Give me three chances to guess your 2009 New Year Resolution. Let me guess: lose weight, jog weekly or strike lottery?What a joke, it is not even the second week of 2008 and here I am guessing what’s your 2009 New Year Resolution Goals.

But trust me when I say this, you can easily tell the 2009 New Year Resolution of 90% of the people on the street. I repeat, 2-0-0-9.

But how to do it!? If you want to try, just ask for their 2008 New Year Resolution, Ta-da! The reason behind it is that human likes to bring forward their unfinished businesses. So their unresolved New Year Resolution from the previous year will most likely be brought forth to this year.

The number was given by a Singapore local Newspaper- The Straits Times, who quoted it from an unnamed source, but that’s not the main point here. What’s important is why human beings behave as such.

Flip through any magazine (seriously, I went through magazines from cars to gardening to childcare to women during the last week of 2007) and you can find pages of tips, rule-of-thumbs and samples on setting 2009 New Year Resolution. But according to the statistics, only 10% of those who had made New Year Resolution managed to accomplish what they had resolved to do.

Statistically speaking, setting New Year Resolution has a very high chance of failure. Granted, there are near-success cases not mentioned by the study, but we will want to focus on those who failed miserably.

The funny thing is, why do we still continue deceiving ourselves? Are we not overly optimistic and building castles in the air? Shouldn’t such immoral and useless culture be banned like human-sacrifice? Agree?

Ok, before I become the victim of cyber rage, I must mentioned that I’m all for the continuation of the tradition of setting New Year Resolution. It has its own merits too.

Lionel Tiger, an evolutionary anthropologist and the author of Optimism: The Biology of Hope, suggests that the optimistic culture originates from our game-hunting and foraging days.

Optimism kept the humans alive then. During those days, men had to begin each morning with high hopes of securing their three meals for the day - even when they had been chewing on field grass for weeks. If they did not carry such optimism, they would not have bother to get out of bed, not to mention chasing breakfast!

Similarly, resolution keeps us alive. We cannot afford to be overly cynical for this sake. We make New Year Resolution precisely because of optimism, that we have outsmarted the failures and this time, we can surpass our past.

So we now know that the New Year Resolution culture is definitely going nowhere. But what is causing most of us to fail each year?

You can point finger at the Romans if you like it. They are the one who introduced January as the beginning of the new year and celebrated it. So we are actually celebrating the coming of the New Year in Romans Style! Drunk, wasted and intoxicatingly ambitious. No wonder most New Year Resolution Goals went down with a ‘clunk’. They are nowhere near being sober when making their New Year Resolution!

But more often than not, with some exception, the problem is not being overly ambitious as we like to believe. Dr Mani, a renowned internet marketer and heart surgeon for children, quotes this, “Man often overestimates what He can do in a day, but Man also underestimates what He can accomplish in a year.”

I find the quote very true. Whenever I ask someone what he or she had accomplished since January, I’ll get relatively short answers most of the time. When I ask what they will change if given a chance again, the answers are much longer in comparison. Man can accomplish a lot more in a year than they think they can.

Since the root problem is not being overly ambitious, then what can it be? I would say it’s the skeletons in our closets. Not those untold secrets, but our limiting beliefs and lack of directions in life. They may be buried deep inside you, but their effects are no less apparent at the surface.

Limiting beliefs can convince you to give up your resolution when you hit a road bump. Having no specific direction will lead you to follow the easiest way. You’ll find yourself changing course very often and end up stranded in the open.

I urge you to remove your limiting beliefs and find a specific direction in life to make the most of your 2008 New Year Resolution Goals, other wise, your 2009 New Year Resolution will end up the same as your 2008 New Year Resolution. I have a report tailored especially to do just that, just follow the hyperlink to get it for free.

It’s the same problem no matter what you want to do, even for setting New Year Resolution. Unless we can clear those limiting beliefs and find a direction to work towards to, every New Year Resolution is just one big joke.

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