetables. How could I adjust the variables in my life to get a different outcome next week?

I don’t know if I can fully endorse that method because an impartial experiment didn’t seem quite adequate to motivate me. Even as I reject perfectionism and embrace the philosophy that a resolution is an opportunity to try something and learn from it, I also enjoy the taste of success when I actually achieve a goal. I didn’t achieve any of my goals from that workshop, but the data I gathered was enlightening and gave me crucial insights that I will apply as I plan a strategy to achieve the New Year’s resolutions I’m writing now. I hope I’m better poised for success now that I have spent some time examining what is standing in my way.

Whether or not I succeed at my resolutions, I know I’ll gain something by stretching myself, acting on the hope that something in my life could be better, and empowering myself to be the change I want to see.

Happy New Year!