TN50#149_2024 Resolutions, How’s It Going?_22 January 2024

Hi Team,

I’m writing this on 22 January 2024, 3 days after what the Strava (the activity tracking company) calls Quitter’s Day.  In 2019 Strava looked at over 800 million user-logged activities to and discovered that January 19th or Friday of last week for those of you reading this in real time. (useful article) How about you?  Have you already packed it in on the 2024 resolution?  Whether you have quit, haven’t quit, didn’t set a goal for 2024 or are still writing 2023 on all your checks, please read on.

Happy Monday and welcome to The Next 50 #149. I like to think of personal performance in 3 components: physical, mental and emotional.  My frameworks focus on 4 Buckets: Eat, Sleep, Move and Think.  This blog is my sandbox for sharing information that you might find useful for your personal performance.

You know what I focus on here at FPP LLC, Eat – Sleep – Move – Think, but I think you could apply the following to setting a business improvement goal or some other form of personal development issue you want to improve.

First, let’s start with a post I saw on one of my Signal channels from 31 December, 2023.

Throwing this out there for accountability’s sake –

Gonna get back to the early morning routine…

(Resolutions)

– 0400 wake up

– meditation

– walk dogs

– workout

– cold shower / plunge

– coffee (reward for the coldness)

– breakfast after 12pm

* start a beginner yoga program (and stop letting that one Tony Horton P90x yoga experience ruin it for me)

Wishing everyone a great 2024!!!

If, by chance, you made a resolution like this and you’re a person who’s just getting started with a personal performance improvement plan I would love to know how it going, and I’m serious.  This is a really bold resolution for someone just getting started.

The one sound bite that got the most play from my appearance on the Rich Roll Podcast last year is, “Don’t try and boil the ocean.” and I said this in reference to the way people think about improving their personal performance.  You can’t make up for years of bad behavior by going full on Rich Froning on January 1st of any year – in fact, this may be the absolute best way to guarantee you only make it to Quitter’s Day.

According to the internet there are a bunch of reasons people bail on their New Year’s Resolutions:

  1. You have unrealistic expectations
  2. You aren’t disciplined
  3. You procrastinate
  4. You don’t have a plan
  5. You don’t have an accountability partner

So if you’ve already knocked all the shiny new paint off of your 2024 Resolution;

  1. With sugar back on the menu
  2. With sleep hygiene “canceled”
  3. With your workout gear rotting in your car’s trunk for the last 4 days (after your last ridiculously hard work out)
  4. With your “One Thing” journal being used as a coaster for empty beer bottles.

Good!  Now you can take a deep breath, get your gear out of the trunk and wash it (you filthy animal) and get started on a Better Basics plan.

Move towards your 2024 goal as follows:

  1. Keep reminding yourself that you can do better
  2. Measure your current situation, as in, Know Your Baseline.
  3. Create a simple and achievable (realistic) plan for where you want to go and how you’re going to get there.
  4. Execute your plan
  5. Review your baseline markers along the way, so you know what’s working and can adjust things along the way
  6. Celebrate the wins
  7. Your best becomes your new baseline and you keep getting better

If your 2024 goal is a set of personal performance goals and you think my simple plan seems doable but you’d prefer to have someone guide you through the whole thing – I know a guy!

For more than 5 years I’ve been guiding my clients through massive performance improvements using this framework, and I’d be happy to discuss being your guide: alex@fpp.llc

Who do you know that could use this information?  I bet you can think of a couple of folks before you click the next email!

As always share the post with your team and anyone who might find it useful and let me know what you think!

Have a good one, Alex

PS. What personal performance questions can I answer for you? alex@fpp.llc

PPS.  If your new to First Principles Performance Coaching, here’s a one stop shop for all my stuff.