OPINION: Begin 2026 with the end

Buzzword. Fad. Waste. The minute you mention New Year resolutions, responses include these words. Understandable? Yes and no. Yes, New Year resolutions are made. Yes, New Year resolutions are not implemented fully. Yes, they bring a lot of skepticism. No, they are not a fad. No, they are not January rush that peters out. No, they are not a waste of time.

Then what are they? They are a choice human beings make. Like every choice it can become an active pursuit or an inactive wish list. The concept and the principle behind this is universal. When you do not choose where you want to go, other people or circumstances will take you where you do not want to go. This understanding dawned on me a bit late.

I am a skeptic about short-cuts. Being in the advising, coaching, training field I used to be suspicious of the popular literature on “5 ways to become a millionaire”, “6 ways of having the best relationships”, etc. Such titles were something that I would avoid on a book store. That is why I read the “7 habits of highly effective people” pretty late. That too when a coachee of mine asked me about the 4th habit and I was found wanting. To avoid embarrassment, I reluctantly bought the book and started reading it. It had an impact on me. I understood a lot of things that I previously did not. The habit that particularly hit me was habit no 2; “Begin with the end in mind”. To cut the story short, I did the original ‘Franklin Covey 7 Habits’ workshop and actually felt how profound this habit was. I made a personal end in mind mission statement. I found that of all the things I most wanted to do, I was hardly doing 20%. That realization changed the course of my life. I started prioritizing, planning intentionally to do things that mattered most to me. It was hard. I took time; and still work is in progress. It cost me financially, emotionally and socially. Things went massively wrong too. But if I look back at what I felt before and what I felt after, I would still repeat this choice. It has added meaning and purpose to my life.

That is why I will keep on encouraging people to begin with the end before it ends. That applies to the day, week, month, year, and life. My counter question to professionals who find New Year goals a laugh is: Would you be able to achieve half of the goals at your workplace if you did not have annual plans and daily, weekly schedules to do important things? The inevitable answer is: “We will hardly get 30 percent achieved without planning and scheduling beforehand”. My follow-up question is: “how to do you expect to achieve much in personal life if you have no proactive plans for it? The answer is a sheepish “Well we really do not have time for it”. The good news is that it does not require much time. The bad news is that in the professional world the company accountability forces us to implement and comply, while in personal life we find it difficult to push ourselves to that level. How do we ensure that we look at our life in a more meaningful way? Here are some things to do:

1. Visualize not fantasize— There is a difference between a ‘can do’ and a mere wish list. Visualization is very closer to the current discourse on manifestation. Most top athletes talk about how they visualize their play before a match in detail. They prepare accordingly. They practice accordingly. Finally, they play accordingly. Fantasy means you have this big idea of soaring in air and keep imagining it without really imagineering it. Imagineering means that once you begin with the end then convert it to a goal. For a goal to happen it needs to have 3 checks. The action check, the reality check and the deadline check.

2. Say no, to say yes— The age-old excuse we all make for not being able to do things is our time constraints. That means we have to take time out. Take exercise-it is a common casualty. Long office hours the biggest hurdle. In every coaching that I do, I ask the coachee to do a TSA, i.e., a time-spend analysis. Every TSA shows time spent on social media, extended lunches, etc., to be about minimum 2 hours per day. My simple question is: Can we take out half an hour out of these two hours to go for a walk or catch up on reading or call a family member? Normally, the answer is: yes. The problem does not lie with time constraints but our will power constraints. The famous quote Choose your hard is absolutely true. Getting up early to do exercise is hard. But having an unfit body that becomes a haven for diabetes and diseases is also hard. Choose your hard. Saying “no” to social media scrolling is hard. But not updating your skills online on AI, etc., is also hard. Choose your hard. As Stephen Covey explains that you can only say “yes” to things that matter most when you say “no” to things that matter less.

3. Seek learning, not yearning— One common trait of people who have more fulfilled lives is that they focus on learning and getting better than wishing and blaming. When you set up a goal, educate yourself. Social media used constructively is a great tool of self-betterment. Every individual is different. What suits me will not suit others and vice versa. However, when you look into details, avenues do appear. Most of these super athletes were not necessarily more talented. Take the example of the javelin Olympic champion Arshad Nadeem: he practiced with thrown away wooden sticks in dirty rubbish dumps. One of my coaches who was not going ahead because his inability to present in front of high-powered international clients learned to practice with a pencil under his tongue to overcome his word rolling and lisp.

The onus of making 2026 just another year or “thee” year is on us. Some may say it is easier said than done. Absolutely true, but then taking it easy is a guarantee or being unprogressive and unfulfilled. Some may say it is too late now. Absolutely false. I remember the year I made changes in my life, I used to think the same. Then I read this quote of Dan Zandra and that transformed my thinking. The quote is, “No one can go back and make a brand new start my friend, but anybody can start from here and make a brand new end.”

Copyright Business Recorder, 2026