F*ck Your New Year's Resolutions

Struggling with your New Year's resolutions each year? Maybe you're not ready to make any. Try this instead.

---------------------------------------------------

🔥 Webdev Career Help - https://calendly.com/donthedeveloper/coaching
🎮 Join Discord - https://discord.gg/TpQe2k8Ab3
❤️ Support What I Do - https://www.patreon.com/donthedeveloper

Disclaimer: Some product links are affiliate links which means if you buy something I'll receive a small commission at no extra cost to you.

===========================
WEBDEV COURSES I HIGHLY RECOMMEND:

🎓 Learn Frontend - Scrimba (20% off): https://scrimba.com/the-frontend-developer-career-path-c0j?via=donthedeveloper

🎓 Learn Backend - Boot.dev (25% off): https://boot.dev/?promo=DONTHEDEVELOPER - Get 25% off your first payment with code "DONTHEDEVELOPER"

🎓 Already Experienced? Level Up Here - Code Crafters (40% off): https://app.codecrafters.io/join?via=donthedeveloper

Transcript

Don Hansen: 0:00

Happy New Year's. Now let's talk about New Year's resolutions. If you're like most people, you've probably made New Year's resolutions at some point which you haven't followed through with. I don't like the idea of New Year's resolutions because it trains you to plan to change yourself for the better. Instead of owning that, you could change yourself right now, in this moment. You could change who you are as a person when you firmly decide who you want to be. That's a really difficult thing to do. Decide who you want to be that's a really difficult thing to do, but I think a lot of us can agree that New Year's resolutions tend to get broken, probably sometime in January, sometime in February. They don't last long. Now, maybe you're perfect, but I know I'm not and I've broken many of them.

Don Hansen: 1:02

So what I have found? When I want to make drastic change, I need to make sacrifices, not goals, but sacrifices. When I feel like my vision is foggy, when I feel like I don't know which direction in life I'm going anymore, sometimes my brain is just foggy. Right. That can happen through bad diet, lack of exercise, stress, you know, not really taking care of my spiritual side, not meditating, not grounding myself again, dumping toxins into my body like alcohol, and I'm just going to start with that Instead of New Year's resolutions. I have a couple things that I do want to try, but I want to sacrifice alcohol. I feel like if I had to pinpoint the thing that makes my brain the most cloudy and it makes my vision seem so far away and it just destroys my motivation. Like I'm not even someone that drinks every day, like I drink with family, drink a lot during the holidays, but I feel like every time I dump it out of my life, things clear up again, clear up again. So I'm going to be sacrificing alcohol for all of 2025. And I trust that that sacrifice alone because I know myself and I've done this before but that sacrifice alone clears everything up. My motivation is at an all time high.

Don Hansen: 2:41

I'm happy. I enjoy the little things, like I want to enjoy every night getting into programming and reading a book again, but I feel like my mind just needs constant stimulation. And so, on top of the alcohol, I'm going to be doing more of a dopamine detox because I want to enjoy the moment. I want to be comfortable being bored. It's like I always have to listen to a podcast when I'm going around the house doing stuff or driving. I got to listen to something. I got to be multitasking. I have to because I can't stand being bored and that's not good. I can't live in the moment when I'm like that and I miss when I could do that. But I'm going to be dumping video games for at least a month and I like to give up something during Lent. Every single year it's been alcohol in the past.

Don Hansen: 3:34

I'm probably just going to give up caffeine, taking a lot of the additional stimulation out of my life so that I can learn to be bored, so that my mind has room to start becoming more clear, like my vision can start becoming more clear, because I'm not constantly just driving noise and stimulating it in so many ways that create an additional expectation to feel fulfilled, to feel excited throughout the day. I've gotten way too much stimulation. So I highly encourage you to consider this Fuck your New Year's resolutions. If you find that you're just making New Year's resolutions because you have this generic idea that you want to be better but you don't have a really, really solid vision for where you want to be in five years and you don't have a strong emotional attachment to that vision, then maybe it's because your brain is just your mind is full of shit, it's full of waste, it's full of it's just brain fog and a lot of your motivation, or lack thereof, can really come down to just what you put into your body. Because we've normalized things like drinking. We've normalized we don't like really stress at least in America about the dangers of stress eating. It is such a bad habit in America we just dump so much shit and process shit into our body.

Don Hansen: 5:25

Maybe, if you really want to give yourself a fighting chance and clear that mind up so that you can build yourself into a better version, so that you can let that vision unfold as things become more clear, maybe consider foregoing the goals for this year, which often people will extend the whole year. I'm going to do this all year. It's like try making sacrifices, or the biggest sacrifice that you can make that you know will make you into a better version of yourself. Do it for one month Instead of year-long goals that you probably won't follow through with. Shorten that duration. Let's make it easier. Let's sacrifice the thing that is making that's the biggest toxin towards you becoming the better version of yourself. For one month, try it one month and see if that doesn't change your entire perspective of how to build a better version of yourself.