The Calendar We Inherited

I want to talk about our calendar, our 12 month 365 day calendar that we're all using right now. And in the self-help, self-development space, January 1st is a big day on that calendar because January 1st is a day that we are supposedly supposed to change our lives. We're supposedly supposed to adopt all these new great habits. And when January 1st rolls around, we're supposed to set ourselves up and have this massive change in our life, whether or not it's new job, new business, going to the gym, new diet, but all these changes are supposed to happen January 1st that are going to set ourselves up for the next 365 days, which is absolutely absurd. If you actually know where our calendar, our 12 month calendar, came from. And I'll go into it a little bit more, but ultimately our calendar and our schedule that we live by today was designed for harvesting wheat and coordinating factory workers. But we're using it to supposedly change our lives, right? What happens January 1st? You make the list, right? You lose weight. You want to read some more, start the business, learn the language. This is the year. And by February, most of that list is abandoned and by March, you forgot that you made the list at all. And by December of next year, you're making the same list again, maybe with some different words or some different ideas, but ultimately it's this cycle that we all fall victim to. And then we don't follow our list. We don't do the things that we're supposed to do. We're committing to doing. And then we call it failure or we call it a discipline problem or a commitment issue. But what if the problem isn't you? What if the problem is that you're trying to change your life on a schedule designed for harvesting wheat because that is actually what you're doing. Now where does this January 1st idea come from? So the Romans gave us January 1st as the new year, but they were thinking about consoles taking office and military campaigns starting fresh. They were not talking or thinking about your personal transformation or personal development. And for most of human history, the year didn't start on a fixed calendar day. It restarted when something actually restarted. So when the harvest came in, when the river flooded, when the season changed and you couldn't plant again, see farmers didn't sit around on January 1st, deciding to grow 10% more wheat this year. They planted when the ground thought they harvested when the crops were ready. And the cycle was external, not internal and then came the industrial revolution. So factories needed everyone on the same schedule, fiscal years, quarterly targets, annual performance reviews. The calendar became a management tool and companies found that if you set annual goals, you could measure annual progress. And if you tied compensation to annual performance, you could drive annual productivity. So the calendar became a control mechanism and it worked for factories, for corporations, for systems trying to coordinate thousands of people doing the same repetitive work. And then something strange happened. We took that corporate calendar system and we applied it to ourselves. This New Year's resolution, as we know it, became popular in the 1960s and 70s, right? When corporate culture was added to peak, right? When annual performance reviews became standard and right when people started treating their lives like little corporations, they needed to manage and the self-help industry saw an opportunity. If people were already trained to think in annual cycles at work, why not sell them personal annual planning? So some books started to appear, right? Your best year yet, or this year I will, or New Year, New Year. And we imported the corporate calendar into our personal lives and it felt right because we were already thinking that way at work, set annual goals, review annual progress, start fresh next year. But here's what we didn't notice. We were solving a problem that didn't even exist. So let me explain. The corporate calendar was designed to coordinate large groups of people who needed to work in sync. And you don't have that problem. Not managing a factory floor where everyone needs to start and stop at the same time. You're definitely not running a fiscal year where budgets need to be allocated and spent by December 31st. You are one person trying to learn a language or get in shape or build something that matters and that process looks nothing like a fiscal year. See, learning a language doesn't happen in 12-month cycles. It happens in daily 15-minute sessions that compounds over years, not months. There's no year end review where your brain suddenly consolidates everything you've learned. Getting in shape doesn't follow a calendar, it follows consistency. You don't get fit in December just because you're closing out the year strong. Your body doesn't care what month it is. Same goes for building something meaningful. It doesn't align with January 1st. It aligns with when you're ready to start and when you have the idea and when the opportunity appears. But we're still using the calendar because it's what we inherited. And because the self-improvement industry makes a lot of money in January. What are we actually optimizing for? When you set New Year's resolutions, you're not optimizing for change. You're optimizing for the feeling of a fresh start. Which is fine, except fresh starts don't actually do anything. They're just a story that we tell ourselves to feel like this time will be different. Jim knows this and that's why they run January promotions. They're not selling fitness. They're selling the feeling of a fresh start. You know that 80% of people will stop coming by March. But they'll still have the membership. And the book publishers know this and that's why self-help books get released in December in January. They are selling the hope of transformation. Not the transformation itself. The course creators know this. That's why New Year New Year sales happen every December. They're selling the calendar. Not the skill. See, we've been trained to believe the change happens in nearly cycles because that's when the offers appear. The offers appear then because that's when we've been trained to look for change. And it's circular and it's profitable. Just not for you. See, the real cost isn't the abandoned resolutions. It's what the calendar prevents you from seeing. See, you want to start writing, but it's March and you'll say to yourself, well, I'll just wait until January to really commit to it. See, you know what that means? That is six months of writing gone. It goes for your work. You want to quit your job, try something new, but it's October. And you say, I'll just start fresh in the New Year. That is three months gone. You could be making progress on something that you're building, but it's a little bit slow. And then December hits. You say to yourself, well, this was supposed to be the year that I figured this out. And then you stop because the calendar says you failed even though you were on track. See, the calendar creates these artificial start points and end points. And artificial end points are probably the worst because they create artificial failures. See, when you stop something because the calendar year stops, you didn't fail. The calendar failed you. It told you the change happens in 12 month intervals. And when your change didn't fit the interval, you assume that something was wrong with you, but nothing was wrong with you. You were just using the wrong measurement tool. It's like trying to measure your height with a calendar, right? The tool doesn't match the task. And this is why I stopped making New Year's resolutions about three or four years ago. Not because I stopped wanting to change, because I stopped waiting for January to give myself permission. I wanted to write more, so I started in March on a Tuesday, because that's when I decided to start. I wanted to get stronger, so I started in July, because that's when I was ready. I wanted to build something new so I started in October, because that's when the idea finally clicked. Now, none of these aligned with the calendar, but all of them worked, because I wasn't trying to fit change into a 12 month container. I was just changing when it made sense to change. And what surprised me about this shift was that it just felt easier, and it wasn't because the work was easier. The work's always tough, but it was because I wasn't carrying the weight of these artificial deadlines and this fresh start mythology. I didn't need to wait for January to feel like I could start. I didn't need to feel like I'd failed if I wasn't done by December. I just started when I was ready, and kept going as long as it made sense. And the calendar stopped being relevant. The whole self-improvement industry depends on you believing that change happens on a schedule. January is when you buy gym memberships, the course, the plan, or the program. And if you figured out that you could start in March of July or whenever you were actually ready, the industry would lose its most profitable month. The calendar creates urgency and urgency creates sales. Start your transformation today, new yours offer, and soon they're not selling transformation. They're selling the calendar date because they know that you've been trained to associate January with fresh starts. But I'm telling you that fresh starts are available every single day. You just have to stop believing that the calendar matters. So I want you to ask yourself a question. The question that is definitely worth sitting with if you're like most people who subscribe to this 12 month ideology. What would you start right now if you didn't need to wait for January? Not what would you resolve to start, not what would you plan to start, what would you actually start? Because I'm telling you, the calendar isn't stopping you. The belief that you need the calendar to start is stopping you. You don't need a fresh start, you don't need a new year. You don't need to wait for the right moment. You just need to start and starting looks the same in March as it does in January. The only difference is that you won't have to compete for space at the gym.