Everyone’s been posting with a ‘HAPPY NEW YEAR!’ message of some sort, so I figured I’d be a sheep and follow:

Happy New Year, possible-stranger-whom-I-may-or-may-not-know!

I couldn’t figure out how to make that that font bigger, so I just made it stand out in every other possible way. Now, I would continue to wish you the most wonderful and candy-filled New Year possible but, really, other than wishing you much wonder and candy, I wouldn’t have much else to say. I suppose I also ought to wish you good luck fulfilling those New Year’s Resolutions that everyone else has been blogging about! Not that they’ll last too long.

No, no, I’m not discouraging you! Well, I admit that that was a pretty discouraging sentence… but I’m not out to get you. Rather, I think that if your resolution is something you really want to do, then you’ll have no problem doing it. An issue I have with New Year’s Resolutions is that I feel like we’re expected to make them. And being expected to make a goal is completely different from wanting to make a goal.

Say I want to get a 4.0 GPA this semester – that’s a pretty average resolution, right? Maybe not… let’s change that to a 3.8 GPA. In any case, why do I want a 3.8? Well, obviously because I’d like to do well in school. But that must mean that I had wanted a 3.8 last semester too, right? What was keeping me from getting it last semester? If nothing, then why didn’t I get it last semester?

Just to be clear, that was just an example. I would never share my GPA on the publicness of the web, where fellow Life Sci competitors lurk, snooping for peer grades.

Back on topic! I feel that if you really want something, then it doesn’t have to be a holy and legal binding New Year’s Resolution for it to happen. This whole idea of the New Year’s Resolution, I think, puts pressure on us and makes us forget the reasons we made the resolution in the first place. So, in my humble opinion, it’s not the goal that matters, but how much you genuinely want the result(s).

I have this whole idea that, if you want something, you can get it… unless it’s something crazy like dividing by zero (you don’t want to end up in an alternate universe, now do you?). A hypnotherapist once told me that the key to achieving a goal is to constantly remind yourself of how much you want the result. Do I take advice from hypnotherapists? Of course I do! They have the awesome powers of hypnosis AND education in psychology!

So remember: IMPOSSIBLE= I’M POSSIBLE

P.S. While I’m on the topic of wordplays, spell ‘stressed’ backwards. Then, get some next time you’re under stress.