Making a New Year’s resolution is an old custom, and many people today will still attempt to begin work on just one thing at the start of the new year.
However, this article from 1917 recommends we make several resolutions in the hope that maybe we will succeed with at least one of them.
New Year’s Resolutions
It’s very much the fashion to joke about making New Year’s resolutions; but as a matter of fact there is advantage in making resolutions, if they are good ones, and there is no other date except one’s birthday anniversary so appropriate for the practice.
The individual must be totally devoid of sentiment who has no sentiment on the subject of New Year.
Jokers whose topic is New Year’s resolutions lay stress on the fact that many of them are broken. A fact it is — there is no denying it. But not all of them are broken.
A man who makes ten New Year’s resolutions, every one of them good, and breaks nine, is better off to the extent of the virtue involved in keeping the one to which he adheres than if he made none at all.
For the sake of argument, however, perhaps it may be conceded that making numerous good resolutions at once is open to criticism on the ground that it is harder to attain perfection in many things than in a few things, and that failures cause discouragement, and that concentration is helpful to success.
From this point of view the wise thing for New Year’s resolution-makers to do is to survey their failings and frame a few resolutions hitting the high spots.
Source: The Home news. (McCrory, Ark.), 05 Jan. 1917.
