As the writer of the first Adventure Club Games blog post of the New Year, I was severely tempted to write a whole post about monitor resolutions, but seeing as one my New Year’s resolution is to make fewer puns, I will deny myself the gratification. New Year’s resolutions represent an opportunity to come clean with ourselves, to be honest about our faults and shortcomings and to try and do something about them. As stand-up comedians from the mid-90s have pointed out, most people don’t follow through with their resolutions. Maybe it’s a lack of will power, or perhaps promises made to one’s self are easy to break. I think it might be because we make the wrong kinds of resolutions. We tend to say we will ‘get in shape’ rather than ‘lose 10 pounds’, we will ‘be better with money’ rather than ‘put together a monthly budget’. As an artist and designer I have this same problem, I tell myself I’m going to be ‘a better artist’ or a ‘more thorough designer’, the problem as you can see, is that these really aren’t goals at all, they are aims. It is a direction you want to head in, not a place you want to end up.

Imagine you have an employee, an artist if you will. You want this artist’s skills to improve so that you can get better work out of them. You could tell them to ‘improve as an artist’, but what would that even mean? How would you check their progress? If you gave another person a vague resolution like the ones we give ourselves, you would be setting them up to fail. If you wanted a student or an employee to improve in a measurable way; you would give them specific directives or assignments. People need specific, achievable goals to measure our progress and get that sense of accomplishment we all crave. The problem is, we are never done improving; we can always be a little better, and there is no level cap on real world skills.

Marrying these two ideas requires giving ourselves milestones and benchmarks. World of Warcraft does this especially well, there is always better gear and more quests to complete; but the goal of WoW isn’t to get to level cap; it’s to get that next skill, piece of gear, battlefield rating. If we can give ourselves smaller, short term goals that feed into our larger overall goal of self-improvement we might actually stand a chance. Even giving yourself a directive like ‘get better at drawing heads’ is better than ‘get better at art’; but still not as good as ‘draw 50 skulls’ which would itself be improved by saying ‘draw 50 skulls TODAY’.

Personally, I hate planning ahead; I’d rather let things come naturally and live in the spontaneity of the moment. I can tell you though; my periods of greatest creativity have come in times where my schedule and plans were the most regulated and planned out. If you regulate your practice to a strict schedule then when inspiration does strike you, you are prepared to grab it and bring it to life; rather than finding yourself wasting moments of inspiration on dull practice and warm-up. My personal resolution is to ‘spend 2 hours every morning practicing traditional sketching’. It’s a goal that I can fail one day, and still try again the next, every day is a new opportunity for success. I can give myself directives for each of those days, focusing myself of my specific weaknesses like figure drawing, perspective, or expression.

For this New Year, find that path of self-improvement you want to be on, give yourself bite sized goals, much like individual steps along a long path. Find something you can do every day that will help you reach that goal, and set aside a specific time for it. Soon enough, it will become part of your routine. It is far better to set your sights too low rather than too high; if you aim to high, you are likely to get discouraged, and you will get nothing done. Even if you aim to low, you are at least getting something done, and you will get a better sense of what you are capable of. So take your resolutions and turn them into daily goals, measure your progress over a few weeks and adjust accordingly, don’t be afraid to dial your ambitions back a bit. Remember, you are doing this for yourself, don’t get too caught up in how other people will view or measure your success, the real resolution isn’t in your sweeping  improvements, but in overcoming your desire to give up. Just doing a little bit, every day, is victory enough.