Dory, Orry and other NY resolutions that won’t leave you sorry

Jonathan Swift, author of ‘Gulliver’s Travels’, made a list of resolutions in 1699. After declarations like, ‘Not to boast of my former beauty, or strength, or favour with Ladyes, &c’ and ‘Not to be fond of Children or let them come near me hardly’, he ended with the most sensible resolution of all time, ‘Not to sett up for observing all these Rules; for fear I should observe none.’

He already knew what research tells us today, that 80% of resolutions are abandoned within a month of making them. There are two primary reasons why resolutions fail. They are either too grandiose or aren’t meticulously planned. If you decide that you want to lose 20 kg and starve yourself, only to weigh yourself after two weeks, and see that you have lost half a pound, which you regained the next day because it was just water, it’s enough to drive you to drown your sorrows in a tub of Baskin-Robbins. Or say, you resolve that this is the year you want to become truly wealthy, and after listening to Narayana Murthy, decide that working 70 hours a week is really the ticket, then chances are that you will either exhaust yourself by the end of January or a few months later, your fed-up spouse, unlike the wonderful Mrs Murty, will leave you and take half of what you already have.