The "Myth" of New Year's Resolutions - 12/02/26

Give yourself credit for surviving 2025, and be kind to new gym goers! My new routine for this year is reflective of how my resolutions in the past haven't always prioritized happiness so much as maximizing my time in favor for productivity. I also got a new reading lamp because I'm making the transition back to physical books instead of digital ones. But if you are interested in digital copies or physical, learn more about my newest release, Magic Reborn:

Magic Reborn can be read through this link!

Transcript

0:00

There's a lot of room for us to be kind to people and someone coming to the gym for the first time in a long time, or maybe ever. That took a lot for them to get there. It takes a lot to overcome that and get yourself to the chairman. And the last thing you need is some snotty guy in tight shorts who's impatiently waiting to use the weight machine, make you feel like you don't belong there. Good morning everyone. This is Jeffe Kennedy, also writing as Jennifer K Lambert, author of Epic Fantasy Romance. I'm here with my first cup of coffee, which is delicious and has a hair in it, but that's life, isn't it? Right there in a nutshell. Today is say it with me, people. It is Friday. Woo hoo! Does it feel like Friday? Because it is a new year. It is January 2nd, 2026. And if your life is even remotely like mine, days of the week have ceased to have meaning. It's it's funny how that happens with the holidays. And I've been reflecting on this, actually, that I think it's it's a good thing. It's a positive thing. You know, there are people out there who are like, don't make resolutions. Don't, set yourself up to do something that you wouldn't do all year long. But the turning of the year does give us a demarcation. But it is a good time for reflection. I had a friend send me, a really nice note saying that they were reflecting on the last year and what a significant part I had played in it, and that they were grateful for me being in their life. And I think that's that's was a wonderful message to get right. That's a lovely thing to hear and to to reflect on what meant something in our lives in the last year and what we want to keep, what do we want to change and always be for? And maybe this is what people are getting at with, say, you know, don't make resolutions always. Before I've been looking at how to improve what I'm doing. And and I would say this is a lifelong thing about me, which it took me a long time to understand that not everybody was doing this. But I've always had this idea of, you know, like, what are my failings? What are my flaws? Where have I not done what I wanted to do? And how can I improve myself? How can I be a better person? How can I be a better writer? How can I produce more? And I think this is where we get into the whole resolution thing is like, how can I make more money? How can I produce more words? How can I do more and more and more and more and more, which is what the success people are always pushing, right? The influencers and so forth. Another person that I follow, fitness influencer who I really enjoy, who's always calling out the grift of other fitness influencers, is was saying how this is the time of year when, new people start showing up at the gyms, you know, and for those people who are out there going to the gym regularly, this influx of the new people who don't know how the weight machines work and don't know which direction to go on the track and, you know, don't know how to work the walkers, all of this kind of thing. It's frustrating, right? You know, they feel like interlopers. And he was encouraging people to be kind to about that. And that's one reason why I like him, because he's always says, you know, there's a lot of room for us to be kind to people. And someone coming to the gym for the first time in a long time, or maybe ever, that took a lot for them to get there. And if you're trying to do that, you know, more power to you because it takes a lot to overcome that and get yourself to the gym. And the last thing you need is some snotty guy in tight shorts who's impatiently waiting to use the weight machine, make you feel like you don't belong there, or like you're an idiot. I think encouraging each other to improve without turning it certainly into a grift. But even without turning it into a competition, right? I probably haven't talked about competition in a long time, but it's one of the things that I do think and talk about a lot, because in general, I think competition is not good for us. I've always thought so. I've occasionally had people try to convince me that things like team sports and those kinds of competitions are actually positives, that they, drive people to do better. And I guess I can see the argument. And yeah, I think that competition is more destructive than it is positive because it leads us to comparing ourselves to other people. And that is always a problem because each of us is following our own path. We're all trying to do something slightly different. And, you know, comparison is the thief of joy, right? It's really important to remember that because we inevitably compare ourselves to other people professionally, romantically, spiritually. I mean, there's that whole spiritual pride thing, you know, like, oh, well, I am more nirvana than thou. You know, I've heard about people, you know, like really competitive yoga classes, which I think is just mind boggling, right? That, you know, like you're supposed to be there at your yoga class, trying to work with your body and find where your body needs to move and finding ways to to flow and relax and energize, and that there are people out there who are, like, competing over it, you know, who can, I don't know, be more bendy, bendy or than now, the more that we can avoid comparing and competing, the happier we will be. If you want to make changes for the year and I, I do encourage you to do that. I'm planning to do that. You know, this is a time to think about that. What how do you want this year to be different from last year? But with the things you can control? As an important caveat, they're not looking at someone else's career and saying, I want that career. What do you want for yourself? What what do you want? What would be a comfortable amount of money to try to make and and why? What what do you need the money for? And I think, you know, money is great. I'm not gonna ever criticize someone for wanting to make more money, because money is freedom, right? Money is power. Money enables you to do the things that you want to do, and it protects you from the predators, right? Money and our society is power. So what is a useful amount of money for you? You know, there's that really interesting metric. And I don't know if it's changed, but that around where someone's making around 75,000 a year up to that point, their happiness increases. If they're making less than that and they start making more that their happiness increases. And up to about the $75,000 mark. And after that, the correlation stops. There is no correlation between having more money and increased happiness. So how much money would make you happy? Well, what do you need it for? What you want to do. You know, maybe you don't want to be happy, which is a valid choice. And hear me out on this. Maybe you want to spend the next year really pushing on something or going through something very painful. Maybe you need to extract yourself from a toxic relationship, and it's going to be really difficult and really painful, and you're going to set aside the idea of happiness and say, okay, I'm just going to get this thing done. I'm going to push through this, and I am going to accept the fact that I'm not going to be happy for a while and bank this against future happiness. That's a choice, too, right? And it's fine. Most years when I have evaluated what I've done over the last year and I've been, you know, crunching my year in finances and, you know, figuring out how much money I made, all of all of the metrics I look at, you know, which books have been selling well, which ones were and are not any longer. There's all these really interesting fluctuations. There are some books that sell only on certain platforms. My other books that sell really well everywhere else. I also sell none on that one. Why? I don't know. Usually I'm thinking about things in terms of how can I maximize my time. That has been a push for a long time. The last ten years had been a huge, huge push for me ever since I got laid off from the data and decided to try to write full time, in 2015. I cannot believe it was 2015. I have been working and writing really, really hard and doing everything I can maximize, to get there. And and it worked. And this is what I mean about, like, you know, maybe you're going to choose the push, maybe you're going to choose the pain because, yeah, there were some painful years there. But, you know, this last year I finally got a step free. We're in a a good place, like where things are repaired. I am ready to launch some new projects, like the, the writing retreat. I have the casita ready. We can start running the the retreats. I'm going to be doing some more stuff online as far as teaching and mentoring, and I'm feeling good about those projects. It's interesting to be in this different place, because this last week I've been working on this project of writing a poem every morning to try to refill the well, sort of find my creativity again. My friend Megan gave me this great quote, and this is from the newsletter, the Substack, from Elif Shafak, who wrote all the colors we cannot see. Here's this quote elsewhere. Mark has said that when you are new to writing stories, perhaps you rely more heavily on inspiration. Then at some point, you get published and people start calling you a professional writer. This phase lasts for a while, but there comes a moment when inspiration diminishes and then you are on your own. It is very important that by this stage you should have developed your own literary technique. If you don't have that, then everything collapses. And she read that to me and that was just like shivers down my spine. People shivers down my spine. I've been doing these different things, writing a poem every morning, which has been really interesting. I wrote poetry in a very, very long time, and to continue my previous thought, some of my friends have been suggesting that maybe I am at a different point in my writing. Maybe I am changing up what I'm writing. I do have my literary technique right, but maybe I'm moving into something slightly different and that that idea feels very good. I've been reading some really great stuff lately, and I've been going back and reading like on paper again. I know, gasp and reading some of the old fantasies that inspired me and that feels really good to do. It's funny to read on paper. One thing that I've been discovering was writing these poems at the morning as I sit up in bed and, you know, pop up my pillows and sit up in bed and, and write in my journal because so I can write on paper. And that feels really different to start the day that way and to spend some time lingering. And then I've been, you know, getting up and doing yoga like my usual thing. But then I've been drinking my coffee while reading, and having a slower start to the day feels very luxurious and wonderful. And I am realizing that for the first time this year, I don't want to rejigger my schedule as I have on previous years, where I set up a timetable on how can I get up earlier and start producing earlier, and how can I pack more things into my time and be more productive with my time? That for the first time that I can recall, I'm thinking about dialing it back? And how can I be less enslaved to the clock and less worried about the actual time? When you're a professional writer, you kind of have to write on a particular timetable. We're always going to be in train to schedule, so in some ways, there are ways that I don't have to make myself being trained to a schedule that I probably haven't been allowing myself, certainly these past ten years. And before that, because I was both writing and working a day job for 20 years. And so I really had to maximize my time. And now I'm think I'm looking at maximizing something besides time, which feels really good. So these are the things I'm thinking about. I encourage you all to to think about the coming year that way, give yourself credit for what you did in the last year. It's really important to give ourselves credit for the things we accomplished, for the things we endured, the things that we managed to make our way through. It's not always these right, social media worthy postings that are the important successes. It's the I made it through this without actually falling apart. That can be that's that's a huge thing. I'm giving myself credit for that. And then for the coming year, looking out what would be good for you? What what are you want to try to do? What would be good for you? And I wish that for you. I will talk to you all on Tuesday. I'm probably going to talk about books. I'm going to take a nap. And, you all take care. Bye bye.