Hello,
New Year’s resolutions tend to get a bad reputation. I like to think of them as goals rather than resolutions. The word resolution carries more of a symbolic meaning, and the word goal carries more of striving context. Goals are more practical and applicable.
I love practical goals and metrics. Sometimes they disappointment me though. I’ll be vulnerable with you. I only achieved one of my goals in 2020, but that’s one more than if I’d not planned any! Right?
Sure, we can write 2020 off, but let’s face it: sometimes our goals don’t even come to fruition when everything goes perfectly in the world. Some of us get discouraged and avoid setting goals for the next year. That’s unfortunate, because we lose the fulfillment of being able to celebrate our successful goal completion.
It may be easier to have goals and aspirations when we are still working or were younger, but the Wall Street Journal article discussed the science of learning new things throughout our lives.
From the article, “Though the first steps can be difficult, it’s worth the effort: Becoming a beginner is one of the most life-enhancing things you can do.”
“A good starting point is to take up juggling. The innocuous little act of throwing balls into the air has been found, in a number of neuroscience studies, to alter the brain. This ‘activation-dependent structural plasticity,' as it’s called, pops up in as little as seven days. Juggling changes not only gray matter, the brain’s processing centers, but also white matter, the networked connections that bind it all together. 'Learning a new skill requires the neural tissue to function in a new way,’ says Tobias Schmidt-Wilcke, a neuroscientist (and juggler) at Germany’s University of Bochum.”
It continues, “After that initial burst of activity, the brain settles down. By the time you can do the skill without much thinking—when it becomes automatic—gray matter density declines. So, you try a new juggling trick, and the process begins again. Interestingly, the changes in brain density happen for older people just as much as for younger people.”
We were designed to strive. It’s important to obtain new goals throughout our lifetime. Necessity created striving in the hunter gather days because your survival depended on it. You might have to hunt, fish, grow food, or raise animals among other things.
The idea is to always have the spirt of a beginner though. The article explained the progression babies go through from crawling to walking.
They spend a third of their day practicing and it still takes them months to master walking. But when they learn how to walk and not crawl it opens new opportunities for them. They no longer face down all the time and they can use their hands. In other words, learning new things opens new opportunity for us.
