…is eventually your backside gets burned.

I read this quote in a Forbes article the other day in the Internet’s insane desire to show the world they need to spend the month of January fixing their lives. It’s cute, something I am sure the writer has heard before, but loses it’s appeal once you give it context beyond a coffee cup or poster.

The gold of this article, however, is when you dive deeper in the article. Past the reasons why we don’t really begin true change, there is a little Scrum methodology woven in. There is a cost to getting the things we really want in life. The cost could be time, giving something up, adding something in, or (more likely) a combination of all three. These kinds of ideas are often times really big. To accomplish it, the investment can be huge. Sound familiar?

In the end, I feel that the smaller ideas are what begins real change. Many of the real movements in society begin with one small move or gesture. I won’t insult your intelligence by quoting all the stories we know and love. Two minutes of thinking will confirm that someone choosing to do something to better things around them have paid huge dividends all over the world.

Maybe it’s going without soda for a week, putting your mobile device down after 9 PM, or choosing to give one person at work a compliment every day. If you have been reading my stuff so far, this will start to seem like a pattern. Try it out, inspect and adapt.

Maybe the resolution we are all looking for is to not be burned by the fire we seek to light. In order to do that, we take small ideas that can be tried out over a couple of weeks. I can’t wait to hear the stories from you over this year!