“What’s a new year’s resolution?” I asked my mother. I’m not sure how old I was, but evidently I’d heard the subject mentioned on TV.
“It’s a promise that you make to behave differently in the new year,” she said. “To do something that’s good for you, even if it’s hard to do.”
“Do you have to make a new year’s resolution?” I asked.
“No,” she said.
“Then why would anybody do it?” was my quite reasonable response.
I have to admit that I still don’t understand the idea of new year’s resolutions. If there’s something I’m convinced that I must do, I don’t resolve to do it; I just do it. If I’m not psychologically prepared or sufficiently motivated to do it, resolving isn’t going to help. (I get that most people’s resolutions are about behaviors — like eating better or getting more exercise — that are ongoing rather than one-time-only, but even then, they still have to wake up each day and newly find the motivation to do the thing.)
Perhaps my failure to grasp the concept of resolutions has something to do with my general approach to life: I’ve never been one to set goals. In fact, I’m not even clear on where goals are supposed to come from. If I’m not satisfied with my current circumstances, I look for some opportunity to change them. It’s a trial-and-error process — some things work out; some don’t. No matter what I do, I end up learning something, and whatever I’ve learned allows me to try something else. Eventually, as a result of these incremental changes, I end up in a place that’s better than where I started. But there’s no way that I’d have been able to predict where I am today and set that as a goal.
That’s one reason why I’m self-taught in just about everything I do. Unlike most of my peers, I never went to graduate school. What would I study? Without a vision of what my future life will look like, I had no idea what I’d need to learn.
This attitude presented some problems when I became a community-college faculty member. I was expected to help my students get on a career pathway, which I was entirely unqualified to do. I was also expected to insist that my students learn whatever I was teaching them, that they stay in my course even if they want to drop out, and that they finish college. I didn’t feel like I had grounds to insist on any of those things, since I don’t know what’s best for any given student. If a student doesn’t come to class, how can I possibly judge whether what they did instead was more important? If they don’t complete some of the lessons, perhaps they’re not interested in learning about those particular topics — and if so, why should that not be OK? How do I know that college is even the right thing for any particular student?
Then there was the administrative side. As head of the Digital Media program, I needed to engage in an annual process called Program Review, in which I had to account for my department’s performance over the past year and state my needs for the coming year. The college used this information to decide how resources would be allocated. Since I was a one-person department, this should have been pretty straightforward, but I’m not skilled in the kind of thinking that this exercise required.
One of the sections of the Program Review form (which was as long as a federal income tax form and about as pleasant to complete) required me to list my department’s goals, lay out a timeline of steps toward those goals, and state the criteria by which progress could be measured. This section always flummoxed me. I was a teacher, so what kind of goals was I supposed to have? The only thing I could think to put on the form was, “To teach each lesson a little better than I did the previous time.” For the timeline, I put “Every day.”
Of course I had bigger ideas for what could be done in the future, but I could hardly call them goals. In the section in which we requested resources, I’d say things like “If you’re willing to buy more powerful computers and expensive software, we could teach 3D animation” or “If you allow me to hire additional faculty members, we could teach things I don’t know about, like game design.” Then it was up to the college administrators to decide whether they thought those things were important. It made no difference to me; I was content to go on doing what I was doing.
I’ve heard many times that one of the keys to happiness is setting life goals. I’ve never understood why. As far as I can tell, there are people who set goals and reach them, and therefore are happy. There are people who set goals and don’t reach them — they’re not happy. That doesn’t seem any different from people who don’t set goals and are happy, or people who don’t and are unhappy.
For almost everyone, getting anywhere in life requires taking risks. By staking everything on a desired outcome, goal-setters take one big risk. Incrementalists like me take a series of little risks. Both seem like equally good approaches to me.
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