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New Year's Resolutions
Posted by Michael E. Marotta on 12/31/2011, 9:11am
"I swear by my life and my love of it..."   Warren Meyer wrote this essay for Forbes last year. 
Like many people, around the new year I set various goals for myself over the coming year.  Some I have achieved (e.g. getting myself out of corporate America and into my own business) and on some I have fallen short (e.g. learning to play the guitar).  But every year I have renewed just one resolution, which I took from Atlas Shrugged.  It is
“I swear–by my life and my love of it–that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
I have tried, with various degrees of success, to live up to this resolution for decades.   A few changes have occurred — for example, I started a family and added my wife and two kids under the umbrella of my my own self, to become part of the “I.”  Throughout this time, though, this resolution has always been a great focusing device in a world where self-reliance seems to be increasingly out of style.
Alan Epstein's essay, "The Meaning of New Year's Resolutions" (for the Chicago Sun-Times and Vancouver Sun, December 30, 2006; and Montgomery Advertiser, January 4, 2008) is at the Ayn Rand Center website here.  He concludes:
This New Year's, resolve to think about how to make your life better, not just once a year, but every day. Resolve to set goals, not just in one or two aspects of life, but in every important aspect and in your life as a whole. Resolve to pursue the goals that will make you successful and happy, not as the exception in a life of passivity, but as the rule that becomes second-nature.

On the Atlas Society website, Bradley Doucet's essay examines some of the reasons why resolutions fail.  It seems that only 12% of us follow through on the good intentions. 
Far more inspiring is to focus on values. As David Kelley has written, “Speaking the language of values instead of the language of duty, ‘want-to’ instead of ‘have-to,’ is a daily reminder that we live by choice, with both the freedom and the responsibility that that entails.” If you choose to honor values like health or productiveness because of the benefits they bring to your life, and if you keep those values in mind on a daily basis, you are far more likely to stick to your self-improvement program. That doesn’t mean you can’t also choose to lock yourself into a commitment, say, to exercise with a friend. But it is good to remember that you have freely chosen this commitment. The cold, dead hand of duty is a poor substitute for values. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to—oops, I mean, I want to—go floss my teeth.
Capitalism magazine  (read here) launched 2011, with Scott McConnell's 2004 greetings from the ARI in which he noted, perhaps obviously, but nonetheless cogently:
New Year's Day is the most active-minded holiday, because it is the one where people evaluate their lives and plan and resolve to take action. One dramatic example of taking resolutions seriously is the old European custom of: "What one does on this day one will do for the rest of the year." What unites this custom and the more common type of resolutions is that on the first day of the year people take their values more seriously.
...
 Every resolution you make on this day implies that you are in control of your self, that you are not a victim fated by circumstance, controlled by stars, owned by luck, but that you are an individual who can make choices to change your life. You can learn statistics, ask for that promotion, fight your shyness, search for that marriage partner. Your life is in your own hands.
...
If people were to apply the value-achievement meaning of New Year's Day explicitly and consistently 365 days each year, they would be happier.
So every day, fill your champagne glass of life to the brim with values--and drink deep to your life and the joy that it can and should be.

Objectivist blogger Moran Polotan also kicked off 2011 with ten resolutions.  (I am adding his blog to my Favorites.)  He wrote:
2. I resolve to never use emotional invectives, ad hominem attacks or straw man arguments in any debate. Instead I will rely on reason and logic to support my points.
3. I resolve to always be calm and collected when debating. I realize that ranting and raving makes me look bad, and undermines the credibility of my positions.
8. I resolve to properly define controversial terms, such as “rational self-interest” and “laissez-faire capitalism.” I will not shy away from such terms just because their meaning has been misconstrued by others.
10. I resolve to resist the temptation to get sucked into irrational debates with people who insist on attacking my personal character or affiliations, and refuse to address my main points. If someone rejects reason as a means of arriving at the truth, there is no point in engaging them.
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