New Year is a time of celebration for the fresh start of the 2018 year! New Year’s represents hope to enable people to achieve a state of happiness that was not present in the outgoing year. Wanjiku Hopps ’20 shares her insights on her favorite part about New Years, “I love staying up late and watching the fireworks in Seattle! It is an amazing start of the New Year.”

New Year’s activities can range from staying at home and watching the ball drop in New York on TV to hanging out with friends and counting the seconds until the clock hits midnight. Laurel Gary ’19 is excited about, “being with my best friends and reminiscing on all of our fun memories from the last year!”

Popular resolutions for 2018 are to get healthy, organized, live life to the fullest, and learn new hobbies. Gary’s ’19 promise of self-improvement is, “to only eat red meat once a week.”

Creating a New Year’s resolution is an opportunity to make a positive change academically, socially, or physically. However, students have stated that their resolutions are almost never successful. In fact, most people respond that they stopped making resolutions because they never work. Only 8% of people keep their New Year’s resolutions, according to a commonly cited statistic.

To have a successful resolution, students must first focus on positive goals rather than negative ones. A positive goal is an action people want to perform; a negative goal is something people want to stop doing. Habits are memories of actions people perform in a situation. If people focus themselves only on stopping behaviors, they will never develop new habits that are necessary to stick to their resolution.

Hopps ’20 resolution is an excellent example of a positive resolution, “my goal for school is to be on top of homework and to do homework on the day it is assigned. My personal goal is to drink 8 waters a day.”

After the New Year, people must be ready to work hard and accept the days when they fail in their aspiring goal. On the days people fail, they must treat that as an opportunity to learn about what to do in the future rather than as a reason to give up. Students at Seattle Prep can succeed with their New Year’s resolutions and make a positive change in their life. If students make it through the month of January, there is a good chance of lasting a lot longer!