It’s that time of year when we may dare to make a resolution and possibly by the end of the month will have already given up the lofty plans of losing weight, eating better, saving money, writing that book, climbing a mountain, etc.

I think we should pick something we are likely to fail at achieving. If we’re trying to make a significant lifestyle change, our resolution shouldn’t be something that is easy to achieve. It should be a struggle and we should have to make multiple attempts to figure out how to be successful.

If we want to climb a mountain we have to take steps to achieve that. We can look online, read, watch webinars, take classes, and talk to people. We’d have to work on getting in shape, figure out what skills are needed to actually climb a mountain, make travel plans, and make mountain climbing arrangements. We would also have to consider our progress periodically and decide if we will be able to meet the desired goal or if we have to adjust the timeframe. Perhaps as we learn more about mountain climbing we will realize that we need to learn about other things or get certain equipment. As we learn more about ourselves and the goal there will be unexpected information and situations to manage in order to be successful.

Ultimately to be successful, we will have to put our own spin on the advice to tailor it to our situation. We will have to be disciplined to make changes and give up habits or things that keep us from achieving our goal. This is not easy, but we have a whole year to figure out how to pull it off. Right?

So if we are expecting not to be 100% perfect at our resolution in the beginning, we don’t have to be hard on ourselves when we mess up. My goal is to write a blog post every day. I was hesitant to challenge myself this way especially considering I’ve already missed 2 days but sometimes things do come up. I’d consider myself successful if I have 300 posts by the end of 2016.

Truthfully, I’d consider myself successful even if I ended up with 25 biweekly posts by December 2016 because that would mean that I didn’t forget about my resolution and was still working toward it. Maybe 300 posts is a lot to expect now, but it would lead to writing 100 posts in 2017. And maybe by 2018 I could attain the goal of 300 because by then I would be better at thinking of topics and knowing how to write about it meaningfully.

So whether or not you have a New Year’s Resolution, I encourage you not to be too hard on yourself for falling off the wagon, but to continue because some progress is a step in the right direction.

I have always wondered about this. Why don’t they run out of Social Security Numbers? Upon hearing this question most people suggest the numbers are reused  when people die.

This is not the case. They don’t recycle social security numbers. Finally, I asked a math teacher and she explained that there are nine numbers and ten combinations for each slot, so there is room for almost a billion possibilities. Upon further research we found that there are currently about 419 million people living in the United States. They probably don’t all have a number, but still that is a lot of people. Upon checking the Social Security Administration there had been 450 million unique SSN’s issued as of 2008.

You can click here for a mathematical breakdown if this has been keeping you up at night too.

In case you aren’t as amused with this topic as me, consider how amazing it is that we live in a time where you can find the answer to so many questions just by searching the internet. Before we would have to go to the library and consult an outdated encyclopedia and now we can just speak or type our question into a smartphone that we keep in our pocket and learn  about anything.

Here is another site with some interesting facts.