Do you believe that New Year's resolutions work?
I don't. But you can still make a fresh start. More inspiration, guidance and fun inside.
January the first. New year, and a new start for many. Great news for gyms and Weight Watchers, as the membership fees start rolling in. But if you’re not careful you can end up with a crashing case of disappointment, as well as a leaky bank balance.
We so desperately want to be able to turn the page and get a fresh start that many of us go all in on making a change that we went to see last the entire year, if not the rest of our lives.
Think again.
This isn’t to say that you can’t make change, because you definitely can. But I’d encourage you to break your targets down into smaller chucks. Movements and campaigns like Dry July / January have the idea.
Make it manageable.
It’s not surprising that many people who choose to abstain from alcohol for a more achievable 30 days find that they feel better and more motivated to carry on the habit.
But what kept them persisting in the first place was the intention to stick to a finite and manageable period of time. This meant that when they were having a tricky day, they knew that they didn't have that much more time to stick to the goal. That’s far easier to think about than the alternative of thinking that you now cannot break this habit for the rest of your life.
Once you bust through the barrier of getting through a difficult day, you put yourself in the position of having a greater chance of experiencing great days - where your chosen habit makes you feel better.
Now, you’re not just sticking to your habit because you said you were going to. You’re doing it because it makes you feel better.
And there’s no greater reward than that.
Here’s some tips:
Start small.
Join a larger campaign or movement that works for you - together works better than alone if you are inexperienced at making changes stick in your life.
Make it time limited.
Give yourself the chance to experience the benefits as well as the challenges.
And remember, a bad day when you didn't stick to the plan doesn't mean that you have failed. Start again tomorrow. But if you’re continually doing this day after day, you might need a different target to tackle.
Final tip: just to play Devil’s Advocate with myself here, this study found that 55% of people considered themselves successful in sustaining their resolutions one year later. Self-rated success is a bit of a flaw in this study, but there was an important finding they reported that’s worth noticing: Adopting new positive behaviours tends to lead to more succesful outcomes that trying to give up or avoid behaviours.
Among the participants who set approach-oriented New Year’s resolutions, 58.9% considered themselves successful, compared to 47.1% of participants who set avoidance-oriented resolutions.
A slightly shorter, holiday-version this week - back with more in the new year - all best wishes for 2023!
A deep look at the upcoming diplomatic TikTok crisis
This has been brewing for a while, but it appears to be coming to a head now, with TikTok being banned from being downloaded onto US Federal Government devices. Even though the US Government is still in talks with TikTok about how to ‘shepherd’ US data, it’d unpredictable how this is going to pan out. But here’s a fascinating backgrounder, along with accompanying audio - which is a great 1-hour listen.
On March 10, two weeks after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the White House convened a Zoom call with 30 prominent TikTok creators. Jen Psaki, then the White House press secretary, and members of the National Security Council staff briefed the creators, who together had tens of millions of followers, on the latest news from the conflict and the White House’s goals and priorities.
The app had only become more popular in the intervening months. “We recognize this is a critically important avenue in the way the American public is finding out about the latest,” the White House director of digital strategy, Rob Flaherty, told the assembled group. “So we wanted to make sure you had the latest information from an authoritative source.” Yet at the same time, the Biden administration was more than a year into negotiations with ByteDance, the Chinese company that created and owns TikTok, about national security concerns surrounding the app. In fact, the White House staff members who organized and briefed the TikTok creators were barred from downloading the app on their work phones.
I made a video on YouTube
… for the first time in over 255 days. I’ll be making more. But it was fun re-learning how to edit again, and filming and all the things that go along with being a YouTuber. I missed the fun aspects of that, but no so much the other sides, like the overwhelming sense of obligation and loneliness too.
Heard about ChatGPT?
Most articles about this new AI-powered writing tool are focusing on how it might replace copywriters. I’m also going to make a video about how it might also challenge YouTube creators making how-to, instructional-style videos (including me). But even Google are worried, because this could fundamentally change how searching the internet works, and break their business model too.
ChatGPT was released by an aggressive research lab called OpenAI, and Google is among the many other companies, labs and researchers that have helped build this technology. But experts believe the tech giant could struggle to compete with the newer, smaller companies developing these chat bots, because of the many ways the technology could damage its business.
Google has spent several years working on chat bots and, like other big tech companies, has aggressively pursued artificial intelligence technology. Google has already built a chat bot that could rival ChatGPT. In fact, the technology at the heart of OpenAI’s chat bot was developed by researchers at Google.
Called LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications, Google’s chat bot received enormous attention in the summer when a Google engineer, Blake Lemoine, claimed it was sentient. This was not true, but the technology showed how much chat bot technology had improved in recent months.
Google may be reluctant to deploy this new tech as a replacement for online search, however, because it is not suited to delivering digital ads, which accounted for more than 80 percent of the company’s revenue last year.
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Mōrena, I heard you on National Radio this morning Sarb good interview.
Welcome back (to making vids) :-)