Resolutions, Habits, & Systems
New Year’s Resolutions seem antiquated. January used to be filled with lofty ambitions, often to recommit to goals that were not achieved in the prior year. That book you were writing, that 20 pounds you were losing, that hobby you were planning to take up—none of them actually happened. Yet, the new year brings with it the promise of new possibility, so we dust off our best intentions and put them out into the universe once again. However, we eventually realize that wishes, or even willpower, is insufficient.
The new focus is on building habits (as popularized by books such as The Power of Habit and Atomic Habits) to build consciously create routines around the actions or tasks required to reach our goals. While habits are certainly more effective than resolutions, they do require a lot of tending. It takes conscious effort each time you interrupt the old cue-routine-reward cycle and replace it with a new behavior. Tracking is a huge help, but even that tiny bit of administrative work takes brain power since the tracking itself is a new habit. Also, the more amorphous the goal, the more difficult it is to pick habits that will achieve it.
For instance, if one of our goals in 2025 is to “Make More Friends,” what does that actually mean? On the surface, that statement seems to indicate you want a higher volume of people in your life whom you consider friends. Great! But what does that actually mean? How many do you want? What is your threshold for the label “friend?” Most importantly, how do you actually make more of them?
Here is where people flounder—they try a variety of tactics without first considering the overall outcome. It’s easy to meet new potential friends. Take a class, join a sports team, go to a happy hour, etc. and you’ll meet loads of candidates. But then what? How do you convert those new acquaintances into actual friends? In some cases, you might have a built-in mechanism for meeting them again (such as sports practices), but generally, that condition is temporary. At some point, you’ll need to take the relationship out of the introductory casual phase into real bonding if you want that friendship to be permanent.
This problem is particularly challenging when your pool of potential friends is actually subdivided into categories. You might have volleyball friends, acting class cohort, and craft beer buddies, with zero overlap among all the groups. It’s possible you only have that one interest in common with each person, or you never get to know what else you share because your entire time spent together is engaged in only that one activity. It’s incredibly common for these pop-up friendships to wither as soon as the scheduled joint activities end. Then it’s back to the drawing board, trying new groups and only getting to the acquaintance stage all over again.
Adventure-Us is designed to facilitate the transition from stranger to real friend. First, our recurring events aren’t temporary—there is always a next opportunity to meet someone you met there before. Secondly, there are a variety of events so you’ll naturally get to know the total person. For instance, you may meet someone at Sip & Snack, then see that person again at a cooking class and again at an amusement park. Each encounter is a natural opportunity for conversation which builds on the last interaction. Your shared experience becomes a story you relate to other people at the next event and establishes mutual history. Even if your schedules don’t coincide more than once every few months, you still have equity in an ongoing relationship that continues as soon as you see each other again.
The crucial difference in the Adventure-Us approach is that it is a system which provides necessary consistency. Instead of meeting random people based on one shared interest, members join a group filled with fascinating individuals who have all opted into spending time together on a frequent basis. You don’t have to seek friends—they’re already here to be met. You won’t see every person at every thing, but the familiar faces will be the ones you naturally gravitate toward because you have the most in common. You won’t have to think about when you’ll see them again or worry about any planning. Adventure-Us is already the thing you do together. Just sign up, show up, and enjoy your growing group of friends!