Christmas has come and gone and now we look ahead to the last holiday of 2024, which is also the first holiday of 2025: New Year.

I’m guessing the first thing that comes to mind for most of us when we think about the new year is resolutions. Most of us make them each year; some of us joke about how we never keep them; and still others take them very seriously. Like most things, I think a lot of us fall somewhere in the middle. We make them, we do an okay job with a couple of them throughout some of the year, but a lot of them fall by the wayside at some point. 

And that’s okay. In fact, over the last five-or-so years, I’ve come up with a completely different way to handle New Year’s resolutions: I don’t make any.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m a goal-oriented person. At least I like to think of myself that way. But, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to terms with a lot of my strengths, and even more of my weaknesses. And let me tell you guys, I’m an overthinker. For all those out there like me, you know that particular quirk has its pros and cons. It can serve as motivation to get things done and allow those things to become successes, or it can be a debilitating reminder of what didn’t go well and became failures.

So, coming to terms with that particular part of who I am, I’ve started treating goals as more of a daily thing, rather than something I think about in grand terms once a year. It’s not all that different from how I look at the newspaper. Whether it is a weekly paper, a daily, or, like The Post, a three-times-a-week publication, there are some things that inevitably get covered each and every year. Some of those things are annual events; others are special sections we do each year. When I get ready to cover one of these events, or help publish a special section, I’ve learned to look back at the year before and very simply try to do a better job than was done last time. That’s not to say the year before was bad. Just that I want to top even the best job with something better.

I also try to apply that to daily life. When I was publisher of a small, weekly newspaper in a market less than half the size of Vicksburg’s, I was basically a one-man show, and I employed this strategy a lot! The funny thing about that is, after a year on the job, I was always trying to top myself from the year before. And that’s basically my strategy for resolutions: I just want to be better than I was yesterday at, well, whatever it is.

Now, I do realize this may sound a bit obsessive; as if all I think about is accomplishments, but that’s not how I mean it. In fact, a great example of this philosophy comes from former NFL quarterback Phillip Rivers. I once heard a snippet of a commencement address he gave when he explained a motto he has long tried to live by: Nunc coepi. I’m glad I’m writing this and not having to pronounce it for you verbally, because it’s a Latin phrase that translates to “now I begin.”

The idea, as Rivers explained it, is to remember to start over and begin again each day, no matter what. Whether the day before was your biggest success, your most devastating failure, or – more likely – somewhere in between, simply begin again. I love that. In fact, I would go as far as to say it is those days in between when it is the hardest to remember this advice. Most of our days don’t come after huge successes or failures, but, if we can remember to just begin again and try to be better than we were the day before, those new beginnings add up.  I’ve found they’ve made my years more successful, in all aspects of life, than chasing big goals made in January and being dismayed when I haven’t gained the ground I wanted by June.

So, if any of that made sense to you, I urge you to join me in 2025. In fact, why wait until then? Join me today. You can begin again right now.

Nunc coepi.

Blake Bell is the general manager and executive editor of The Vicksburg Post. He can be reached at blake.bell@vicksburgpost.com.