To the max!

So the one thing that I explicitly remember from all my Boy Scout leadership training (besides "lead by example," which is obvious) is that all goals should be measurable and attainable. It's good advice, and I try to apply it especially when it comes to New Year's resolutions. Sometimes I hear people make resolutions like "I want to be a better person," or "I want to keep in touch with my friends more." Noble aspirations, but how does one measure the goodness of oneself as a person? Similarly, you'll hear someone resolve to lose 20 pounds. Wonderful, but losing 20 pounds is a lot of work! Not very attainable. The point is, when you set unrealistic goals, or goals that you can't really know if you've achieved or not, failure is, by definition, inevitable.

Last year, I resolved to only press the snooze button once when I woke up in the morning. As it turned out, I couldn't get it done, but I went from like, five snoozes to only two. So it sort of worked. This year, I made a couple resolutions. One was to set my alarm clock earlier in the morning; it's working out like gangbusters. Another was to make the switch from coffee to tea in the morning, because honestly, I don't even like coffee. Also working out swimmingly.

The toughest one, though, is going to prove to be my resolution to switch from a bottle of Pepsi in the afternoon to, I don't know, something with less sugar and calories. (I'm trying to maintain my girlish figure, after all.) I say it's going to be the toughest one, because I haven't even really started yet.

The whole point of this post, which took me several paragraphs to reach, is that I bought a bottle of Pepsi Max today, and it didn't taste nearly as much like deadly poison as I thought it would. So maybe this thing might be attainable after all. I'll keep you all abreast of my progress.